Nashville Business Journal - by Cynthia Yeldell Nashville Business Journal

If you're a Tennessee business looking to get into China, the Hong Kong government can help.

This week Michael Rowse, director general of investment promotion for Invest Hong Kong, spoke to the International Business Council of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce's about the benefits of choosing Hong Kong for a China-based operation. Rowse, a government official, travels the globe telling companies that Hong Kong is an easy place to do business and they can be up and running in less than a week.

The government has an office in New York that works with American companies. And one of its programs involves partnering companies with other businesses in their industry that already have operations in Hong Kong.

On the heels of Tennessee's push to strengthen business ties with China, Nashville's Dr. Ming Wang has started the Tennessee Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

The Nashville-based organization is the first in the state and has dual purposes: helping Tennessee-based companies conduct business in China, and attracting China-based businesses to Tennessee.

"I want us to grow our trade in China," Wang says. "We need to be better prepared and better organized."

Nashville Business Journal - by Cynthia Yeldell Nashville Business Journal, July 22, 2007.

Two small publications -- and the publishers who drive them -- are making a big impact on the mood, attitudes and events in Middle Tennessee's Chinese community.

Xingkui Guo started the Tennessee Chinese Times -- the state's first Chinese language newspaper - because he noticed a void for local news in the community when he moved to Nashville in 2003 to become a professor of graphic design at Tennessee State University.

And less than six months ago, a group of Chinese businessmen including Nashville insurance company owner and real estate investor John Wang, started a second Chinese-language publication, The Tennessee Chinese News, which circulates statewide.

Dr. Ming Wang has taken his ophthalmology expertise to China, where he's bought an ownership stake in the country's largest private eye hospital system and trained thousands of eye surgeons.

Wang, who emigrated from China 24 years ago, began taking a more active role in the 1.3 billion-person country after starting the Wang Vision Institute in 2002. He believed the rapid adoption of cellphones and automobiles would translate into potential for eye surgery locations.

"China's economic growth is unprecedented. Never before in world history has there been such rapid economic growth with both speed and amplitude with such a big population," Wang says. "When I came to the U.S. years ago, 90 percent of the vehicles on the street were bicycles. When I went back in April, 90 percent of the vehicles were cars."