China Private Equity

Hangzhou’s main art museum, known as the Zhejiang Provincial Museum,  sits on a nicer plot of land than any museum I’ve ever been to, including the Louvre in Paris and National Gallery in London. It’s on a small bend in the road that circles the city’s famous Xi Hu, or West Lake. From the museum entrance, you look out across the lake at a particularly lovely spot, with a small steep island ahead and the steeper mountains beyond. The museum itself is modern, in a classically-Chinese format, with pavilions reached by gabled walkways, set among small streams teeming with koi. 

The setting is perfect, but sadly, the museum’s contents are anything but. One pavilion offers a bunch of world “art treasures” that looked like they were bought for ten bucks each at airport souvenir stores . A low point: a set of mounted bull horns from Indiana. Another beautiful pavilion had the paintings and personal effects of a Hangzhou-born 20^th century artist who had studied painting in France in the early part of the century, and then did some so-so pastiches of Chinese subject matter, incorporating elements of Cezanne, Picasso, Monet among others. 

A pavilion said to hold “historical relics” was locked and empty. Finally, you get to the two buildings with Chinese porcelains. My hopes remained high, since, after all, Hangzhou is the greatest of all China’s cultural cities, capital of the Southern Song dynasty, which produced (for my money) the finest porcelains the world has ever seen, including Jun, Ding, Guan, Yaozhou, Longguan, Qingbai, Cizhou, Ge styles. (The bowl above is an example of Song Dynasty Guan porcelain.) I’ve had the good fortune to see a lot of Song porcelains over the years, in museums in the West, and have handled a fair number at auctions in London and New York.  Many were produced close to Hangzhou. 

My not-unrealistic expectation, therefore,  was that the Hangzhou museum would have both more and better Song porcelains than I’d ever seen. So sure was I of this that I invited four CFC colleagues to come along with me, after we finished a client meeting. 

Bad choice. The museum, though in a gorgeous setting on a lake fabled for its beauty and historical meaning, is mainly a sad reminder that many of China’s most important art treasures are held outside the country, in museums and private collections. The porcelains in the Hangzhou museum look like (and most probably are) the leftovers after all the best pieces had been spirited away. The celadons have little sparkle or translucence, and have a gimpy shape.  There are no examples of the Jun and Guan styles most prized by connoisseurs. The one Yaozhou bowl is clumsily carved. Song burial urns are among the least ornate and less precisely-molded I’ve ever seen. 

The two pavilions with Song porcelains are a colossal disappointment, not just because the art works are generally of middling quality. Instead, a museum that should be a encapsulation of the greatness of Song culture is, instead, a subtle reminder of how much has been lost or pillaged.  Thousands of Song wares are in collections, public and private, around the world. At least six times a year, Sothebys and Christies hold auctions in London, New York and Hong Kong that include dozens of  works of Song porcelain far better than any on display in the Hangzhou museum. Museums from Tokyo to Paris to Washington D.C. are loaded with great works from the Song. 

But, here in Hangzhou, there are only cast-offs. Among the millions of Chinese who come to Hangzhou each year as tourists,  most will likely leave with no concrete appreciation of the paramount artistic achievements of the Song culture that sprang from here.  Instead, many must end up wondering, after visiting the museum, if there’s really anything much to be proud of from that period. One of the two pavilions for Song porcelain is almost entirely made up of shards of the most common sort of household pottery from the Song era, not the exquisite pieces crafted for emperors and scholars. 

The effect is a little like visiting Tiffany, expecting to ogle the diamonds, and finding it filled instead with broomsticks and knitting needles. 

The Chinese government, quite publicly, has been seeking to block the sale at auction of art objects looted from the Summer Palace in Beijing. It’s a small step toward the goal of one day recovering more of China’s lost artistic patrimony. I’d personally like to see the Chinese government more active, not just blocking the sale of items stolen long ago, but also buying some of the more important Chinese antiques that come on the market.

It’s easy to understand why the Chinese government has so far refused to do so, since they don’t want to let others profit from what it sees as wrongful expropriation. But, as a lesser of evils, I’d prefer them to bring back some of the more beautiful objects, and add them to the collections of important national museums like the one in Hangzhou. That way, at least, more Chinese would have opportunities to admire up close the crowning achievements of Chinese culture. 

It’s a good side project for CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, and China’s State Pension Fund. Along with trying to secure the country’s financial future, these two organizations could also invest, on a comparably small scale, to secure more of the country’s incomparable artistic heritage. 

The museum visit left me feeling sad, but also resolved to do my own small part. I’m fortunate to own a few Chinese porcelains and jade pieces from the Qing and Ming dynasties. The jade was left to me by my grandfather, who started collecting in the 1950s. I’d like to donate the art works to a Chinese museum when I die, if not sooner.  While nowhere near as important as the items regularly at auction at Sothebys and Christies, they are decent examples of the output of some of China’s finest artists and artisans. 

Art is a shared inheritance. But, more of China’s treasures should be seen where they were crafted. 

With CFC’s business motoring along nicely, I decided in late spring to redesign our very bare-bones website, to add more information, and make it a little more pleasing to the eye. After four months of sometimes tedious labor, the process is now complete. The English-version of the new CFC website went live earlier this week. The Chinese version will follow after the October holidays in China.

