Manufacturing

When Zou Qinghua first ventured into Vietnam in 1994, all he had was a scrap of paper with a Vietnamese trade official's phone number on it. After negotiating the bribe-hungry guards on both sides of the China-Vietnam border, he tried calling the official, but neither spoke the other's language, so he hung up. Then, Zou showed up at the bureaucrat's office and tried to mime interest in investing in Vietnam. The official just looked confused. The next day Zou returned with an interpreter and finally got his point across. Today, the 42-year-old Communist Party member is one of the top individual...