Mr. China
Authors: Tim Clissold
T
IM
C
LISSOLD
has worked in China for sixteen years and travelled there extensively. After graduating in
Physics from Cambridge University and working in London, Australia and Hong Kong, he developed a fascination with China. He spent two years studying Mandarin Chinese before co-founding a private
equity group that invested in China.
Praise for
Mr China
‘It’s got big money, charismatic capitalists, Communist apparatchiks, crime and mysterious disappearances – the lot. Sadly for author
Tim Clissold, though, it’s not just a novel – it’s true . . . [But] it’s not, he insists, an anti-China book, at all . . . the real butts are the Wall Street types who
thought they could crack China without knowing what they were doing.’
Richard Spencer,
The Daily Telegraph
‘Hard to put down . . . delightful for the engaging way in which it details the hardships of any businessman who lives on the road . . . at the
same time a useful lesson for those who think there is anything easy about direct investment in brand-new markets.’
Economist
‘Engaging, extremely well-written and often very funny. An extremely insightful account . . . we can’t recommend
Mr China
too highly:
anyone in business associated with China, however large or small, ought to read it and learn from it.’
China-Britain Trade Review
‘A compelling view of China since Deng set its present course in 1992.’
Management Today
‘Such a good book. It is a must-read . . . don’t leave home, heading for China, without it.’
China Economic Review
Tim Clissold
ROBINSON
London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2004
This edition 2002
Copyright © Tim Clissold, 2004, 2006
The right of Tim Clissold to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN-10: 1-84119-788-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-84119-788-2
Printed and bound in the EU
7 9 10 8
For
Christian, Honor, Max and Sam
A Chinese Chop
‘The events that I describe in this book actually happened; but this is the story of an adventure, rather than an expose of a particular company
and, since it describes circumstances that many foreign investors find in China, I have changed the names of some of the companies, places and people who appear. The main events described took
place between 1995 and 2002.’
Everything under heaven is in utter chaos;
Chairman Mao |
Contents
We are But Wanderers at the Ends of the Earth
A Journey of a Thousand
Li
Begins From Under One’s Feet
If You Won’t Go into the Tiger’s Lair, How Can You Catch the Cubs?
We Tramped and Tramped Until Our Iron Shoes Were Broken
Three Vile Cobblers Can Beat the Wisest Sage
Wind in the Tower Warns of Storms in the Mountains
The Magistrate’s Gates Open Towards the South
Crushed by the Weight of Mount Taishan
The Battle of Ningshan: The Mightiest Dragon Cannot Crush the Local Snake
The Siege of Jingzhou: Up in the Sky there are Nine-Headed Birds
The Bottle Finally Bursts: Nineteen Thousand Catties Hanging by a Single Hair
The idea of China has always exerted a pull on the adventurous type. There is a kind of entrepreneurial Westerner who just can’t resist it: red flags, a billion bicycles
and the largest untapped market on earth. What more could they want? After the first few visits, they start to feel more in tune and experience the first stirrings of a fatal ambition: the secret
hope of becoming the ‘Mr China’ of their time, the
zhongguo tong
or ‘Old China Hand’ with the inside track in the Middle Kingdom. In the end, they all want to be Mr
China. They want to be like Marco Polo roaming China as the emissary of the Kublai Khan. Or the first pioneering mill owners lolling about in the opium dens in Shanghai, dreaming of the fortune
to be made if every Chinese would add an inch to his shirttails. Kissinger must have felt like Mr China as he schemed against Russia with Zhou Enlai; Edgar Snow may have been the same as he stood
on the Gateway of Heavenly Peace with Chairman Mao. And of the countless businessmen who come to China with high hopes of the ‘billion three market’, how many long to become the
ultimate China Hand, the only outsider, the first and only
laowai
to crack China? But in the end, it’s an illusion.
We are Wanderers at the Ends of the Earth;
But to Meet Each Other Here,
Why Must We Have Met Before?
Bai Ju Yi: Pi Pa Xing
Tang Dynasty
AD
650–905
For anyone whose mood is affected by the weather, Hong Kong in October is heaven. There’s a month of perfect blue skies with a bite in the air and a sharpness in the
light that accentuates the dense green on the Peak against the brilliant blue of the harbour. So with my spirits buoyed up in the sunshine, I cut through the Botanical Gardens on my way towards
Admiralty. A colleague in Shanghai had set up my meeting and I had no particular expectations. There was still plenty of time so I stopped to admire the orchids for a while.
I took the lifts to the eighteenth floor and waited. There was silence apart from the slightest breath of the air-conditioning. The deep red thick-pile carpet absorbed all traces of footsteps.
Terracotta figurines stood in carefully backlit alcoves; there were lacquer vases with twigs of twisted hawthorn and one or two high-backed Chinese antique sandalwood chairs. The faintest scent of
pollen drifted across from the huge white lilies in the tall glass vase on the table. And the silence. As I waited on the black leather couch, I couldn’t help feeling that it was like so many
other offices in these tall glass towers where nothing ever seemed to happen. Maybe I was about to meet another wealthy US business executive using the boom in Hong Kong as a cover for an early
retirement away from the wife back home. Or maybe not. There was more style to this place than the average.