Mr. China Read online

  ‘He was beaten and beaten until he died on the floor.’

  I corrected him gently; I knew that his father was still very much alive and well. But he was insistent.

  ‘No, my father actually died on the floor and he only came back when they threw a bucket of freezing water into his face,’ he said.

  It couldn’t have been literally true but it was a telling metaphor and I let it ride. The pity of the Cultural Revolution was that Mao had calculated so deliberately, so callously when he set up young people to humiliate and destroy their elders. In a society where face was everything, the fear and humiliation had literally killed thousands and thousands of older people, many of whom took their own lives. The shame was so total that for many children, their parents had ‘died’ whether or not they happened to remain on earth.

  By the late 1960s the Cultural Revolution had created such chaos across the country that even Mao feared that he might lose control. His main political rivals had been destroyed so he attempted to rein in the Red Guards. He did this by sending them to work in the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants.’ All forms of intellectual learning were regarded as useless. Only politics mattered and Mao had hijacked politics to regain control. The campaign to move people to the countryside quickly grew and, in the early 1970s, millions of young people were reallocated from the towns to the countryside. Ai was one of those millions; he was sent to Jiangxian County in a remote part of Shanxi Province, a few hundred miles to the west of Beijing.

  I had been to Shanxi the year before. It lies in the northern part of central China on the banks of the Yellow River where, five thousand years ago, there were the first stirrings of the Chinese civilization. The yellow-grey loess soil there, which gives river its name, is like powder and is difficult to farm. The whole dusty landscape is pitted with deep ravines caused by rainwater washing away the light soil over the centuries. I knew that some of the counties in Shanxi were amongst the poorest in China and that many people still lived in caves.

  For four years Ai rose with the sun and slept as it set, the daylight hours spent in the fields.

  ‘The peasants there were very kind,’ he said. ‘But they had nothing. Nothing! They knew nothing, they had nothing, they did nothing except work in the fields.’

  There was no machinery, no electricity, at times not enough food. Nothing but the prospect of another day’s hard labour in the fields. But at least Ai was removed from the political campaigns and the incessant din of the slogans from the loudspeakers in the city. In Shanxi, free from the constant fear that he might become the next target, there was at least a semblance of peace.

  He recalled the one luxury of those years; sometimes on rainy days, if things were particularly good, he would sit inside on the kang with his workmates. A kang is a big raised platform used as a bed for the whole family and made out of beaten earth with a primitive wood-burning stove built in. They would sit listening to the falling rain and enjoying the occasional cigarette rolled out of newspaper.

  Once a tractor came to the village, Ai remembered. ‘Some peasants from over the hill had walked ten miles to come and gawp at it,’ he said, ‘and it was all decked up in ribbons and red rosettes. Afterwards there had been a celebration with speeches about how grateful we should be to Chairman Mao for giving us a tractor.’ But the following day the tractor went to the next valley and the peasants walked back over the hill with their shovels.

  After Mao died, life slowly returned to normal. Ai was accepted at an engineering university in Xi’an where he met his future wife. On graduating, he found a good job in Beijing.

  ‘The problem was,’ he went on, ‘that at that time in China you had to have a hu kou.’ The hu kou was a rigid system of residence permits that made it impossible for ordinary people to move around the country without the little red chops, or Chinese seals of approval, from the Public Security Bureau. Ai’s wife had not been able to obtain a hu kou for Beijing so she had to stay in Xi’an. Even in the first few years of marriage, they were only allowed to see each other twice a year, at the Chinese Spring Festival and in the summer. It was nearly ten years before she got a hu kou for Beijing and for the first seven years after Ai’s son was born he only saw him for three weeks a year.

  I felt that all these experiences might have hardened and embittered Ai, but, years later, as we sat in a bar in Beijing, the strongest feeling I had from him was his burning ambition for his one son. He had a fierce hope that his son would be spared all the troubles and political turmoil that had blighted his own early life, and that China would be stable so that the next generation would be free to use their time more constructively. Years later, his boy got a place to study in America.

