From: thn89@nwsca.att.com
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: Joint Ventures with Co^.ng Phi?
Date: 2 Sep 92 15:44:41 GMT
Reply-To: thn89@nwsca.att.com
Organization: SCV Relay
Originator: daemon@media-lab.media.mit.edu

Hi all SCVers

Yesterday, I read this article from the Chicago Tribune and found this 
has somehow related to the current influx of people who want to work
and open join venture businesses with the communist regime in Vietnam.
Hopefully, this article will serve as a lesson for them learn. 

Enjoy reading

Thie^.n Ngo^

Post without permission.



        AFTER PALACE COUP, 'GANG OF 3' TAKES OVER IN BEIJING HOTEL

Beijing - China's new business moguls may have scant knowledge of Western
corporate practices, but their homespun recipe for company takeovers is far
more effective than the share manipulations of Wall Street-style stock-market
raiders.
Ask Richard Kin-Ting Fu, 47, a U.S. citizen who was outted recently from his
job as general manager of the luxurious Tianlun Dynasty hotel in downtown
Beijing.
The  palace coup that kicked him out brought back memories of the tactics
employed in the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, when gangs of young zealots
carried out random purges.
It also illustrated how fragile management contracts are in China and how
little legal recourse is available to the thousands of join ventures operating
in a country in which legal provisions are virtually non-existent or have not
caught up with the investment fervor of foreign companies.
Fu told the Tribune that after returning from vacation in California he was
confronted by his two assistant managers, both Chinese.  They presented him
with a document signed by He Jibo, a senior Communist Party member who had
appointed himself chairman of the hotel's joint-venture company.
The document advise Fu that he was dismissed and that management of the
395-room luxury hotel was in the hand of an interim governing body.  Hotel
staffers have privately nicknamed this ruling clique "The Gang of Three."
The China News Service recently reported that Fu and his staff of 25
expatriates, mainly HongKong citizens, were fired because their management
record was "lousy."
"If this sort of takeover can happen to me without any board meetings or
consultation with the foreign partner of the joint venture, then it can
happen to any one involved in joint ventures in China ," Fu said outside the
hotel.
The modus operandi of the takeover was no novelty in China.  First Fu found
that telephone in his office had been disconnected.  His closeest staff
members said they could no longer take orders from him.
Next, he said, he found that the lock on his office door had been changed and,
when  he protested, an orchestrated mob of 50 Chinese employees shouting
"you must go, you must go" berated him as he kicked his locked door in
frustration.
At this point, he said, 10 security guards grabbed his arms and legs and
carried him, struggling, out of the hotel.  In the melee, Fu said, he bit one
guard's arm.  The other choked him, and he ended up on an ambulance that took
him to a nearby hospital.
Fu said that despite his high blood presure and erratic heartbeat, the hospital
refused to keep him for observation overnight because the new hotel management
warned hospital staff members, "Someone is trying to kill him, so unless you want to be responsible for his life, don't keep him."
The saga of Fu and the Dynasty Hotel startled Beijing's foreign hotel business,
whose staffers remember that similar, though less dramatic, methods gave Chinese
partners operational control of two other major joint-venture hotels here, the 
Ramada Inn, renamed the Asia Hotel, and the Meridien Hotel.
In the lobby of the Dynasty Hotel, Assistant manager Allan Qin said "Mr. Fu is in Hong Kong."  Told that was not true, Qin added: "Maybe he is in the hospital.
You know he has a weak heart."
After some prompting, Qin admitted that Fu had been fired but denied that he
had been roughed up.  Qin promised to consult with members of the interim
governing body of the hotel.
After 20 minutes he returned with a wan smile: "all the leaders (of the hotel)
are at a political meeting," he said.  "They are studying Deng Xiaoping's
speeches."
Qin volunteered that Fu was accused of "damaging hotel property" when he kicked
his office door and of "injuring hotel staff" when he bit the security guard's
arm.
Qin, in his mid-20s said the former general manager was relieved of his job
because his work contract was not legal.  Qin said he had heard that Fu also 
behaved in an improper way with women staff members and that "the board is now
investigating if he was running a prostitution racket."
Chinese authorities often accuse foreign business executives or troublesome 
foreigners of being involved in prostitution.
Fu has worked as a senior hotel manager for the Hilton and Hyatt chains in the
U.S. and Asia.  He is vice president of Hong Kong-based Dynasty International
Hotel Corp., a major Asian chain.
"We have written letters to every Chinese leader, but we have received not a
single telephone call.  I have been waiting patiently but in vain for someone to step in, "Fu said.
Tje fiasco at the Dynasty Hotel is part of growing desire by Chinese managers to run joint ventures without the cost and staff-conscious interference of foreign managers.
Foreign executives here say that, because the government backs these ventures
financially, Chinese managers seem to care little whether the venture makes
profits on paper but covet the power to appoint and promote friends and comrades and to offer free accommodations and meals to political cronies.
The Chinese partner of the Dynasty Hotel, with a 50 percent stake, is the powerful Political Consultative Conference of Beijing, a political club of retired Communist Party officials who wield considerable clout behind the scenes.  Thirty
percent of the hotel is owned by Dynasty Development Co. of Hong Kong, 10 percent by Peking Trust and Investment Corp. and 10 percent by Canadian_Taiwansese investment company Axom.
The first mini-coup took place in April 1991,when Chinese partners quietly
changed the license from the Hong Kong-based managing company into their names.
Next the Chinese partners ignored restructuring attempts for a $38 million loan
with Standard Charter Bank of Hong Kong.  Instead the Chinese paid the bank off,
allegedly with government funds.
That procedure followed a takeover of the Meridien Hotel, whose Chinese partner
is the People's Liberation Army.  A general walked into the hotel last year and
announced that all foreign staff members were fired.
Fu said he ran into trouble with his Chinese partners when he rejected demands to give jobs to untrained staff members or to promote appointees to senior positions.  Since his dismissal a number of junior staffers have been promoted to senior department jobs among the hotel staff of 900.
One  of the most glamorous of the Beijing hotels, with a spectacular lobby built
like an Italian piazza, the Dynasty quickly has turned into a ghost hotel. 
Eight receptionists stood at an empty counter recently, two Chinese clients ate
at the vast restaurant and noisy taxi drivers and peddlers playing cards sat
in the plush chairs of the lobby.
The new management said the hotel had a 50 percent occupancy rate in the
current high tourist season, when most hotels are booked full.


Chicago Tribune, Section 3, Tuesday, September 1, 1992