This is China! BLOG

Book Review: “The Story of a China Practice”

The Story of a China Practice is a great afternoon’s read, a kind of Chinese version of Homer’s Odyssey for the company Dezan Shira & Associates (DSA). Subtitled, “A Case Study of Professional Services Development in China,” the compact book is a far cry from Tom Clissold’s Mr. China, in which Clissold writes about how the company for which he worked, ASIMCO, lost hundreds of millions of dollars to developing a China business. Though DSA did not lose even a fraction of ASIMCO’s amount, Founder and Senior Partner Chris Devonshire-Ellis shares through the booklet the near misses that would have had the consultancy never make its fifteenth anniversary, which it celebrated just a couple months ago.

Dezan-Shira & Associates (DSA) is a tax and legal advisory with offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as in many second-tier cities throughout China. The company name, Chris writes, was actually a mis-spelling of his full name that he would occasionally receive on mailings. With that inspiration, he began the advisory in 1993 in Shenzhen as a legal services business. For those of us who have started our own businesses in the rough and tumble China market, there are some quite inspiring moments in the booklet that give one a sigh. One is the simple point that he had no business in the first eighteen months of “going it alone”. He ate A LOT of noodles to survive there in Shenzhen, where there wasn’t even a bar when he first set up shop.

Another spill that I could relate to involved the theft of (at that time, especially) funds by a trusted employee within the first couple years of operation. One bureaucratic foul up that I’m sure at the time was frustrating beyond belief involved the business being shut down because the company did not have its business license on hand: the certificate was in a different government office having the address of the company changed.

Another interesting story was the establishment and development of The China Briefing, a well-known tax and legal publication the company produces monthly for China readership. The guide also discusses the evolution of its line of books, such as guides to doing business in different parts of China, as well as more hands-on advisories covering tax and administrative issues involved with setting up and operating a business in China.

China Practice brings a focus on the difficulties of keeping a business going during the bad times of the Asian economic meltdown of 1997 and the SARS epidemic of 2003. Sacrifices on the part of partners and employees alike kept the business going and helped the company make it to its fifteenth birthday: by any measure in any country an admirable feat. Now with nearly 130 employees across ten offices in China, two in Vietnam and two in India, DSA has certainly come into its own.

Though clearly a marketing piece, it is a charming read nonetheless. And educational, too. Especially for those who would like to have some idea of where lays ahead the Scylla of Chinese Culture and Charybdis of the New Economy in China.

You can find DSA’s bookstore here.