First Week in Beijing

Some highlights

1. I attended a talk by Amazon China's VP, James Fong in Peking University Guanghua school of management. In one of his slides, Mr. Fong highlighted Amazon's products eco-system in the following diagram which was drawn by one of Amazon's founders in the early years.  The diagram starts with sellers, followed by selection and customer experience, then growing traffic, lower cost structure,lower prices and better customer experience, finally a better eco-system. Some of the stages in the circle can be beaten by other competitors, but a stronger eco-system is not that easy to be challenged. The most important fact in this diagram is " Customer Experience" as Mr. Fong mentioned, that is why most companies now focus so much on improving "Customer Experience".

Another thing he highlighted in that talk is the difference between the Chinese market and the Foreign market in terms of e-commerce.  Two examples can be "Payment(alipay instead of credit card)" and "发票". Amazon shares around 10% of the e-commerce market in China with the purchase of joyo.com . This is quite good. However, the reason why people buy products from Amazon is not because of its superior user experience or cheaper price(Indeed, Amazon's product is quite expensive compared to some other e-commerce sites in China and Amazon CN's UX is pretty bad for the Chinese customers as some audiences complained about the tedious procedure of checking-out and buggy one-click purchase function in the Chinese site). However, amazon still owes its customers because of the TRUSTWORTHINESS it brings to the Chinese customers. Trustworthiness is so important. During the talk, the audience also drew some attentions to the coming 5% tax Chinese government is going to add on to the online-transactions. Well, it's hard to draw conclusions on what will happen to the e-commerce market in China.

2. I attended a non-profitable event by Chinayouthology which is very meaningful. http://www.douban.com/event/18974029/ Attendances come together to design education solutions for kids in rural areas. Many social entrepreneurs attended the event and I found it so cool. The founder of the 多背一公斤 social movement also appeared in the event. I had a short chat with him. It opened my eyes on what social enterprises mean. There are some other interesting social enterprises like the one who invits volunteers to read story books to kids in subways. NPOs doesn't mean the organizations shouldn't spend money, on the contrary, they really need the money to employ talents to move the organizations forwards. Unfortunately, the public don't really understand and these organizations are not so easy to get fundings and sponsorships. 

3. I attended Haidian Church English fellowship on Sunday. This church is much better than the one I attended last week. The pastor explains nicely and the songs are very touching. After the worship, new comers are welcomed to attend bible study groups. The church workers explained the key principles of christianity in 1-2 hours. Thankfully, the key principles are all the same as the ones I was taught in Singapore. Though I was told that the Chinese pastors are restricted by the government to not teach certain topics in churches, I didn't find any teaches wrong in Haidian church. That is great! However, one bad thing about that church is that they only teach 8 weeks' courses for people who are determined to be christians, while the new comers only have one course to learn about christianity. In another word, they expect people to become christians at the first course they get to know Jesus. That's so unrealistic...