Who wants to be a multi-trillionaire?

Based on the apparent pace of growth in China’s foreign reserves, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange may need to answer this question in a mere three months. Its answer should be an emphatic “Not China.”

In fact, SAFE’s next quarterly announcement of foreign reserves is not due until July but unconfirmed reports have been flying through state and foreign media (covering an unofficial number in China Business News interestingly) that China’s foreign exchange reserves increased by US$74.5 billion in the month of April alone, to reach US$1.76 trillion.

As a point of comparison, the world’s second largest foreign reserves are held by Japan, and in March 2008 they increased by one tenth of China’s apparent April gains - just US$7.6 billion. Incidentally, it was only in February that Japan’s foreign reserves surpassed one trillion for the first time, and they have since fallen back below the trillion mark, once again leaving China the lone member of the trillionaire’s club.

China first hit the one trillion mark way back in November 2006 but, unlike Japan, its foreign reserve increases are usually measured in double-digit billions. If later confirmed by SAFE, April’s increase of US$74.5 billion will be the biggest ever increase, anywhere.

If this pace continues, China’s foreign reserves could reach two trillion as early as August this year.

This is perhaps not the message China’s government wants to send to the world during the Beijing Olympics (”All your money are belong to us”), so there is intense discussion at the highest levels of China’s government over two issues: How to reduce the foreign exchange reserve, and how to use the existing foreign reserves more efficiently.

Reducing China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves

At one time, having enough money on hand to pay for imports might have been a prime consideration, but this has not been the case in China for years. Its current amount of reserves may cover monthly imports 15 times over, or more. What about another main reason countries keep a large foreign exchange reserve on hand, to defend the currency from speculative attack?

China does not allow convertibility of the yuan, which curtails the possibility of a run on the currency, but as well, China, together with the ASEAN countries plus Korea and Japan (the so-called ASEAN + 3), recently pushed forward the Chiang Mai Initiative, a US$80 billion foreign reserve pool that could be swapped to any member country experiencing speculative pressure. In theory, from 2009 this could reduce the need of Asian countries to hold such large foreign reserves. Until then, Asian central banks may feel better safe than sorry and decide to keep more reserves on hand, but China really doesn’t need to do this in the first place, so it needs to more aggressively reduce the size of its foreign currency holdings.

One way to reduce the size of the foreign reserve is to encourage foreign currency outflow. At present, the yuan’s continued and still expected appreciation has actually increased inflows, both as FDI and as hot money, to record levels.

In the first four months of 2008, FDI was up almost 60 percent over the same period last year, while the total number of company registrations actually decreased by 23 percent, according to the Ministry of Commerce. One likely explanation for this is that foreign firms inflated their average investment size so as to benefit from the future yuan appreciation. In fact, for hedge funds and other investors, this is one of the only methods they have to skirt Beijing’s capital controls, sneaking money in as legitimate-seeming FDI. The exact amount of hot money is unclear but can be inferred from known inflows (e.g. announced FDI), the estimated trade surplus, and other data.

To lessen the inward flow of hot money, China could either reduce interest rates to make passive funds less profitable in China, or could revalue the yuan exchange rate in a one-off revaluation similar to 2005 when the original dollar peg was removed. The former is likely to exacerbate China’s current inflation problem, while the latter would shock the country’s exporters. On balance, allowing the yuan to appreciate faster seems the lesser of two evils for the government.

An appreciation will cause outflows for several reasons. Some of the hot money will repatriate, while the stronger Chinese currency will encourage more consumption and imports from abroad. If the trade balance can reverse the current trend of annual surpluses, foreign reserves will dwindle rapidly.

Using the Foreign Reserves more Effectively

The second issue on China’s leaders’ minds is how to use existing reserves more efficiently. Some may even wonder why large foreign reserves are a problem at all. A rich country is a strong country, as this argument goes.

But the foreign reserves are, in effect, sitting in the central bank earning meager returns and keeping the yuan under-valued. Each unit of foreign currency that enters China is bought up by SAFE and yuan notes are issued by the central bank.

China does not actually hold wads and wads of cash, like a high-roller hitting Macau’s new casinos. Most of its funds, especially those denominated in US dollars, are in the form of US Treasury bills and other long term securities. T-bills have a notoriously low interest rate because they are seen as the safest investment available.

