Making friends in China

I’ve been in Suifenhe for two and a half years. At first, I sold Russian-made sausages because my father-in-law made them. The annual sales in China were 20 metric tons. Chinese really liked our product because they considered meat from overseas to be better.

The sausage business is not that easy to do now because there’s too much Russian food in China and it’s hard to verify the counterfeits. Moreover, the inspection and quarantine procedures are complicated.

I’ve turned to the business of selling machines for processing fish and sausages. I purchase them from Shandong and Hebei provinces and sell them to factories in Russia. They are popular in Russia due to their good quality and reasonable price.

I’m from Vladivostok, and in the 1990s, when I was a child, I heard from adults about China. As they described, there were few high buildings and a scattering of shabby houses. But border trade was booming then. Nearly all the people could make money by exchanging daily goods with Chinese.

I traveled to Suifenhe for the first time in 2008 and made some friends there. Then I chose to study Chinese and got an MBA after five years at Beihua University in Jilin, Jilin province. After that, I earned my doctorate in education at Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service.

I found I was still interested in business, so I chose it as my career. Trading with Chinese is no different from trading with Russians. It depends on who they are, not which country they are from.

However, there is a slight difference between people from southern and northern China. When I went to Zhejiang province to do business, they wouldn’t invite me to lunch or dinner, only tea was provided. They would only dine with me if I signed a big contract with them. However, in northeastern China, even though I didn’t make any deal with the businessmen, they would treat me like an old friend.

As for the food-processing equipment business I’m running, I’m not sure about its future. It depends on the economy in China and the global situation.