Can Korea be a gateway for companies interested in selling or manufacturing in China?
I used to laugh at that. I said, “Why would anybody use Korea as a gateway to China when they could just go straight to China?” But i’ve seen it happening, and I’ve seen it happen very effectively, and the reason is that even though Chinese and Korean culture of course is very different, it’s much more similar than American and Chinese culture is. Things like how to manage people, rule of law, managing “white envelopes,” relationship-based legal structure rather than law-based legal structure – all of these things are what Korea used to be like 20, 30, 40 years ago, so your senior executives in Korea have all been through that. Now Korea has changed a lot, and rule of law is becoming more important. Bribery is much more difficult to achieve than it used to be, but these businessmen have experience in that kind of an environment, so I’ve seen it happen very effectively that foreign-invested companies in Korea have used the Korean human resources to manage their operations in China. Kore
