The Asian Experience

To the far southeast of Seoul, South Korea is the country’s second largest city, its largest commercial port, and actually one of South Korea’s hidden gems for travel and business.

In China, writing and language are separate. It may be said without exaggeration that there is an oral Chinese language and a written language, each having no relationship with the other. This characteristic explains part of the difficulty in learning Chinese – be it Hong Kong Cantonese or Mainland China’s Mandarin. The languages require both considerable visual and auditory memory. Some say that this same dichotomy is perhaps the greatest obstacle to a full understanding of Chinese civilization and thought.

Duke Energy, one of the major utility players in the United States, has announced that it has signed a third agreement with a major Chinese power company, with the focus this time on what is called smart-grid capabilities.

Recently, one of the cable international news (in our case “satellite television”) stations briefly delivered a news piece on the Top 10 Rankings for the world’s centers of financial industry influence.

Shanghai, China is gearing up for what will become quite possibly the largest, most widely attended, utterly spectacular world’s fair and exposition ever. They had competed with rival Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, and instead will show the planet China’s new-century predominance, not through athletic endeavors, but instead as the newest financial, manufacturing, and cultural capital of the world.

The news of Google's decision to leave mainland China, instead re-directing its search users to their Hong Kong site, has actually been in the works for some time, given the acrimonious feelings and belligerent rhetoric that has taken place among all parties involved on both sides of the negotiating table. This is but one example of how far everything has to improve if China is going to rightfully take it place in a leadership role in the 21st century.

Ever since the summer of 2008, I have been observing a trend that remains in complete control of the international business travel scene. Namely the involuntary return of foreign expatriates from overseas assignments as well as corroborating media conclusions that global business travel remains well below what might be considered normal, in both duration of foreign trips and corporate travel budget expenditures.

As if things could not become increasingly bleak for Japan’s “lost decade” and the recent news concerning Toyota’s global auto quality troubles, Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency has issued a warning to Japan’s new government relative to the nation’s borrowing, with a threat to downgrade its sovereign debt unless policy makers figure out the deflationary funk while curbing spending.