Mapping China

China, already the world's largest consumer market, is now on the fast-track to supplying home-grown innovation to global markets. Foreign companies and returning Chinese are hoping to enter this lucrative space by forming strategic alliances with Chinese firms or establishing regional offices in China. Understanding the network of company relationships and industry dependencies is crucial to successful business transactions in China.

Many online textual sources currently exist for this information market -- research databases (Ovum), industry analyst portals (IDC), and financial sites (Yahoo!Finance). Yet these sources provide massive quantities of data that are tedious to sort through. Mapping China is a dynamic, web-based information infrastructure that helps users quickly understand industry landscapes through interactive data visualizations. We demonstrate the capabilities of our tool by mapping the relationships in China's wireless telecommunications industry.