ABSTRACT
At the end of the previous chapter we saw the expectations of Taiwanese entrepreneurs seeking to establish businesses on the mainland disappointed as they came up against a culture that, in some ways, differed markedly from their own. They might have been less surprised if they had thought to look back into Taiwan’s own past. In the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan’s workforce had low levels of skill and little appreciation of the importance of quality standards and meeting delivery dates; a situation comparable to that now complained of in China. Westerners also have a history that offers many parallels to what is being experienced in China today as industrialisation shifts workers from the countryside to the towns. In the West, factory owners in the early phases of industrialisation also sought to tame a workforce unused to discipline and routine through their own harsh equivalents of the Taiwanese rulebooks. These similarities suggest that certain problems faced by managers in China are transitional, a conclusion at once encouraging and discouraging. It is encouraging because it provides every reason to think that development will run its course on the Chinese mainland as it has elsewhere, eliminating or reducing some of the problems it now confronts. It is discouraging because experience suggests that such change does not occur overnight. Accumulating resources and experience, building institutions, take time.
