Hi, I'm Gene

I'm an American entrepreneur and the founder of EME China Consultants, a China business training and advisory firm I started in Shanghai in 2014 with a team of local marketing interns.

My Greater China experience began in 1996 as Taiwan Country Manager for an American manufacturer. At the time, Mainland China was still far behind the four "Asian Tigers" of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, but this began to shift after 9/11, the year I received my MBA.

I thought I was destined for high-tech fortunes because I worked at Motorola, but no one has a proverbial crystal ball. Besides the Dot-Com crash in 2000, followed by the events at the World Trade Center in 2001, the iconic Motorola brand was acquired by a Chinese company, Lenovo, in 2004, the same year I arrived in Shenzhen via ferry from Hong Kong on my first China business trip.

Over the next 15+ years and counting, I discovered that "knowing how to speak Chinese doesn't mean you know what to say in Chinese," and I had a talent for explaining complex cross-cultural issues to my Western colleagues and Chinese partners.

To positively impact an increasingly divided world between the country of my birth (USA) and ancestry (China), I started hosting Meetup events, podcasting (China Myth Podcast), creating training programs (Solving CHINA Unknown Unknowns), and writing books (The Chinese Honeymoon Period).

I've run the entire gambit from China expat to instructor, consultant, and entrepreneur in China, and I now live with my wife and son in Irvine, California.