I hope Manpower’s Jeffrey Joerres is a man of his word. Because he’s got power when it comes to China’s workers and labor market.

Joerres, CEO of the Milwaukee-based staffing giant, just told Workforce Management’s Gina Ruiz that his company would stick to high employment standards as it becomes China’s first foreign temporary staffing firm.

“I wouldn’t place anybody in a situation where I wouldn’t want to be in,” Joerres says.

On October 10, Manpower announced that it had gained government approval to become the first non-Chinese temporary staffing agency.

Although China’s capitalistic push over the past three decades has created great wealth in the country, it also has come with widespread labor abuses. Many of these are associated with small factories, which often supply items to major Western corporations in areas such as electronics, apparel and toys.

Even though Western businesses have stepped up efforts to enforce decent labor practices, abuses have continued. Last year, BusinessWeek showed how factories have gotten better at concealing problems, with the help of a new type of consultant that helps plants evade audits.

It strikes me that if Western firms were really serious about curbing abuses in China, they would stop tapping these questionably run suppliers and get more involved—either through joint ventures or by owning their factories outright.

Of course, reining in the outsourcing probably means higher costs and less flexibility. Companies typically hate both of those results.

That’s what makes Manpower’s China news intriguing. Manpower gives organizations—Western or Chinese—the option of outsourcing some of their workforce needs. Manpower’s offer promises companies not only flexibility, but expertise in assessing worker skills for optimal performance.

At the same time, Manpower could be a force against labor abuses. Multinational firms may choose Manpower over a shady domestic supplier to safeguard their reputations. In turn, domestic staffing firms seeking to compete with Manpower could set a higher bar for their labor practices.

Of course, this potential for a virtuous circle turns on the integrity of Joerres and his company.

Joerres told Ruiz that Manpower may turn down business if employers won’t adopt higher standards.

“We understand that our way of doing business is not going to appeal to everybody,” he says. “That’s just part of the territory and we accept it.”

I wish Joerres the best. And I look forward to seeing if he lives up to his promise.

The story of leadership in China came alive for me as I stood in Angel Yu’s office, some 300 feet above the streets of Shanghai.

Up to that point in a three-week reporting trip in China, I’d learned that the country lacks enough homegrown managers to satisfy all the demand at multinational firms doing business in the fast-growing Chinese economy. I’d also discovered that the resulting hasty promotions of young Chinese leaders amount to a risk for companies, the country at large and even the rest of the world.

But these matters can be largely impersonal, abstract. Angel Yu helped me see how much the topic of China’s leaders is about individual people who’ve often made courageous choices, collectively achieved dramatic results and who are trying to create a new leadership style—one that may be particularly well suited for the 21st century.

Yu, 42, is vice president for human resources and administration at clothing firm Adidas for the Greater China region. In January, I interviewed her and the president of Adidas for Greater China, Sandrine Zerbib, about how the company handles leadership challenges in the country. My findings from that discussion and talks with some 30 other company officials and consultants will be published next week in a Workforce Management special report.

After the hourlong interview in an Adidas conference room, Yu walked me to her office to give me a report naming the company as one of the top employers in the Shanghai region. Yu’s office on the 32nd floor of a Shanghai high rise has a sweeping view of the bustling, still under-construction city.

It—and Yu’s possession of it—became all the more stunning to me as she described her career history. The daughter of Shanghai-area factory workers, Yu attended college and worked as a teacher in the early 1980s. This was back when the Chinese economy was still largely run through central planning, and individual choices were limited. Fed up with the restrictions governing her job, she quit and headed to Shenzhen, then China’s free-market outpost. By doing so, she gave up the security of the “iron rice bowl”—guaranteed employment—in hopes for a better life. “I took a risk,” she says.

It has paid off. Yu worked for four years at direct-marketing company Amway, and has been an Adidas HR manager since 1999. She now has responsibilities for mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She’s even playing a leading role in worldwide HR initiatives at Adidas, Zerbib says.

If Yu were haughty, it would be easy to see why. She has reached a powerful position, and once a week a headhunter tries to lure her away to another job. Instead, she is gracious, warm and soft-spoken.

Her story parallels what’s happened in China. Beginning in the late 1970s, the country essentially placed a big bet on free-market reforms. That gamble has largely succeeded, in the form of rapid economic growth and newfound prosperity. Problems still plague the country, ranging from human rights abuses to the immature manager dilemma I found in my reporting.

But at least on the latter front, executives and other officials in China seem aware of the issue and are determined to tackle it. And as they do, there is growing talk about blending the best of the East and the West when it comes to leadership. There’s even an argument that the Chinese capacity for handling complexity could be a key strength as the entire world grapples with tricky issues such as economic inequality and climate change.

Angel Yu may be an example of a new generation of Chinese leaders prepared for an ever-more integrated globe. She’s clearly comfortable with Western management principles. But she also says many Chinese values are worth preserving in a business setting, including loyalty and the importance of personal relationships.

Can Yu and her peers pull it off? Can they solve the many leadership problems facing the country? I can’t say for sure. But I will be following her story, and China’s, closely.