With China holding an estimated US$466 billion in T-bills alone according to the US Treasury, earning interest in the low single digits, this means China is literally leaving billions in potential investment income on the table.

Couple this opportunity cost with the depreciation of the US dollar against major world currencies and China’s US dollar holdings are looking even less attractive. Given a common estimate that China’s total foreign reserves are comprised of about 70 percent dollar-denominated securities and cash, and that the depreciation in the US dollar over the last year has been about 10 percent against the yen and 13.5 against the Euro, that is like saying those Chinese reserves in US dollar terms have lost about US$100- 150 billion in spending power.

Of course, China’s Euro and Yen holdings have increased buying power in terms of US dollars, but they only represent about 20 percent and less than 10 percent respectively of China’s foreign reserves. With such low interest returns and the passive depreciation of its US dollar holdings, China is anxious to look for other ways to spend its growing fortune.

In the last six months, SAFE has made a number of portfolio investments abroad in an attempt to diversify and increase returns, while China created the China Investment Corporation, a US$200 billion sovereign wealth fund, in 2007 to place funds in higher-growth areas. [ED: I covered the uses of China's foreign reserves by both SAFE and CIC in an earlier post, The New Gold Mountain.]

At the time of writing, the yuan appreciation has reached 20% against the dollar since that fateful day in 2005 when the peg was finally removed. It has taken three years to get here, and if it takes three more for the next 20%, I worry about the effect this will have on inflation in China as the foreign reserve will continue to surge.

There’s no easy solution to China’s growing problems of inflation and low rate of return on its reserves, but letting the yuan appreciate more quickly is probably the best place to start, for the sake of the Chinese economy, and maybe even the global economy, as a whole.

[UPDATE: June 25 - Two notes which just came to my attention: In regard to how some foreign media have not covered the April 2008 rise of US$75 billion as alarming or even sufficiently surprising, Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism commented yesterday on the apparent nonchalance, and overnight Brad Setser added some data on changes in China's portfolio investments and overall foreign asset growth. On the point of western media attention: I don't think the lack of in-depth coverage on the ramifications is indicative of disinterest. As I pointed out above, the April foreign reserve figure of US$74.5 billion hasn't been officially confirmed and will not be until July, most likely. I held off reporting on this figure in my newspaper column until June 23 expecting a repudiation by SAFE or the PBOC, but their combined silence on this issue has been deafening.]

Categories: Affluencing, Foreign Direct Investment
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One of my frequent reads in the econoblogosphere is Brad Setser’s Follow the Money. In a recent post, Setser covered the topic of a June 13 Wall Street Journal article that posits transportation costs from China would affect trade with the US. This in turn was based on a May 27 analyst report from CIBC World Markets provocatively titled “Will Soaring Transportation Costs Reverse Globalization?” Salon’s How the World Works caught this even earlier back in 2006, and updated the post on June 6. I duly covered the topic myself a week ago in in my June 9 Shanghai Star Business Journal column, reprinted below.

But first, Setser raised an interesting question: Why did the WSJ article focus on transportation costs from China when the RMB appreciation has also been significant in 2008?

I would answer this in two ways from a purely practical approach. (I’m going to focus on the US since it is the largest export market for China.)

• China-based firms usually price in US dollars, not RMB, so for much of the appreciation of the past several months, possibly even for all of 2008, suppliers may be locked into existing contracts and pricing schemes, or under frequent pressure from US customers to keep prices steady. This makes the RMB’s rapid appreciation of the past five months less important.
• Transportation costs, on the other hand, are usually set at the time of shipment by a third party (most orders from China may be quoted ex-Factory or FOB to a China port, but rarely priced ‘all-in’ to a foreign port). Therefore, transportation costs for the buyers have been increasing more quickly in the last few months.

As well, there’s probably an economic argument to be made about elasticity of transporation versus a change in price due to exchange rates, but I’ll leave that one alone for now. Instead, here is my article from the June 9 Business Journal:

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China’s Coming Oil Shock

The recent sudden increases in the global price for oil threaten to choke off China’s export economy, further clouding the outlook for what should have been the country’s Olympic year in the sun. June 6 saw the biggest one day price gain ever, exceeding even the period during the two oil shocks in 1973 and 1979, an increase of more than ten dollars in one day. As prices for crude oil continue to climb, closing at an all-time high of US$138 per barrel June 6, China is now facing rising transportation costs that could derail its economic development.