During my journalism career at Forbes, I had some experience working with designers, so I generally understand how words and images can best interact on a page.  Or, at least I thought so. Web design is a whole different ballgame. The web format allows for a lot more flexibility than designing print pages to in a particular newspaper or magazine’s existing template. You can incorporate animation, videos, pictures, sound.  But, there’s also a lot more chaos about the whole process. Maybe it’s the fact that a good web designer must be combine the character traits of a graphic designer and a computer programmer. Rendered in mathematical terms: flakiness ²

Everything turned out well. But, completing the site took far longer than I’d expected at the outset. I helped contribute to the delays by frequently changing my mind about which images should appear on the site. I decided one thing emphatically from the start:  I did not want to reproduce the hackneyed sort of imagery you see on every other financial industry website I’ve ever seen, from Goldman Sachs’ to a small regional bank’s. So, I wanted no photos of men shaking hands, or gathered around a conference room table, or walking purposefully down a busy urban street holding a briefcase. For one thing, I don’t even own a briefcase.

Instead, I wanted to do something far more personally meaningful on the site, and use only close-up images of Chinese art.  After some experimenting with images of Ming Dynasty porcelains and sculptures, I decided to use only Chinese paintings. I wanted them to reflect many of the broader thematic and stylistic movements in Chinese painting, from the Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty.  And, of course, I wanted to feel a connection with each image, both aesthetically and also as  metaphorical statement of core principles and values that animate our work at CFC.

That’s a pretty tall order. I probably looked at over 1,000 paintings, and did my own, on-screen close-up crops of several hundred, before deciding on the 25 I liked most. In the end, there was room on the new site for only 13.  Early on, I’d thought of using close-ups from several thangkas I’m lucky enough to own. The images were gorgeous, but my team felt (and I ultimately agreed), they were too unmistakably religious, even in extreme close-up,to fit well on the site.

The text was not as difficult. We’re lucky in that our business has a very clear, narrow focus that’s easily expressed.  Ours is also, importantly, not a business that relies on website traffic, or Google search results, to create awareness and revenue. I know this other world very well, through my role at Awareness Technologies, which is a web-marketer par excellence. Every day, Awareness Technologies’ websites and Google strategy will deliver new customers who buy our software. It’s highly-specialized work, this kind of online marketing, and my Awareness colleagues do it as well as, and often better than,  anyone else in the world. Awareness Technologies also builds great software, which matters even more, of course, to the success of the business. 

CFC, on the other hand, is mainly a “word of mouth” business. Chinese SME come to us not through an online search, but because we’ve been introduced to them by others they know and trust.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn none of our clients have ever visited our website.  They’re generally too busy running their companies to spend much, if any time, online – let alone searching the web to find an investment bank.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t look to the CFC website to generate “walk-in” traffic. We do no search advertising, or web marketing. So, someone finding our website will usually do so through following a link on what’s called a “natural search result” at Google, Yahoo, Baidu or other search engines. 

My main hope for the new website is that all those who do visit it, first and foremost, will get enjoyment from looking at the paintings, and allow the close-ups to meander around in their minds for awhile.  If that gets them then to read about what we do, so much the better.

My thanks go to our web designer, Rune Ecklon, a Dane living in Shenzhen. (His email: rune_ecklon@hotmail.com ) Rune sometimes needed the patience of Job to put up such a persnickety client. In turn, I needed more patience than I normally exhibit to deal with a designer who seems to work only in the middle of the night, and is often in pain after breaking his ankle last year after some kind of romantic entanglement with a very strong Chinese girl.

We had our share of struggles, and missed one “deadline” after another. But, now that I can see the new site live, by typing in our company URL (www.chinafirstcapital.com), I finally feel it was all worth it, the game was worth the candle.  

I’m a very happy man today.  After several weeks in the US, I’m back in China. Nowhere else on this planet more pleases, inspires, awes and  enchants me.  I have a very long – just about life-long, in fact – love affairs with China.  As a boy growing up in the US during the height of the  Cold War, China was remote, closed, secretive, hostile to US foreign policy – and deeply fascinating, to me. More fascinating, in fact, than anywhere or anything else. I can’t entirely explain why. Maybe it was Nixon’s visit in 1972. Or, more likely, my early, and abiding, love of my grandfather’s exquisite Ming and Ching dynasty jade collection, which I’m now very proud to own. (The photo on the left is one of the pieces from my grandfather’s collection, a vase from the Ching Dynasty.)

All I know is that as soon as I got to university in the US, I enrolled in Chinese class, and declared myself a Chinese history major. My first visit to China was 1981, when I arrived as a postgraduate student at Nanjing University.

My intent back then was to devote my life to China – working, living and learning. In fact, my career path took an unexpected course and I ended up in Europe for 15 very happy and rewarding years, many of them spent as a foreign correspondent, traveling to well over 60 countries. From there, I moved on to Los Angeles to run a venture capital firm, and then lead a finance business during its US IPO.  I visited China during these years, but until last year, never had the opportunity to do what I’d long hoped and planned to do – work and live in China.

China First Capital is a culmination of my life’s dreams, hopes, and goals. 

I divide my time now between LA and Shenzhen, maintaining an office and home in each place. I feel intensely fortunate now to be involved in my work in the most important and history-changing development of our time: China’s rapid rise to economic greatness.  This work is deeply meaningful and fulfilling for me, because I have this long and unbreakable bond (in my heart as well as my mind) to this country. China is reassuming its role at the epicenter of world commerce, and everyone in the world, quite literally, benefits from this.

Right now, I have one specific, personal benefit in mind. Just as soon as I shower and unpack, I’m off for a delicious lunch of Sichuan food at a local place where I’ve gotten to know the owners, an extended family from Chongqing.