  After coming back to Beijing, Ai was assigned to work for the ministry in charge of foreign investment. Never the diplomat, he got into difficulties after the Tiananmen protests. The Party apparatchiks, or ‘cadres’ as they are known, decided to muzzle him so he had been sidelined to run a business centre in one of Beijing’s hotels. It was somewhere that they thought would keep him out of trouble.

  I met Ai through a friend. She’d been pestering me to see him for months but our paths never seemed to cross. ‘If you want to get anything done round here,’ she said, ‘you should talk to Ai.’ So I eventually called him and fixed a time to meet. Dumped into a backwater by the cadres and pushed away from the action, he was in a restless, searching mood when I found him; and as I described what had been happening in Hong Kong, he quickly latched on to the opportunity.

  I knew that Ai was different from my other contacts in China when I came back a few weeks later. Whilst the others just talked and talked and made endless promises, when I met Ai for the second time he reached into his drawer and pulled out a cardboard box full of handwritten letters. He had written twenty-six letters to his colleagues in local governments all over China. He only got three replies, but that was enough to start.

  Over the next six months, we travelled all over China in search of investment projects. At the end of each trip, I went back to Hong Kong to talk to investors. It was frustrating work. They never quite knew what they wanted and seemed reluctant to come up to China. We found steel-rolling mills and watch factories, power equipment works and lock makers. Every time we found something that looked promising, I wrote it up and sent it to investors in Hong Kong. But they never seemed to bite.

  Eventually I managed to persuade some fund managers from a big New York investment house to come up to Shanghai. It was an important visit, so one of my colleagues, Maneksh, flew out from London. He’d been in India and brokered a few deals so I was glad of his company.

  The trip was a disaster. These bankers, still slightly jet-lagged from Wall Street, stared with disbelieving wonder at the chaotic traffic, gesticulating policemen and the waves of bicycles. They kept checking their Rolexes, sighing unnaturally loudly and repeatedly looking through their air tickets as we sat sweltering in near-gridlock on Hengshan Road. They had sent me a fax beforehand saying that they were interested in ‘real estate and consumer packaged goods’ so the first meeting I arranged was with the Land Bureau of the Shanghai Government.

  Despite the considerable power that came from controlling land during those times of spiralling property prices, the Land Bureau was in a dilapidated building at the end of the Bund, the sweeping avenue that looks out over the river in Shanghai. It was squeezed in among the grand colonial buildings next to Suzhou Creek. The contrast between the bankers with their highly polished shoes and designer silk ties and the bureau officials could not have been sharper. As we were led down a corridor with enormous old-fashioned frosted-glass lampshades like Olympic torches set into the walls, the bankers noticed a huge gash in the ceiling with lath and plaster hanging through. In the meeting room, they settled on to a lumpy sofa with their knees tucked up to their chests. Sitting between a pale green plastic thermos flask and a spittoon, they tried not to stare too hard at the torn brown curtains flapping limply in the windows or the s
uspicious-looking holes in the skirting boards. The meeting started with the Deputy Bureau Chief offering them some melon seeds to chew on and it got worse from there on in. It didn’t last long; there was no way they were ever going to get their heads around buying up land in Shanghai.

  As they left, muttering under their breath and shaking their heads, they asked what was next.

  ‘Er, the Rubber Bureau,’ I said.

  ‘So that’s consumer products, right?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I said nervously, not knowing quite how to break the news. I spent the next hour sweating quietly in the back of the car, hoping that the traffic would be so bad that we’d have to call the meeting off. Then suddenly, out of the blue, inspiration seized me.

  ‘You know, the one-child policy is quite controversial in the West, isn’t it? But I reckon that the population here is so huge that it’d be kind of irresponsible just to ignore it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Uh-huh!’

  ‘You know, in China, even though there’s the one-child policy, there are only seven condom factories. Amazing really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Uh-huh!’

  ‘Yeah, only seven in the whole of China,’ I went on.

