The abbreviated term for the Beijing Foreign Enterprise Human Resources Service Company Limited, a state-owned enterprise founded in 1979 as the first company to provide professional HR services to foreign enterprises’ representative offices in China. Such foreign businesses cannot hire employees directly and, by law, have to use the services of dispatch companies such as Fesco which provides workers on a temporary basis. Given Fesco’s first mover advantage and its dominance in the Chinese market, the term is now commonly used as a general description for all Chinese dispatch firms in the same way as genericized trademarks Hoover and Sellotape have come to be common terms for vacuum cleaners and sticky tape. So, employers in China may use “a Fesco” to source labor which may not necessarily be part of the original Fesco. There are now multiple competing Fesco’s in each city, some subsidiaries or affiliates of companies in another part of the country, some partially state-owned and some 100 per cent privately-owned.