The recent run-up in oil prices was not the first shock China has dealt with in 2008, but the effects of snowstorms, civil unrest and the Sichuan earthquake, already making 2008 one of the most unpredictable in China’s modern development, may be eclipsed by the consequences of a sustained high oil price on China’s economy.

China is not alone: Since the record oil price spike, foreign leaders have been calling on OPEC to increase production. While many analysts believe that the high price is a distortion, possibly due to over-speculation, even a short-term stay at these record prices will cause economic pain for both developed and developing countries. The leaders’ calls echo President Bush who, in March, criticized OPEC for not answering his call to raise output.

At that time, OPEC appeared to be rebuffing Bush for mismanagement of the US economy and US dollar. At present, other global leaders are starting to express worry. Seeking to draw attention to the issue before the upcoming July G8 meeting in Japan, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently said “We need a clear statement from the world’s major economies to the OPEC producers to lift their production quota now.”

China is caught between a rock and a hard place. It is an export economy relying on its weak currency to fuel exports, while its fuel is made more expensive because of the weak currency. Some analysts say the oil price is set to rise further. Morgan Stanley predicted US$150 oil by July 4, while in May Goldman Sachs forecast US$200 oil within two years before a cutback in demand would cause a return to rational pricing. If this happens, China will be hit with a double body-blow.

First, while China’s currency exchange rate has been set against an unspecified basket of currencies since 2005, when the US dollar peg at 8.28 yuan per dollar was ended, it is still weighted heavily in dollar terms, meaning that as the US dollar depreciates against other major currencies, so does the yuan albeit at a slower pace. With prices for crude set in US dollars, the cost China is paying per barrel steadily increases. This could add further pressure to revalue the yuan at a faster pace.

Second, and this is the real kicker for an export-driven economy such as China’s, transportation costs are going off the charts. Specifically, ocean freight, all those millions of containers being sent from China to the US and Europe, are now significantly more expensive. A May 27 report by CIBC World Markets forecast some major transportation cost increases: If, as Morgan Stanley predicted, oil reaches US$150 per barrel, shipping a container from Shanghai to the eastern US will increase from about US$8,000 today to US$10,000. If the US$200 target from Goldman Sachs is realized, the shipping costs of that same container will rise to US$15,000.

How big of an impact would that have? According to PIERS Global Intelligence Solutions, China shipped the equivalent of 4.65 million 40 foot containers to the US in 2007. This means that, if all those containers were sent to the east coast with oil at US$200 a barrel, the increase from today’s prices in overall shipping costs would top US$32 billion. Suddenly, cheap clothes and knick-knacks for Wal-Mart aren’t so cheap anymore, and the US supply chain would start to shift back to nearby countries such as Mexico.

Of course, China may be expected to produce higher-value exports to negate the effect of transportation costs or to place more emphasis on domestic market consumption rather than on exporting - both of which appear to be happening already - but if the oil prices increase too much too soon, manufacturers could not retool quickly enough. The effect on exporters would be compounded if the high oil price also drives the US further into recession, reducing aggregate demand.

China, the world’s second largest user of oil after the US, can act to alleviate the oil price shock for itself and the global economy by reducing the gasoline subsidy to China’s transportation system as India and Malaysia have recently done. China has some of the cheapest gas in the world among non-petroleum exporting countries, even cheaper than the US currently. This promotes inefficient vehicles and transportation choices. Reducing the subsidy will not only make Chinese industry and transportation more efficient, it will help China meet its own environmental goals and improve quality of life for everyone.

Categories: Drivers of the Drivers, Globalization, Primary Growth Drivers, Trade
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Two months ago I discussed in this post the effects of regulation on the stock markets in China. My theory: After the precedent China’s regulators set in April by offering two investor-friendly policies timed to pump up the markets, China’s investors would now get in the habit of looking to the government for a bailout whenever the markets were in trouble.

