Knowledge management in the Chinese business context

With over a billion people living in the People’s Republic of China, it should not be surprising that Chinese businesses have traditionally relied on an abundance of low-cost labour. Indeed, China has become well-known for its labour-intensive economic activities, to the point of being nicknamed the “factory of the world” (Miyagawa & Yoshida, 2005). However, the Chinese business landscape has been undergoing a process of continuous and at times radical change. This change was sparked in 1978 by the economic reforms associated with the Open Door Policy (see Taylor, 2003, for an extensive review of the economic reforms and their impact) and has been fuelled more recently by China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization. Economic activities planned and controlled by the state have been progressively supplanted by market-based competition. The emerging markets across most industrial and commercial sectors of the Chinese economy have typically stimulated rivalries between domestic enterprises and rivals with foreign funding and/ or management. © 2011, IGI Global.