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Avoid Shanghai and Beijing. Both have excellent universities, and Beijing has central government ministries while Shanghai is the commercial capital of China. In IT, companies have preferred to hire from Tsinghua for smart technology people. But there are major problems with both cities. First of all, staff turnover is too high, and costs are too high.

And when it comes to Internet/IT, I say that the Internet already has become a platform and there is plenty of talent around. Do you really need expensive people from the very best universities in China who may prove a pain to manage? If you don’t, second-tier people who are reliable and don’t ask for huge pay raises are good enough, and maybe even better. When hiring local talent, look for tortoises, not hares.

Your most loyal people will be the ones you hired and trained on the job. They will also be the ones who understand local market and conditions and connections.

Instead of going to Beijing and Shanghai, look at the 20 major city markets in China if you are thinking of selling to Chinese consumers.

If you want to get into China under the radar (in my opinion, always a wise strategy), these are places to look at very seriously. If you need knowledge workers, as in programming or game production or pharmaceuticals, pay special attention to the local universities, and partnering with them to hire their graduating students.

If you can help and offer investments which create jobs and upgrade the skill force, you are in a good position. Be sure to get your money and profit back within 15 years (by 2023). That is because if you are selling to Chinese consumers, you are selling to the current group who are in their 20s - 40s. By 2023, China’s demographics will fall off a cliff because of the one-child policy, and they will be in savings mode instead of spending mode.

When it comes to modernization, China is crossing a 30-foot chasm with a 20-foot rope, with each foot representing one year. China’s hardware development and infrastructure are very impressive and are the most modern in the world, as the Beijing Olympics showed. The hardest part to modernize is peoples’ mentality as the tainted milk scandal has shown. China’s aging demographics do not give it enough time to cross the chasm, so Chinese will get old before they get modern. When that happens, China will look like a bigger version of Japan, and will have all the problems Japan has today. Just hope that China has a national healthcare system in place by then.

Rural infrastructure is less developed, and so far, the Chinese government has made all the wrong moves in rural development by not supporting the development of rural collectives for the farmers.

This organization is partly responsible for the Sanlu tainted milk scandal, and is copied from the US. But the US has a surplus of land and shortage of farmers, while China has a shortage of land and excess of farmers!

The push is on to inspire developing countries to do what more American communities are doing: steer away from sprawling, cookie-cutter subdivisions popularized after World War II and create sustainable communities that will not deplete natural resources.

 

That includes developments built around mass-transit stations to reduce reliance on cars and projects that mix homes and businesses so that people can walk from home to stores and other services.

After touring Tysons Corner, he said: "I'm overwhelmed by the lack of coherent design. … It's 'build where you want.' "

The first true suburb was born in the 1830s outside Manchester, England, Lang says. It was Victoria Park, a gated community of luxury homes that now is part of Manchester. About 20 years later came the first U.S. suburb — gated Llewellyn Park in West Orange, N.J., about 12 miles from Manhattan. Streetcar suburbs followed, first along the route of horse-drawn streetcars and later along rail corridors such as Philadelphia's Main Line.

 

After World War I, pedestrian-oriented suburbs flourished, including the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City and Beverly Hills. Suburban expansion came to a standstill during the Great Depression and "the great burst comes after World War II," Lang says.

 

Tract-style subdivisions dependent on the automobile flourished. The most famous is Levittown, on New York's Long Island. Then came larger, 1960s-era split-levels and colonials on cul-de-sacs.

 

Within 20 years, suburbs exploded in the booming Sun Belt around Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities.

 

Then the craze for large luxury homes — dubbed McMansions — pushed development to the farthest fringes of metropolitan areas, where land was still cheap and plentiful. That helped spark an anti-sprawl fervor still alive today that has the backing of many environmentalists, preservationists, health professionals, farmers and big-city mayors.

Suburban sensibilities began to change.

 

Town centers designed to mimic small cities sprouted in suburbia. New light-rail lines were built and transit-oriented developments along the tracks followed. More people embraced "new urbanism," a movement that strives to capture the essence of turn-of-the-century communities. Central cities enjoyed a renaissance as young professionals and empty-nesters embraced the urban lifestyle.

 

Today, the dialogue about suburbs among urban thinkers around the world is intensifying largely because of universal concern over global warming. There is worry about traffic congestion and air pollution. That's why designing suburbs that require residents to drive to get anywhere is losing relevance.

The Chinese delegation that visited Phoenix suburbs last month "had a keen interest in finding out what is this Petri dish of Del Webb communities they've been hearing about for many years," says Jacque Petroulakis, a Del Webb spokeswoman. She says hundreds of foreign architects, planners, developers and private investors from Japan, China, Germany and South America have visited the company's developments in recent years.

For many developing nations, however, the suburban ideal is stuck in circa 1980: a sea of lookalike single-family homes and shopping malls on the edge of the city. It's a model that many Americans increasingly are rejecting.

 

"Most intellectuals say it's horrible. Most environmentalists say the same thing," says Nora Libertun de Duren, urban planning professor at Columbia University and an expert on suburbs in developing countries. "But developers say it's good business, and architects say it's good business."

In Argentina, developers are building gated communities in poor neighborhoods. Shantytowns pepper the outskirts of Buenos Aires, areas that had no roads and other infrastructure until a major upgrade in the 1990s, Libertun de Duren says. Once highways were built, gated developments went up and lured commuters who worked in the city. The developments provided employment to the residents of shantytowns, she says.

China, where major cities are choking on stifling pollution, is striving to build the world's first sustainable city — Dongtan, which broke ground last summer. Designed by a London-based global consulting company and built on an island outside Shanghai, Dongtan, ultimately to house 50,000, will ban cars that pollute (even hybrids), grow its own food, recycle almost everything — including wastewater — and create its own energy from wind, the sun and human and animal waste.

 

"The Chinese are very interested in doing the latest and most interesting things," says Paul Lukez, an architect from Somerville, Mass., and author of Suburban Transformations. "There's a recognition by the government that something needs to be done. … If something is cutting edge, whether it comes from the United States or Europe, they want it."