By John Ostapkovich

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Doing business in China can be a gold mine, or a land mine, depending on how you go about it.

Penn graduate Stanley Chao says he wrote Selling to China because he’s been consulting on the subject for 20 years and it’s too often re-inventing the wheel.

China has changed from being a place for low-end to high-tech manufacturing and, he says, is in the process of moving from copying Western designs and tech.

“In the next five years, the idea is going to be discovered in China. You know, they design the product and they’re going to manufacture the product in China. During all these phases, they need to build things better, faster, cheaper and all of these technologies and all of these resources are going to come from the West,” Chao explains.

By way of analogy, he says companies need to find a way to sell hamburgers in the world’s most populous nation while not giving away the secret sauce.

China is keen on joint ventures that siphon off technology.