At the time, I predicted that the existing market fundamentals affecting China (high inflation, decreasing exports, high oil price etc) would eventually re-register with investors, and we might see another dead cat bounce. Well, the cat is back:

The above chart shows China’s CSI 300 Index, the measure of both the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges.

Two periods to take note of: First, April 20 to 24, when the two regulatory actions were announced, a clear jump in the markets was evident. Overjoyed would be an apt description of investors when their stamp duty was reduced.

Second, May 12 to 19, the week following the Sichuan earthquake, there was market confusion until May 20. Thereafter indexes began their slide over uncertain earnings growth and worries about the 8.5 percent April inflation figure, announced just before the earthquake, started to sink in.

So, what now?

The China Securities Regulatory Commission faces a dilemma: Does it toss the market a bone, perhaps by offering investors margin trading as some are predicting? Or will it finally let modern investors learn a hard lesson in stock market bubbles? As of June 11, the markets are setting new 2008 lows and volumes are dramatically down as investors start waiting for the bailout.

While I am in favor of China’s use of industrial policy to grow the economy, my admiration doesn’t extend to such shallow tactics as propping up the stock markets. Margin trading, suddenly thurst upon the investing public at such an uncertain ecomomic time, would be an unmitigated disaster in my opinion. China’s development needs to be sustainable, so supporting the pusuit of easy money is not one of the solutions China’s leaders should be considering.

Categories: Affluencing, China Supertrends, Drivers of the Drivers, Pro-business Policy
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A number of excellent blog postings, for example over at China Herald, have covered the nuts and bolts of China’s telecom restructuring announced in late May, but few have mentioned the ramifications the announcement is having on critics of China’s industrial policy. Such critics, it is fair to say, run the gamut from free-market Friedmanites to political appointees of the Bush administration, who inevitably say China’s telecom market is closed to outsiders and anti-competitive. After this restructuring, it turns out they are still half right.

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With the recent news of a reshuffling of China’s six major telecommunications providers, critics of China’s telecom industry have two less targets to shoot at, namely the de facto monopoly of China Mobile and the slow-pace of telecom industry reform in the post-WTO era. But these critics, including the offices of US and EU Trade Representatives, were firing blanks in the first place: China Mobile was never a true monopoly, and industry reform does happen, it just happens at China’s pace, not at the pace trade negotiators desire, as this implementation of pro-business government policy clearly shows.

On May 24 guidance on the telecommunications sector’s planned restructuring was finally made clear in a joint announcement by China’s Ministry of Industries and Information (MII), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Finance: Where there were six operators before, now there will be three - China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom - that will each have an existing fixed-line and a mobile phone business as a result of mergers and divestitures.

Furthermore, at the end of the process, new 3G licenses will be issued for each, on different technology platforms: China Mobile will get the home-grown and untested TD-SCDMA standard, China Telecom will get the stalwart CDMA 2000 system, and China Unicom will get a license for WCDMA technology, which has long been popular in Japan. The market will now decide which is best for China. Critics, however, have been fast to say that China Mobile’s long-dominant position stacks the deck and so it will likely emerge the winner anyway. This is not a foregone conclusion for two reasons.

A short history lesson can help to put this into perspective: Before restructuring, the dominance of a certain telecom provider was undisputed. It had the most subscribers and the largest cross-country network of telecommunications infrastructure, and its revenue and profits exceeded those of all of its smaller competitors combined. At its peak, it had more than one million employees. After deregulation the giant telecom provider would be forced to open its network to smaller competitors and have its competitive powers capped by the regulator, which would mandate rates for it and watch it much more closely than its younger, more nimble, adversaries. Does this sound like China Mobile? No, this was American Telephone & Telegraph, at the end of 1981.

AT&T, once the biggest telephone company in the world, was reduced to a mere shell of its former self following deregulation and the forced divestiture of seven regional operating companies in early 1982. After a few bad strategy decisions, parent AT&T ended up being bought by one of its own spin-off children twelve years later.

So, the first reason the critics are wrong: History shows that the preeminence of an incumbent is by no means assured. The second reason: Asymmetric regulation, whereby China’s regulators intend China Mobile to overcome greater obstacles than the other two, is going to be a burden for China Mobile. For example, it is being saddled with the smallest of the fixed-line operators, China Tietong, and receiving the TD-SCDMA 3G platform license, which is unproven in both its technology and market appeal. This means that China Mobile’s ability to maintain its monopoly is uncertain.

