Mr. China by Tim Clissold

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.
    The ministries and the officials we met with all seemed the same. For days on end, we tramped around Beijing, turning down some leafy side street somewhere in the centre of town through a set of
gates with vertical white signs hanging on either side. The columns of Chinese characters showed the work units inside: black characters for Government offices, red for the Party. Then up some
concrete steps into an enormous draughty hallway with high ceilings, creaky wooden floors and spittoons outside the doorways. At the end of some fusty corridor with peeling paintwork we’d
invariably find a meeting room with rows of brown sofas draped with antimacassars and a table in the middle with a bowl of oranges, each wrapped up in crinkly cellophone. It was the same everywhere
we went. Drab colours, the smell of dust and old floor polish, high ceilings, the bowls of fruit, green plastic thermos flasks, wooden-framed windows that didn’t fit properly and the same old
frosted-glass lampshades in the shape of an Olympic torch, just like the ones in the Land Bureau in Shanghai. And at every meeting the opening line from the officials on the other side was the
same: ‘ Xingku la! Chi dian’r shuiguo. You must be tired after your journey. Do have some fruit!’
    The force of Pat’s message to the ministries seemed undulled by Ai’s translation; it was well received. He told the officials that investors believed that China was set for record
growth and would need unprecedented amounts of capital. The only place that could come up with that kind of money was Wall Street and, with his decades of experience in investment banking and his
willingness to come to China, he was the man to get it. Whoever got this money first in China would far outgrow their domestic competitors so we should grab the chance together.
    Pat’s powerful dynamism, his self-confidence and undeflectable optimism all came across clearly in his manner and gestures and the officials liked what they saw. As he spoke, he seemed to
work himself into the story, growing with it, almost as if by the strength of his own feelings he had set about convincing himself as well as those who were listening. He seemed to have a knack of
explaining overwhelmingly complex situations by reducing them to a simple set of economic forces. He could explain trends in whole industries in a couple of sentences that seemed so simple that we
were all left wondering how we could have missed something so obvious in the first place.
    As I sat absorbed in those meetings in the Chinese ministries, I had my first clue of how simple the world might seem, viewed from those towers on Wall Street. From there, everything seemed so
straightforward, just another enormous case study like they do at business school. It was the simplicity that made it all so convincing. On Wall Street, everything came down to relative power: eat
or be eaten, buy or be bought. And the key to survival was capital. Without capital, businesses die. The winner in the endless struggle for capital was the