“Gangnam Style.” By now, anyone who’s anyone has heard the song, watched the video, and mimicked its catchy dance moves. Many did so as South Korean rapper Psy swept through Macau and, most recently, our Fragrant Harbor, taking home four awards at the Mnet Asian Music Awards – the most among all that night. In…
Friends have repeatedly told me to avoid running on Hong Kong’s city streets because they are unrelentingly packed; there are taxis, buses and people to dodge; and, you stick out like a sore thumb. Last Thursday night, I ran with several others in one of Hong Kong’s most congested areas, Causeway Bay, but this wasn’t…
China Investment Corporation (CIC) was established almost five years ago by Beijing as a sovereign wealth fund to earn high returns by actively investing abroad; today, it is just one of at least six other entities investing outside China, according to Henny Sender at the Financial Times. However, as Sender writes, “It is difficult to…
The world has come a long way since 1972 in Stockholm, when the UN held the first international, multilateral conference to address environmental protection and development issues. From Stockholm to the first Rio conference in 1992, the world began to embrace its interdependence and acknowledge we, as a global network of human beings, organizations and…
As China’s financial firms seek to move up the value chain to compete with international firms in more sophisticated financing and investment activities, the need for skilled employees has become glaringly apparent. Around this time last year, Baling Technology was the first case in China of a failed IPO, shattering the myth that an IPO…
BNI Attraction – Thursday Morning 6:45AM – 9:30AM at Coast Restaurant, Soho, Hong Kong Even before 6:45AM the dedicated members of BNI Attraction started trickling into Coast for their weekly Thursday meeting. BNI, or Business Networking International, is the world’s largest referral generating networking organization, based on word of mouth strategies. Though meetings follow a…
The global financial crisis in 2008, including a drop in demand for Chinese exports, quickly brought China to the realization of the importance of domestic demand as a major driver for the country’s economic development in the coming decades. The Chinese government plans to promote domestic consumption through a plan that will raise wages –…
If you type “Financial Training” in Google or Baidu and click search, a great deal of related news items will pop up in front of your eyes, including analyst reports and advertisements. From the search results, we can imagine how much mainland Chinese care about financial training, which has resulted in a potentially huge and…
U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke has announced that the U.S. will begin granting Chinese citizens five-year tourist visas if China agrees to do the same for American citizens. The embassy in Beijing this past year granted more than one million Chinese citizens U.S. visas, amidst a 40% increase in visa applicants. The spike in applications can…
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