As to the slow pace of change that critics have leveled at China’s telecom deregulation process, it bears reminding that AT&T, the US’s dominant telecommunications provider for more than a century, with its dying breath, clung to its monopoly for more than eight years against a US Department of Justice antitrust suit lodged in 1974. Regional carriers in Canada have been known to drag proposed rate cuts through years of debate and court action to avoid changing their business practices, meaning Canada only started deregulation of its telecommunications industry in April 2007. In that light, the speed of China’s telecom restructuring has not been slow.

In fact, China’s telecom regulators have shown remarkable brevity when it comes to implementing a given proposed change. For example, China significantly reduced rates for all mobile phone users in the last two years, most recently by cutting roaming charges in March by up to 80 percent. China’s telecom industry has some way to go before it will be totally transparent and fully-competitive, but it is far from the unchanging, anti-competitive sector that US and EU trade representatives paint it to be.

One thing the critics get right: It is true that China continues to groom its national champions, much as the economies of Japan, Korea and, to a lesser extent, Malaysia and other Asian economies did in their high-growth periods up to 1997.

Yet while economists regularly point out the folly of governments picking winners versus a Darwinian policy of survival-of-the-fittest free-market selection, so far China has bucked the trend: It now has three formidable national competitors that will all undoubtedly become global companies fighting over the title, “The biggest telephone company in the world.”

Categories: Pro-business Policy
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Many of our readers are interested in setting up a business in China. Whether that is part of a global firm’s strategy to enter the Chinese market or part of an entrepreneur’s ambitions, China presents great opportunities and great challenges: China has something for everybody, but it is not always an easy place to do business and it is getting harder as a result of China’s harmonization of trade rules and tightening of loopholes. The following article, reprinted from my newspaper column, is for the entrepreneurs out there.

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The Beijing-based China Entrepreneurs professional organization made its debut in Shanghai on May 13, with its first in a series of entrepreneurship-related seminars.

The theme of the event was “The State of Entrepreneurship in China” and was well-attended by both foreign and local entrepreneurs who came to Three on the Bund’s Space by Three meeting facility for networking and a roundtable discussion.

Speaking were China entrepreneur Jack Perkowski, founder of auto-parts supplier ASIMCO and protagonist of the book Mr. China as well as author of his own book, Managing the Dragon [Editor's note: He is also the author of the popular straight-talking blog by the same name]; Taiwanese entrepreneur Raymond Chang, who is bringing a new take to home television shopping in Shandong; and Rocky Lee, an American lawyer with DLA Piper who heads its Asia Venture Capital and Private Equity practice.

While the session was informative, it did not have time to address two issues of the current entrepreneurial environment in China that are on people’s minds: How have recent visa restrictions affected entrepreneurship activities, and have regulatory barriers changed for foreign-run start-ups.

Of the two, the visa situation may be the most worrisome to budding foreign entrepreneurs. As reported in the May 26 Shanghai Star Business Journal article on visa regulations, business visas - long the mainstay of businesspeople traveling to China on business as well as for those with no work sponsorship in China - are now much harder to get due to stricter documentation requirements and come with shorter durations. [Editor's note: Frequent China visa coverage can be found on the excellent China Herald blog, for example here, here, and here]

Foreign Chambers of Commerce and governments have been active in petitioning the Chinese government to clarify the changing visa situation because of its potential to disrupt existing trade, but left out of the debate are the legions of entrepreneurs who come to China on their own to study business opportunities and even launch their own sourcing, Internet, or F&B business. The fact that many entrepreneurs may start without a proper Wholly-owned Foreign Enterprise is the start of the problem.

In practical terms, this means their business has no legal status in China. That usually doesn’t stop a wily entrepreneur, who may have an offshore or Hong Kong-based company to handle the legal transactions. The situation now, however, is that those entrepreneurs may not be able to get business visas to continue working on their company and will face tremendous time and money costs to establish a legal presence. At this stage, many entrepreneurs are in limbo or frantically looking for ways to set up a WOFE quickly to sponsor their own visas. [Editor's note: Another view on this issue, entrepreneur's that used to use L (tourist) visas to do their work in China, can be found in this Forbes article, in which Dan Harris of the China Law Blog also discusses the costs and difficulties of setting up a WOFE and getting a Z-visa with it.]

