This time we will elaborate on sourcing in China.

Everything that I talked about last time was based on one important assumption - your vendor understands what you are saying. While I am confident to say many businesses in China have staff members who can speak English at an eloquent level, many don't. So what are you going to do?

Joint Venture.

Joint venture with a local chinese (who speaks English) can solve many of your problems. Law and regulation changes are notorious in China and what is true this morning might not be anymore the following afternoon. Having a local chinese taking care of this, it can save your worst nightmare.

With the huge profiteering opportunity, I would not worry about adding a middleman. What I do is I outsource to my sourcing effort to several middleman so they do the work for me (although I speak Chinese. Why outsource then? To save some work). I have worked with them over a period of time now and have met with them in person, thus I trust them entirely. However, when you are starting out doing joint venture, do not be afraid to walk away a partner to another if you feel you do not work well with him. Don't worry, there are 1.3 billion Chinese, so you are bound to find a good one, it might just takes some time.

This concludes the answer to my reader's question, and next time we are going to get back to more China business opportunities.