The China Experts: Sissi Zhao of GoGlobal on Managing a China Team and Hiring Across Cities
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
In this episode of The China Experts, Kristina Koehler-Coluccia is joined by Sissi Zhao, Partner at GoGlobal, in a rare episode recorded with both of them in the same room in Luxembourg. Sissi's work runs in the opposite direction to most of Woodburn's clients: she helps Chinese companies expand out of China rather than foreign companies into it. That reversal is what makes the conversation valuable, because the difficulties she describes in running a Chinese team are almost identical to the ones foreign investors describe, and she has neither a language barrier nor a cultural gap to blame them on.
Who is Sissi Zhao?
Sissi Zhao is a Partner at GoGlobal, an employer-of-record provider that supports hiring across more than 130 countries. She grew up in Chengdu and left at 22 to study international law at Liverpool, then took an Erasmus law and economics programme that moved her through Ghent, Aix-en-Provence and Rotterdam. Short spells with the International Bar Association in London and a United Nations anti-money-laundering project in Vienna were followed by a return to China, where she joined Sidley Austin in Beijing and found she was better suited to business development than to desk work. Private equity fundraising for infrastructure projects in Shanghai brought her into contact with Luxembourg's funds industry, and she moved there around twelve years ago, working at TMF and then Orangefield and Intertrust with responsibility for China outbound business. She joined GoGlobal about two years before this recording and now runs a China team of roughly twenty people from Luxembourg.
What this episode covers
Why she thinks regionalisation has replaced globalisation, and what that did to China outbound deal flow
Managing a Chinese team from Europe with only four or five overlapping working hours
What remote work quietly removes from a team, and the deliberate steps she takes to put it back
Why the Asia Pacific town hall is silent and the European one is not
Where Chinese companies are actually expanding, sector by sector and region by region
Why social insurance and housing fund rules make it hard to hire outside your registered city
How she qualifies clients, and why she turns down price-led tenders
Her one piece of advice for anyone starting out in the China market
Running a China team from six hours away
Sissi sits six hours behind her team in summer and seven in winter, which leaves four to five effective hours of overlap a day. In practice that means her team works late whenever something urgent needs her, and Chinese clients expect a response almost around the clock. She is candid that this is a challenge rather than a solved problem, which is a striking admission from someone whose company exists to make distributed hiring work.
Her account of remote work is unsentimental. There is no lunch break because nobody is checking, no colleague to think out loud with, and no small talk about the weather, holidays, parents or pets, because everything on Teams runs to a scheduled agenda. She describes that as working against human nature, on the grounds that we are social animals. Her fixes are ordinary and consistent: meet at least once a week, travel to China at least once a quarter and stay about a month, and bring together a team that is scattered across several cities and rarely meets even within one of them. GoGlobal also gives staff a monthly team-building allowance, and she has run online poker and mahjong sessions on Friday afternoons when the workload eases.
One-to-ones do more work than group calls, because a group of Chinese colleagues on a call will tend to look at each other rather than speak. Even one-to-one, she finds newer team members become defensive if she asks whether they have a problem, since they hear the question as an accusation that they have made a mistake. Trust built over repeated visits is what changes that. None of it is a substitute for hiring the right people in the first place, which is where structured recruitment in China matters more than most headquarters expect.
The same problem, whether you are foreign or Chinese
Kristina's reaction is the most useful part of this section. She admits she had put most of these difficulties down to cultural difference or language nuance, and here is a mainland Chinese manager speaking Chinese to a Chinese team and running into the same wall. Sissi's example is her company's monthly town hall, which runs twice: once in the morning for Asia Pacific and once in the evening for Europe and the Americas. Same content, very different rooms. The European session is interactive, with people raising questions and expressing what they like and dislike. The Asia Pacific session is quiet, which she is careful to say does not mean disagreement or inattention, but does mean participants position themselves as recipients rather than contributors.
The practical conclusion both of them reach is that social contact has to be engineered rather than waited for. Kristina's example is a badminton group her Shanghai team organised themselves, booking a court on Thursdays and asking for a two-hour lunch to run an internal competition. She approved it on the condition the work still got done, and it became the thing the team looked forward to each week.