Nobody said doing business in a foreign country would be easy, but China has had a notable number of loopholes which are now starting to be plugged. Ironically, the post-WTO era in China is becoming stricter as China harmonizes regulations in line with international practices, such as the unified corporate income tax rate starting this year.

After six years of WTO membership, China has implemented almost all of the commitments it made to join the WTO, even finally opening up the banking sector to full competition. So in theory this means, for an entrepreneur, the business opportunities are more numerous that ever before? Wrong. For large companies the playing field is wider, but smaller entrepreneurs need a company too and there is still no suitable vehicle for foreign entrepreneurs.

For example, WOFEs are subject to far greater capital requirements and additional regulations compared to locally-owned firms. For a small restauranteur or Internet entrepreneur, the barriers are still as high as they were several years ago and nowhere near as liberal as, for example, business-friendly Hong Kong.

So, facing these challenges and an extremely competitive high-inflation business environment in China, what should new entrepreneurs do, according to the panel?

Chang said that entrepreneurs needed to get out of the tier one cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, and focus more on the second, third and even fourth or fifth tier cities: 60 to 70 percent of the sales on his TV home shopping network in Shandong come from the rural areas, he said.

Although more geographically-fragmented, the lower tier cities offer much greater opportunities: China’s National Bureau of Statistics says that the third to fifth tier cities have more than double the population of the first two tiers, approximately 234 million people versus about 118 million as of the last major census in 2005. That leaves the majority of China’s 1.3 billion in the less-developed rural areas.

Incomes in the lower tiers are not necessarily poor, the third to fifth tiers have on average half the salaries of the first and second, and 43 percent of China’s GDP is generated in the third to fifth tiers versus 34 percent in the first and second tiers, so there are plenty of under-served newly-affluent customers.

Lee cautioned not to underestimate local firms, saying management teams here are “extremely competitive” and foreigners must be willing to take local salaries to keep their costs in line.

It is clear from the observations of the panel that foreign entrepreneurs have few advantages that cannot be copied, and with the added pressures of visa and an environment not very friendly to small foreign entrepreneurs, it is a long road to success.

Perkowski, long-time China businessperson and former Wall Street banker, repeated the advice he said he was given numerous times on first coming here, and this is still a takeaway for entrepreneurs today, “China is a marathon, not a sprint…Be persistent.”

Categories: China Supertrends
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In a recent post on China’s Human Flesh Search engine, I discussed how the behavior of Netizens in China can be harnessed for good and ill to solve social problems. Occasionally, the online forums in China become vitriolic (much as they do anywhere) for reasons related to China’s strong sense of cohesiveness (which we describe in Supertrends of Future China as a key driver of China’s major trends).

The following article, reprinted (and updated) from my newspaper column on May 23, details how some Netizens have a new target for their anger: Governments, people, and companies that do not donate enough for earthquake relief. While the outpouring of praise for donating companies is generally strong, the praise is reserved mostly for Chinese companies, while the anger is often directed at foreign-related entities.  While there are exceptions when it comes to foreign individuals, the reaction to foreign companies’ donations is often negative even in the face of a large contributions.

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In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, the generosity and compassion of corporations has been put on display by using donation lists in building lobbies, office memos, online bulletin boards, and newspaper articles.

While corporate donors in many foreign countries, if they are listed at all, might be shown alphabetically, here the common practice is to rank organizations together with the amount of money they give and circulate the rankings for all to see.

As a form of peer pressure, this method seems very effective in China in encouraging contributions. But at the same time, lists of foreign corporate donations have caused controversy on China’s online forums.

In the days following the disaster, the netizen community quickly shifted to discussions about the donations of foreign countries and multinationals because the pre-earthquake controversies such as the Olympic torch relay and Carrefour were still unresolved. A new theme has been that there were insufficient earthquake relief donations by multinationals.

In a comment echoed on numerous online forums, netizen “Botage” wrote on Sina.com’s community page on May 15, “Why do foreign companies give so little? Take McDonald’s, KFC, Nokia… they give even less than Chinese companies, it is terrible.”

