A friend of mine who works for a company that does business in China told me an interesting story.

It seems that the U.S Company, Briggs and Stratton built a factory in China to manufacture small gasoline engines. They operated it for about a year and then decided to have a survey done on what the engines were being used for. The survey said that there were 300,000 of those engines in use in China. Now this sounded impossible, because Briggs had made less than 100,000 of their engines since they had opened the factory.

Then they found out that the managers of their Chinese factory were running the place one shift a day for Briggs and two more shifts a day for themselves. They had arranged for separate power meters so they could switch over during “their” period of operation, and separate suppliers and workforce.

Today, China is very much a “every man for himself” type of place. Trust is nonexistent, as Americans doing business with the Chinese have found. Micromanagement is a requirement; you have to sit on them and make sure they do exactly what you want them to. Any experience with Chinese-made consumer products will convince you of this fact very quickly.