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Well, the whole condom production of China is only eight hundred million a year. There’s more than a billion people here, so there’s got to be, say, four hundred million blokes out there all needing condoms. But that’s about two each a year. Must be a huge demand out there – if only we could figure out a way to get at it!’

  ‘You’re not saying-’

  ‘Well, you said you wanted consumer packaged goods!’

  ‘I do not believe we’re doing this’ they said, all exasperated sighs and rolling eyeballs. ‘I do not believe we’re doing this!’

  But by that time there was little prospect of escape. The traffic was running smoothly and we were miles from the hotel. As the car drove through the gates of the Shanghai Great Unison Condom Factory, Madame Tao, who was in charge of foreign investment at the Rubber Bureau, came panting down the steps and took us to a meeting room with a display case at the back. We stared at the contents. The packaging was primitive: it was poorly printed in slightly garish colours and with a line drawing of a long-nosed couple – who were clearly meant to be Westerners – embracing against a sunset backdrop.

  ‘What the hell’s goin’ on there?’ said one of the pinstripes.

  It was a classic example of the Chinese confusion towards Westerners: on the one hand, they were a target in campaigns against spiritual pollution at the university, and on the other they were used on condom packets to conjure up an image of something rather daring that might be secretly admired.

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ said Maneksh, picking up one of the packets. ‘You know, Mrs Tao, you need to redo all this packaging. It’s far too dowdy. You need to make it more exciting for the consumer. Back in the UK there’s all sorts of stuff available. Different colours and shapes, even flavours – banana, strawberry, whatever takes your fancy. Maybe here it’d be shrimp-and-peanut flavour, or spicy bean curd . . .’

  ‘Er, yes, thanks, Maneksh,’ I interjected hurriedly. ‘Shall we go and see the workshops?’

  The machinery that we found at the top of a rickety staircase leading to the first floor of the warehouse at the back of the factory was a botched-up Heath Robinson affair; it looked like some bizarre homespun contraption cobbled together with bicycle parts and bits of old washing machines. There was a huge sagging rubber belt strapped between two wheels that was pulled slowly through a tub of melted latex. On the belt, set at every conceivable angle, some of which were anatomically simply not possible, were hundreds of glass penises. As the belt drooped into the tub, the latex coated each one with a thin layer. Weighed down by latex and by then at slightly less inspiring angles, they clanked onwards into a small chamber that had what looked like a couple of hairdryers inside blasting away to make the rubber set. At the other side, two colossal women with beefy forearms hauled off the condoms from the legions of approaching penises and threw them in handfuls into a plastic tray on the floor.

  There was a rather frosty atmosphere in the car going back to the hotel. The next day we were due to see a pig farm but that was too much. We parted rather stiffly. It was back to the drawing board.

  Four

  We Tramped and Tramped Until Our Iron Shoes Were Broken and Then, Without Looking, We Found What We Sought

  The Water Margin:

  Unattributed Ming Dynasty Novel

  After six months of searching in China but still getting nowhere with the investors in Hong Kong, I felt that we were spinning our wheels. I was beginning to lose heart. Then I had the chance introduction to Pat that was to change the course of my life for the next ten years.

  A month or so after our first meeting, I took Pat to meet Ai Jian in Beijing. We found him in his dim little office, poring over a confused mass of handwritten papers in the fading sunlight of a wintry afternoon. He leapt to his feet as we came in and fussed over some tea for a while. Once he had settled down and Pat started on his introductions, I saw that Ai, unusually for him, was in a state of great nervous tension. His almost anguished concentration on Pat’s every word was so intense that it looked as if something inside him might suddenly snap at any moment. He had immediately sensed that this was no courtesy visit but a one-off opportunity that might be lost if he didn’t grab at it with both hands.

