Francis Tam, vice-president of the People Division of Wal-Mart Asia, cited corporate culture as the soul of a company. It cemented employees with shared values, which influenced the lifestyle, behaviors and values of employees and inspired them to work hard, he said.

Tam noted that Wal-Mart, with tens of millions of retail stores around the world, had its own traditional corporate culture, which gave employees from different regions and cultures a high sense of belonging and imbued them with the willingness to participate in the development of the company.

Along with China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), multinational firms have arrived in the country one after another, seizing resources and markets as well as human resources. Some people in Chinese companies say that foreign companies use high salaries to attract staff.

John Halry, president of Watson Wyatt Worldwide, the world's largest human resources company, however, told the forum that a growing number of multinational firms had invested in China and their personnel quickly became localized.

During this process, corporate culture was the key and most essential thing, not money, he said.

If a company took money as the sole criteria, he noted, employees tended to lack a sense of belonging and tended to change jobs; on the other hand, companies did not dare train employees since they might leave at any time. All those factors would impact negatively on the company as well as its employees.

Worldwide human resources statistics show that 89 percent of people who have changed their jobs have not done so for just for the sake of money.

Huang Hui, senior vice-president of Bearing Point, said at the forum that the advantage of European and American firms lay in their corporate culture, which provided training and chances of promotion for employees.

A senior official of Procter & Gamble Co., for example, once told a group of graduates from universities and colleges in the Chinese capital that P&G would help its employees make a two, five or even 20-year work plan.

Prof. Wei Jie, a noted expert with the School of Economics and Management at prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, acknowledged that the era of knowledge economics made personnel the key to a company's survival and development.

Relevant researches show that by August this year there were 410,000 foreign companies in China employing a total of 23 million Chinese personnel, who once constituted the backbone of government bodies and state-owned enterprises.

In the 200-strong foreign insurance firms currently in China, 60 percent of their employees have come from the People's Insurance Company of China. And the number of research people in the Physics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has dropped from over 700 to 400, with most of whom leaving to work for multinational firms like Motorola and Microsoft.

Chinese companies, too, have their corporate cultures. Yao Jinrong, board director of the world-renowned China International Trust and Investment Corporation with a history of about 100 years, attributed the secret to a company's development to taking "patriotism and innovations and humanizing them" as its corporate culture. As early as 1912, the company advocated for treating employees cordially, kindly and with the best possible care, and exerting to train them as being in the best interests of the company.

The well-known Qingdao Haire Group Co., situated in the most beautiful coastal resort city of Qingdao in east China's Shandong Province, also attracts people with its highly-developed corporate culture. Eddie Ng, president of the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations, said Haire selected from among candidates its employees in strict compliance with its own culture and made itself an established international company.

A small factory with 1.47 million RMB yuan (some US$177,750) debts 17 years ago, Haire is now an outstanding international firm with a very good reputation and a 60 billion RMB yuan (about US$7.26 billion) annual turnover. When asked about its culture, Zhang Ruimin, president of Haire, epitomized it by saying that was "to keep true and sincere forever" to all the employees and clients.

(Xinhua News Agency December 18, 2002)