China's budding entrepreneurs
As China's economy continues to grow, its future looks more than assured given the degree of talent coming through its entrepreneurial ranks. The reasons for the confidence of the Chinese market in its continuing economic strength can be ascertained by checking out the scores of budding entrepreneurs.
By 2015 there will be over 500 million Chinese under the age of 50 - equivalent to the entire population of the European Union. And where these citizens differ drastically from previous generations is that they are no longer backward-looking or insular. In days gone by there would have been a strong tendency to idolise political reformers such as Deng Xiaoping. But China's new generation are far more likely to be hoping to emulate Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
Although scarcely a generation has passed since the austere days of Chairman Mao's communism, modern twenty-somethings are embracing entrepreneurship and the possibilities of market capitalism. Although China's large industries – banking, telecommunications, power supply and steel production – remain state-controlled, a huge portion of the economy is being driven by the vision of its dynamic new impresarios.
One senior associate at Katzenbach Partners, Stacy Palestrant, conducted a study of Chinese students. She adopted the phrase ‘the bridge generation'. “They grew up in communist China and in the 1980s the country started to change”. While their parents would be able to describe a very different world, where state control was the norm, a succession of communist leaders had fully recognised the direction in which the international economic winds were blowing. "So they have a foot in both worlds”, she concluded.
A typical example of China's bright new business stars would be Robin Chan. Aged a mere 32, he is typical of a generation growing up in a People's Republic that has inexorably become one of the globe's most powerful free market economies. Chan is the founder of XPD, one of money China's leading international social-gaming publishers. Chan hit upon a unique aspect of game development in China. While dozens of Chinese game developers wanted to access global social networks, they had little or no feasible methods for distribution. Chain stated: "The culture gap and operational limits are huge barriers for success in this industry". Beijing-based XPD are helping to unlock the planet's multibillion-dollar social-gaming market. One of its recent successes has been to publish a game called Medical Mayhem: in less than two months this has hooked more than 2 million users and over 100,000 Facebook fans.