[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He moved to China to join the production teams of Western film projects that came to China to shoot.Shershow has a knack for getting Chinese and American crews to work together and on schedule, and he has worked on several big television series and films in Shanghai.For instance, he has his own team of carpenters, all from a single rural village in China, whom he can set loose to build any prop or set.He swears they are as good as any in Hollywood, and of course, cost nothing near the price of tradesmen in California.Film work, however, is far from steady.After the SARS outbreak in 2003, it dried up altogether.But in China, where new businesses are just an idea and few dollars away, Shershow came up with an alternate plan to tide him over.He started his own small Internet sales business.Joining a friend in Los Angeles, Shershow picked out several items from the Shanghai markets and offered them on eBay.* Those that tested well included traditional baskets, army uniforms, and Chinese versions of Tin Tin comic books (unauthorized versions from the 1970s and 1980s, completely rewritten by the Communists to remake Tin Tin, the bourgeois Belgian boy detective, into an agent for class struggle).Chinese editions of The Art of War, unsurprisingly, do very well, too.The export business grew into a microenterprise that mirrors the Chinese economy.Shershow now employs a local manager, a Chinese friend who coordinates bulk buys and shipping prices, and he even has hired a migrant worker who comes in every day and packs up goods for bulk shipment to Los Angeles, where another friend ships them out to customers who buy the goods on eBay.The migrant worker, a twenty-year-old farm boy, is so thrilled with the opportunity to learn how to use a PC that he will gladly perform any task.Shershow’s manager convinced him to list for sale tea thermoses made in the manager’s hometown.The thermoses, common in China, are handsome, painted acrylic jars that have screens in their lids so they can be filled with tea leaves and replenished with hot water all day.The leaves stay put and the tea flows through the top.American stores carry nothing like them.On eBay they caught fire, and Shershow’s operation now fills whole shipping containers with tea thermoses and other items for American buyers.Lately, however, Shershow has noticed that the shopkeepers in the Dongtai Market are also trying their luck on eBay.“They’re all over the eBay site now,” Shershow says.1 “If you walk down the street you can see the shop owners packing goods into Styrofoam boxes all labeled for mailing to eBay buyers.” In an ad hoc inventory of eBay sellers, and possible competitors, Shershow found 56,000 items offered by sellers in China, with 31,000 of them in the category loosely defined as antiques.Thousands of Chinese sellers also offer computers, electronic components, musical instruments, cars, cheap DVDs, look-alike watches, and even real estate.The new sellers are something of a problem for Shershow’s business.Like the world’s makers of auto parts and microchips that face constant poaching, Shershow finds enterprising competitors passing themselves off as his operation.On eBay, it is difficult to keep success a secret from other sellers.If his venture finds a product that sells well, the Chinese sellers post the same items in their listing and lift wholesale the language Shershow has carefully crafted to pique interest in his items.Often too, Chinese sellers hawk inferior versions, but do not flag them as such.Nevertheless, Shershow believes his crew can easily stay ahead of the imitators by choosing better items that are more in keeping with Americans’ tastes, especially their quirky demand for offbeat collectibles.No Chinese sellers have yet caught on to the Tin Tin market.For that reason, when Shershow is asked by a Dongtai seller about how to conduct business on eBay, he often obliges, both to keep his friendships on the street strong and to get a look at what the sellers are up to.It was just such a request that led him to the cramped upstairs room where Zhai Ming, the twenty-four-year-old son of the Zhai family, runs the family’s international operations.The slight Zhai Ming greets Shershow in a sweater and tie, his hair pomaded and neatly combed back.He talks in a faint, nervous tone as if the American were a doctor making a bedside call.Shershow eyes the setup, which to an uninitiated American would look something like a Mississippi mud shack stuffed full with scavenged office equipment.Shershow, however, sees more.The Zhai apartment is not a humble beginning, but a huge step up from a much humbler beginning in the provinces.The family’s commitment to buy computers required grave sacrifice, and they see their future riding on what Zhai Ming can do with them.A few moments after Shershow arrives, Zhai Ming’s father, Zhai Young, comes in to say hello [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]