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Economist (UK), 27 Nov 2004
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Back in the early 1990's, everyone was trying to get in on China, the idea being to buy up the assets (factories, companies etc.), help them grow the business and cash in via a listing. Assets were found after a while and joint venture partners became available. Tim Clissold's description of touring Shanghai with a bunch of Wall Street bankers is an accurate account of this process and probably the most amusing I have read.
Eventually, contracts were signed and the funds disbursed. The problems started almost immediately. You as the western party may have a very clear idea what you have agreed to contractually, your domestic partner, however, often has a very different interpretation of the same contract, no matter how watertight you think you made it. Also you may find that you invest in something different than you thought you signed for.
Tim Clissold gives an excellent and very detailed account of some of these investments - and the day after. My favourites amongst these are the 'gearbox incident' and the investment in the brake pad factory. In many of the cases described in the book you feel that every time Tim gets on top of the situation, he finds himself ten paces behind the next minute. I was not surprised that his efforts eventually led to a heart attack.
All said and read, is there money to be made in China? There are indeed foreign companies in China which make money.
On the other hand, a lot of companies probably have to admit that doing business there is anything but easy. I would appear that investors are increasingly fed up with the rules changing all the time and having their products often pirated as soon as they hit the market, just to name a few business hazards. Nevertheless, the lure of 1.2bn potential consumers should keep them coming.
For any of these, Tim Clissold's book is a must. If you are keen on the subject yourself you will also want to have a look at Jim Mann's Beijing Jeep (A case study of western business in China) and Joe Studwell's The China Dream.
If only this book was around then. What it does is to take the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of those stories, weave them together, give them a narrative structure and then populate them characters you can identify with.
Despite being officially being a socialist country, there's no social security system for the unemployed in China. So what's nice to read is how the author resisted constant pressure from his Wall Street backers to carry out their panacea for ailing businesses: lay off the goddam workers. He preferred his companies to lose money in the short term, rather than destroy the social fabric of the villages he invested in by creating thousands of destitute unemployed.
Some scenes are laugh-out loud funny, particularly the final chapter at the Five Star Beer factory. Unlucky customers would buy totally empty cans of beer, whereas really unlucky customers would find their beer-bottles stuffed full of garlic bulbs.
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