Watch out, India

摘要

In a vast curtained room in Xian in western China, rows of dark, pony-tailed heads are silently bowed, fingers moving quickly and expertly. They might be in any Chinese factory-except that they are not assembling shoes, nor soldering circuit boards, but sitting at computer terminals processing medical-claim forms from New York and car-loan applications from Detroit and marking examinations for high-school students in Melbourne, Australia. "This is the future of the global back office," says Michael Liu. Mr Lui, founder of CompuPacific International, one of China's few indigenous business-process outsourcing (BPO) firms, returned after a decade in health-care IT in America, determined to prove that China can do just as well as India in outsourced services.