  I could understand Ai’s desperation; when the ex-Red Guard and forced-peasant-turned-bureaucrat met this Wall Street banker, he already knew that the whole world had tilted in favour of America and its overwhelming financial power. Mao’s China had never had enough money but after Deng there wasn’t even a clear political creed to cling to, or a hero to worship; just the Great Chase of catching up with the West. Ai had sensed that this might be his one chance to get off the sidelines and out of the dismal backwater that the cadres had thrown him into. So, despite his nerves, the first meeting went well and he was in a state of great excitement after Pat had left.

  It was understandable. Pat was in a league of his own. I had come across the odd career banker who had learnt the ropes in Hong Kong, but there was no one else who was remotely as convincing when it came to talking about financing China’s growth. Pat would talk about raising the odd hundred million and consolidating whole industries in a manner that most of us might use to comment on the weather. This lack of pretentiousness only made his story more compelling. Years later, when recalling that first meeting, Ai had said, ‘I had spent years hoping to find a chance to do something big. Searching and searching – and then, suddenly, it was as if a film star had walked into my life!’

  Pat was an enormous personality. His blue eyes, swept-back hair and J.P. Morgan nose gave him a presence that soon dominated any conversation. He was the archetypal Wall Street adventurer, full of the financial bravado of the 1980s when Wall Street pushed deal-size to the limit and reputations were made or lost purely on how far one dared to go. He even came packaged up with the pink silk handkerchiefs and blue pinstripe, an ear-splitting laugh and an insatiable appetite for oysters, champagne and Cuban cigars. Late into the evenings, he would sit around after dinner in clouds of smoke, with wineglasses strewn about the table, bantering and howling with laughter, all the time fiddling with the enormous red rubies on his gold cuff links. He knew how to have a good time, that was for sure, and preferred an audience to a good night’s sleep. But it wasn’t just a carefully cultivated image; this was the real thing. An American icon: the steelworker’s son risen from the bottom rung to the top of the ladder through his wits and force of personality, with plenty of guts and hard work thrown in. By the time that we met him, Pat had become a man with a mission, a pioneer on a single-minded quest to create a machine – a machine for bringing money from Wall Street to Asia. And like me, but for a thousand different reasons, his focus was China.

  At first I was puzzled. How had this man summoned the courage t
o uproot himself from everything he knew? Why had he left the security of the top rung on Wall Street, with all the comforts of a high position, to attempt another and much more hazardous ascent in a totally alien environment? He had certainly aroused my curiosity; and he had my admiration. I could see the drive and determination, the tremendous optimism and thirst for adventure. But it seemed that the trappings of Wall Street had not been enough. I knew that Pat had money; I guessed that what he wanted next was fame.

  Pat had told Ai to work the phones. ‘I want to see every project you can find,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to think big on this one. There are whole industries out there that need a ton of money and we’ve got to get there first. In a few months, the whole of Wall Street’s gonna be crawling all over this place, so I want power stations, toll roads, phone systems, steel, all of that kind of stuff, anything that’s big, and I want it now.’ With that he got on a plane back to the States, and told us he’d be back in two weeks.

  While he was away, Ai called every ministry that he could think of. Although China had started reforming its system of central planning, back in the early 1990s most of the economy was still controlled by the ministries in Beijing. The Government had a much greater role in running industries than was the case in any Western country at that time, so it was the right place for us to start. Ai had such a brass neck that he sat for days in his dingy office, cold-calling government officials all over Beijing, pestering them for meetings. By the time Pat came back, Ai had arranged to see officials everywhere: iron and steel, telecommunications, paper, electronics, chemicals, rubber, building materials, float glass, cement, light industry, power generation, even aircraft maintenance.

  Ai managed to dig out a black Mercedes from somewhere to ferry us around the ministries. ‘It gives us more face and that matters here,’ he said as we left the hotel on the first day wondering what to expect. As the days rolled on, each visit seemed to merge into the next. As we sat in the traffic in the Beijing spring sunshine, moving from one ministry to another, I mused to myself that it was amazing that government departments existed at all for half of these industries. The bureaucratic waste was absurd; a whole ministry just to administer the production of paper and probably a major consumer at the same time. Most of them have since been abolished.