Mr China by Tim Clissold
Mr China is (according to The Economist, anyway) the slightly disguised story of Asimco, founded by Jack Perkowski, a Wall Street banker, who raised more than US$400 million for investment in China in the early 1990s. Asimco, of which Clissold was President for a time, invested in car components factories and breweries and watched the bulk of the money get stolen, re-directed and dribble away.
Even if one is not aware of these particular details, the horror stories that Clissold relates are all too familiar (at least to readers of the business pages of any Hong Kong newspaper): tens of millions of dollars just disappearing, fraudulent letters of credit, joint venture partners going into competition and even violence. Courts, banks and government officials often seemed to be in on the game.
Clissold gamely explains: “I was dealing with a society that had no rules; or more accurately, plenty of rules but they were seldom enforced. China appeared to be run by masterful showmen: appearances mattered more than substance, rules were there to be distorted and success came through outfacing an opponent.”
So, a salutary, cautionary tale.
And yet the true message is surely something else. It would be convenient to attribute the problems Clissold experienced to the uniqueness of China. But theft, graft, manipulated accounts and bluster are hardly unique to China; indeed, nothing in Mr China is on the scale of Enron or Parmalat. One could just as well argue however the problems arose from the rather peculiar way parts of the international banking industry go about its business: change some names, locations and industries, and the book might have been entitled Mr Russia or Mr Dot-Com.
Clissold is entirely, and charmingly, self-effacing about all this. And larger issues aside, Mr China strings together a decade-long story in a continuous narrative, told from the inside, a considerably different experience than reading about it in bits and pieces in contemporary newspaper articles.
The background on the Cultural Revolution, Deng’s ‘Southern Tour’, etc. makes it clear that Mr China is primarily for the uninitiated: anyone who considers it ‘required reading’ before making investments in China probably shouldn’t be trusted with investment funds in the first place.
Mr China is of course, an old story—cunning local yokels vs city-slickers and will undoubtedly give rise to a certain amount of wry amusement in this part of the world. One cannot help but develop a sneaking admiration for the Chinese who managed to hoodwink and manipulate rich Western investors so brazenly, blatantly and so repeatedly.
Clissold tells it all with openness and humour tinged only slightly with cynicism.