Where Chinese companies are going
Sissi puts the turning point at 2021 rather than 2020, on the reasoning that the second year of the pandemic was when it stopped looking temporary. Deal pipelines dried up, mergers and acquisitions became much harder, and her own view shifted to organic international expansion as the realistic route. She frames the wider trend as regionalisation replacing globalisation, with Europe regionalising and parts of Asia doing the same.
By sector, she describes e-commerce as the early wave and now well established, renewable energy as the boom of the moment including electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, and pharmaceuticals as a sector squeezed at home by centralised procurement and anti-bribery scrutiny, which pushes companies to look for markets where the pricing works. Artificial intelligence she expects to be larger in its effects than the internet was.
By geography, manufacturers go to Southeast Asia first, and to India where suppliers have followed Apple. Purchasing power in Southeast Asia is comparatively low, so higher technology companies looking to distribute come to Europe and North America instead. Mexico attracts car manufacturing aimed at the North American market. Within Europe the split is functional: eastern Europe for labour cost when the activity is manufacturing, Germany, France and southern Europe when proximity to customers matters. Africa remains mostly a natural resources story rather than a consumer one.
The social insurance rule that limits hiring inside China
This is the section with the most direct operational relevance for foreign investors. If a company has its entity in Shanghai and wants to hire someone living in Wuhan, that employee's social insurance and housing fund have to be paid where they actually are, or they are stuck with the arrangements of the registering city. Setting up a branch, renting an office and running the administration for a single person almost never justifies itself, and Kristina's frustration is that this pulls in the opposite direction to reforms elsewhere, such as the move to electronic fapiao.
Sissi's explanation is political economy rather than bureaucracy. Municipal and provincial governments carry the pension, healthcare and housing costs of the people who work in their jurisdiction, and they are looking at their own balance sheets, so they have every reason to want those contributions paid locally. Within a fairly loose national framework, cities and industrial parks are free to be creative, which is why the picture varies so much from place to place.
The practical route around it is employer-of-record hiring, which puts someone on a compliant local contract in a city where the company has no entity, with contributions paid at the correct local rates. Kristina is unusually open about the commercial logic, explaining that Woodburn runs its own employer-of-record service out of Shanghai and collaborates with GoGlobal where a client needs someone in a city Woodburn does not cover. Once staff are on the books, cloud payroll services handle the monthly filings and contributions.
Both of them agree on when that stops being the right answer. Once a company has enough people in one city, roughly five or more in Sissi's framing, the arithmetic flips and it becomes worth completing China company registration in that location and running cloud accounting and financial reporting and tax and audit for the local entity.
You cannot target China as a market
Asked about pricing, Sissi refuses to generalise: her clients sit at different points in their life cycle, and while some weigh service quality heavily, others look only at price. What she will generalise about is the discipline required. She does not bid for tenders driven purely on price, because she knows she will not win them. She avoids the very largest brands, who in her description expect to be thanked for the business and served for nothing, and she avoids the smallest startups on risk grounds, which leaves a large and workable middle. Free work, she notes, is not valued by anyone.
Her broader point is that China is too large and too varied to be treated as a single market. You do not target China, you segment it, build a picture of the client you are actually equipped to serve, and work outwards from your own differentiation. She also warns that competitive pressure is relentless and the channels are different, with social media doing work that traditional European marketing channels do not. Where differentiation rests on brand rather than price, protecting it early matters, and because China is a first-to-file jurisdiction, trademark registration in China belongs at the start of a market entry rather than after the first campaign runs.
What she would tell herself on day one
Kristina closes every episode with the same question, and Sissi's answer is creativity paired with an open mind. She means something more active than receptiveness: Chinese clients push you to invent solutions, and the pressure to stay flexible and inventive never really lets up. She also leaves a small practical note for anyone travelling. Foreign visitors can now link an overseas bank card to a WeChat account, so business travellers no longer need to arrive carrying cash, although the verification process takes a few steps.
Watch the full interview
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