Director Bridges East and West
01/18/2005
Dean Calbreath,
San Diego Union-Tribune
When Scott Wang was growing up in a rural town in coastal China, talk of strong ties between the United States and China was unthinkable.
Wang was born just a few weeks after China's Cultural Revolution began to purge the nation of free thought. Nearly every week, young Red Guards surged through the streets, denouncing intellectuals, academics, landlords, Western sympathizers and other enemies of the state.
Even Wang's father, a loyal Communist working as a musician and a librarian in the local Bureau of Culture, briefly ran into trouble with the revolutionaries. When he wrote a paper that local authorities decided was reactionary, they sent him through a course of "political education" to encourage him to change his thinking.
But the era of the Cultural Revolution is a distant memory now, overshadowed by China's ever-improving business and cultural ties with the West.
Today, as director of the Asia Desk at the San Diego World Trade Center, Wang, 38, leads trade missions to China, helping local businesses find partners in China and arranging trade meetings featuring government officials such as Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and County Supervisor Ron Roberts.
"Scott has worked tirelessly for San Diego in China, sometimes to the detriment of his own health," says Roberts, who has traveled to China twice with Wang in the past 15 months. "He's done a great job in helping us put San Diego on the map with many people in China."
By firming up ties between U.S. and Chinese companies, he hopes to create better relations between the two nations.
"Generally speaking, Chinese know more about America than Americans know about Chinese," Wang said. "Americans don't realize how much freedom there is in China or how much progress it has made in developing its cities. If Americans knew more about that, they'd realize there is a lot of opportunity in China. Increasing trade and business and cultural education between the two countries is something I really appreciate."
When Wang was growing up, it was difficult to foresee that China would ever develop such ties to the West. Some of Wang's earliest memories are of the parades that the Red Guards would periodically hold, denouncing public figures or celebrating changes in politics.
"For kids it was a lot of fun since the parades had a lot of fireworks," Wang said. "We didn't know about the politics involved."
Denunciation of Deng
Wang was in fourth grade in 1975 when Deng Xiaoping, then handling the day-to-day operations of the government, was purged for being a "capitalist roader." Each class in Wang's school picked a student to denounce Deng at a public rally. Wang was chosen to represent his class.
"As kids, we didn't really know anything other than what teachers told us," Wang said. "Today, there are lots of sources of information, including the Internet and TV. But in my childhood, we only had a radio and newspapers, which were run by the government. And there were loudspeakers in the streets broadcasting the news. You got most of your information from that source. If you tried listening to the Voice of America over the radio, you could be put into prison. So as a kid, you just didn't know much about what was happening."
Less than a year later, Mao Zedong was dead, and Deng began assuming control in China, slowly relaxing restrictions on speech and private enterprise. By the time Wang entered Hangzhou University in 1981 at age 15, the nation had changed.
"We were getting some freedom to say things different from the government perspective," he said. "In the early 1980s, I was lucky enough to grow up in that environment. I got involved in some of the democratic movements in China. But even in those times, I believe nobody could possibly imagine the tolerance developed for economic freedom, political freedom and social freedom that we have today."
For seven years, Wang studied liberal arts at Hangzhou, eventually getting a job as a literature professor. During that period, China changed dramatically. The government loosened its constraints on the economy, allowing experiments with free enterprise.
When Wang entered college, most students wanted to learn about foreign literature and philosophy, subjects that had been banned during the Cultural Revolution. By the time Wang began teaching, such subjects were passe. Students dropped their interest in liberal arts and began concentrating on business.
"It was all about money," Wang said. "All the best people were going into business."
After three years of teaching at Hangzhou, Wang decided to go into business, taking a job as creative director of a local advertising firm.
"At that time, people in China had no idea about marketing, brand management or promotion," Wang said. "We helped companies build their brands, formulate media plans and place their ads, even handling damage control with the media if things went wrong."
One of the firm's primary clients was KFC, then known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, the largest fast-food chain in China. Scott organized promotional events and helped KFC develop local and regional campaigns, stressing that marketing had to be localized to respond to regional characteristics.
It is an approach that KFC – which now has more than 1,000 outlets in China – continues to follow. In China's heavily Muslim Xinjiang province, for instance, KFC uses English, Chinese and Arabic letters on its signs. In other parts of China, KFC outlets have softened the features of Col. Sanders to make him look more Chinese.
Wang says China's affinity for U.S.-made goods translates into solid business opportunities.
"American brands like Nike and Polo are very popular," he said. "And Chinese love American food. Anywhere you look, you can see Starbucks, McDonald's or KFC. In China, Starbucks isn't just a coffee shop. It's a cultural experience. People go there for dates or business meetings. It's a very good place to meet with someone else."
Studies at UCSD
By 1995, Wang was riding high in China, working at a job he loved. But he felt he needed to broaden his experiences, so he decided to study abroad, picking the University of California San Diego because of the Asian focus of its graduate school of International Relations and Pacific Studies.
"Every friend that I talked to at that point thought it was a bad decision," he said. "'You're already established here. Why give up everything and go overseas,' they would tell me."
Nevertheless, Wang made the move. After he finished his studies at UCSD, his career took another shift, as he went to work for Packet Video Corp., a company designing video services for wireless networks.
"Scott really was tireless," said Michael Barlow, chief executive of Packet Video Network Solutions, a split-off from Packet Video that has since been purchased by Alcatel of France. "He spent a lot of time on the road, in China, doing business development and sales."
Packet Video was ahead of the market in China. Its technology required more bandwidth than the Chinese then had on their cell phones. Nevertheless, Wang set up talks with China's leading telecom equipment providers, ZTE and Huawei, and with Western firms such as Motorola, Siemens and Hewlett-Packard.
"Scott had a tough sell, but he had very good relationships in China, so we were able to see all the big wireless companies," Barlow said. "It was amazing that a guy that young could get us in to talk with the people we did."
Well-known in China
Barlow says Wang's work in China is one reason his firm kept the Packet Video name after being purchased by Alcatel in 2003.
"The name is now very well-known in China because of the work Scott did," he said. Now that the Chinese have caught up with Packet Video's bandwidth requirements, the firm hopes to use Wang's contacts to do more business there.
In 2002, Wang left Packet Video to join the World Trade Center. His job is similar to the work he was doing previously – finding Chinese business partners for U.S. firms and vice versa.
"One of the real values he brings is his contacts," said Dan Hammang, chief financial officer of Drive Cam Video Systems, who is chairman of the World Trade Center. "A lot of guys he went to school with are in government over there."
Wang's skills at strengthening trade ties was seen last October when he organized a San Diego pavilion at the China Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen – a major exhibition drawing delegations from Russia, France, Italy and Canada.
Besides managing the San Diego exhibit, Wang arranged news conferences, business-to-business networking events and high-level meetings with Chinese government officials. When it was over, the San Diego booth was named as the best-organized exhibit at the fair. Many participants walked away feeling as if they had made some solid business contacts.
Wang says his biggest challenge is finding appropriate Chinese business partners for U.S. companies.
"China's a good market, but it's not for everybody," he says. "Many U.S. companies have done great there, while some have been frustrated. One reason is that in the Chinese market, you have to do very good risk analysis to find good partners to deal with. Identifying and selecting those partners takes a lot to time and work, which is a lot of what I do."
Dean Calbreath: (619) 293-1891; dean.calbreath@uniontrib.com