Another netizen on Sohu.com, “Zongq,” writes, “China has given these foreign companies and brands such a huge market and profits, but when something like the earthquake happens in China, we actually don’t see even humanitarian aid (from them).”

This has had some unfortunate implications for the multinational companies doing business in China, with some Chinese Netizens calling into question their commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility while Chinese companies are lauded for their generosity.

The wave of criticism about donations started against the US government, for donating only US$500,000 to the Chinese Red Cross when it had offered millions more in aid to Myanmar. (Editor’s note: The US also donated 10 million to the International Red Cross to be earmarked for China. In fact, aid to Myanmar was pledged but either not accepted or not delivered because of prevailing political conditions, whereas aid flowed to China much more easily: More here.)

And when it comes to foreign money, even China’s own are not exempt from online criticism: Basketball superstar Yao Ming was pilloried in the media and online forums for “only” offering half a million yuan until he quadrupled his donation. From there, debate extended to how much Chinese firms were giving and how little foreign firms seemed to be giving. Is this criticism justified based on the facts?

Chinese companies have undoubtedly shown their support for the unfortunate in Sichuan. Seventy-five Chinese-listed companies have contributed more than 563 million yuan, nearly US$81 million, as of May 19, as reported by financial news portal Hexun.net (partial English translation here). There is no precedent to compare the actions of the national firms as a group, but donations by 75 large foreign firms, based on a similar ranking list published on the Chinese Website manage.org.cn, have reached about half the national firm’s figure, 350 million yuan as of May 20. Both groups likely have much more to give as time goes on.

One firm in particular, the State Grid Corporation of China, already contributed 76 million yuan in cash, almost US$11 million, and almost twice that in non-cash aid, to be recognized as China’s largest donor.

This firm also topped the Hurun Report’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Ranking (English version, 2007 only, here) and is a paragon of how Chinese would like national corporate citizens to act. Another large donor is China Mobile which, in addition to a large cash donation of 86 million yuan, has also committed to donating possibly billions of yuan to mobile phone subscribers in the afflicted regions by automatically increasing every phone’s account by 100 yuan if it falls below a 50 yuan threshold. Large Chinese banks and insurance companies have also contributed significantly, such as the Bank of China’s 64 million yuan cash donation. Larger Chinese firms are typically donating at the 10 to 20 million yuan levels. Many foreign firms, contrary to netizen opinion, are well within this range.

For example, KFC has donated 15.8 million yuan, while Nokia donated 10 million yuan plus thousands of free mobile phones. The largest foreign donations to date, 30 million yuan each, come from Samsung and Nike, but GE, Chevron, GSK, Toyota and others all have made donations at the 10 million yuan level or above. These are no small amounts by any standard.

It may therefore be said that foreign company donations in total are not as large as those of Chinese national firms, but should they be?

In the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the US in 2005, US corporations donated more than US$547 million, according to USAToday, while foreign firms contributed very little, most of the donations coming to the State Department via the donor countries directly.

Meanwhile, the small donation by the US government aside, US firms’ donations in China as of May 20 have totaled more than US$25 million, a significant amount by just one country’s corporations.

The time and distance factors should also be considered in evaluating foreign firms’ responses to the earthquake. It takes more time to communicate with head offices abroad, plan an appropriate assistance package, and select the best channels to deliver relief.

Many foreign firms likely elected to wait until the initial confusion after May 12 had settled down: Cisco Systems, initially making a donation of US$250,000, generously increased its commitment to more than US$ 1 million several days later, once the scope of the tragedy became known.

In the rush to be the first and highest on the lists, is it possible some people are losing sight of the real purpose of giving in times of need?

Foreign firms are certainly aware of the benefits of being in the Chinese market and take seriously their responsibilities as good corporate citizens, but they must be allowed the time to make a measured response and not be held to the same standards as companies in the country suffering from the disaster. And the most important point of all: no matter the source of the aid, it is for a common good and I think that nobody can disagree on that.

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Notes:

1 US$ = 7 RMB

The best resource I found for a total list of donations that is semi-regularly updated can be found here.

Categories: Chinese Determination, Inter-Networking
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