"Book Review" of Mr. China

September 21
Book Review: Mr. China (I)
Mr. China, by Tim Clissold.
Is driving in China any different than in the rest of the world? Not an ounce. You move from point A to point B as fast as you can, expensing as little gasoline as possible. And, yes, avoid running into any body please, warm or dead. Time, energy, safety.

Or so that’s what you think. I was once on a taxi in the city of Wuhan with a colleague from US, who became unusually chatty. “I have to keep talking to you,” he later explained, “looking at how this guy (our driver) takes up the road just wrecks my nerve.” For my first two weeks in Beijing, it was a genuine adventure to cross any street; and I was becoming a “qualified” Beijing driver only after many months of heart-wrenching near-misses, even though I have logged more than ten years onto my US driver license. Once I get myself honed into it, however, I would become a road hazard when tripping back to US: unconsciously I would slow down every time a car pulled up on the side even when I had the right of way – in Beijing the chance is high that it will jerk ahead without a shred of warning; and unconsciously I jay-walked, too.

Scales and complexities do differ, yet driving a vehicle and driving a business in a foreign land aren’t that different. Things will work, but the protocol will need to adapt – sometimes dramatically – depending on the context. This line of wisdom is nothingness unless your experience is personal, direct and real-time. These three elements, conveniently missing from many of B-schools books, are what make “Mr. China” interesting. If you plan to be or already are a road hazard in China or elsewhere, go pick it up.

I have run into many foreign expats in China. Among them there is a group, just like Tim Clissold, who genuinely regard China as their adopted home. Their stories are similar, and the stories start early, too. As young students they troop into this vast “middle-land”, lulled by and looking for marks left by the invisible hand of history. For months they would roam around with their backpacks, to so many places that most of us native Chinese would have to work really hard to match. Some of them will follow through with a couple of years of schooling on Mandarin. Liberal and more open minded to begin with, getting affluent in Chinese now expose them to the everyday culture fabric. From then on they are hooked, and their life will never be the same.

One thing sets Tim apart – more by fate than by choice – his enrollment in a Chinese university cannot happen at a worse time: it was right after the 89 event that sent the entire country to an icy edge, and it was, for a while at least, “China versus the world” again. The physical environment was strenuous , and more depressing is the psychological mind game the authorities reined over them. There must have been moments when one would feel like being trapped at the bottom of a deep and dark well. To be sure, it was also difficult for those of us who left the country and studied abroad, especially in the first year or two. But I have to be honest and say that the setting for Tim was much more challenging. Yet, Tim plowed on and survived and made friends and he accounted all these with a dry sense of humor. For that and not that alone, he has earned my respect.

Does the country, and the people, respond in kind? As a minimum, Tim earned himself a ringside seat to witness the mindboggling expansion of China in the 90’s. In fact, he was in the thick of the game. His entire experience is divided into three episodes. First, as fate has it, he became the wingman of a larger-than-life Wall Streeter (Pat). The two of them were up and down the hills and in and out of the valleys of China inlands, hunting out those “third-frontier” factories built in the fallacies of an impending cold war. They composed a “China story” and raised 400 million US dollars in Wall Street. There, Tim learned his lessons that the high game is “all about capital” and to succeed is to be quick and to “take out your opponents.” They were the first and the largest fund to venture into China at the time, focusing primarily on the auto component business. The model is joint venture, where their money bought them the majority of share in previously state-owned factories, which contribute with assets, labors and everything else. The idea is to build a vast network of their own, leveraging all the factories that they have bought and zigzagging across the entire auto industry in the booming Chinese economy after Deng’s reform. 400 million is a huge sum. Money talks, and so begins the honeymoon.
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Two parts remaining .... too long... it was written on my blog and wasn't really intended as a book review. If any one is interested, please go there (category "China in English")