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. 

Christmas has passed, but the reindeer antlers are still out in force. At my local supermarket in Shenzhen, the checkout team began sporting plastic antlers in late November. We’re a long way from the North Pole, and even farther, culturally, from the parts of the world where Christmas is traditionally celebrated. But, if there’s a party going on anywhere,  the Chinese want to be part of it. 

It’s not just the reindeer horns. A good 30% of all other shops’ sales force, as well as restaurant wait staff, are wearing those droopy red Santa caps. Most lobbies of the larger office buildings have Christmas trees, lit and ornamented. Mine also has a small crèche, that looks like a gingerbread house big enough to sleep three adults.  

Incongruous? Sure. But, one grows inured very quickly in China to things that don’t seem to make a lot of sense culturally. Red wine is increasingly the drink of choice among urban, upwardly-striving Chinese. Never mind that most of the wine is domestically produced, and has a thin, sour watered-down flavor a bit like salad dressing, and doesn’t compliment well the salty and spicy foods favored in much of China. 

Other examples: pajamas are occasionally used as outdoor-wear in China. The slowest-moving trucks on China’s expressways tend to putter along at one-third the speed limit in the left passing lane. Many ads for infant formula feature fat blond-haired babies. 

Christmas in China does not involve gift-giving, carol-singing, church-going. It’s a reason to decorate buildings, wear odd outfits, and send tens of millions (by my guesstimate) of SMS messages wishing other Chinese “圣诞快乐” ，literally “Happy Holy Birth”.  Santa Claus? His plastic likeness is plastered everywhere. In China, though, he is known as “圣诞老人“，or “Holy Birth Old Guy”. 

Not only is Christmas part of China’s holiday calendar now, so is Halloween in some of the bigger cities. But, it’s a Halloween celebrated only by adults wearing scary costumes to restaurants and bars that night. There’s no candy, no trick-or-treating. 

Much as China’s government still describes the economy as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, there’s a lot of my daily life here that can be understood as “Western civilization with Chinese characteristics”. Much is broadly familiar, but most things have a strikingly and singularly Chinese flavor. 

Thursday night is New Year’s Eve. It’ll be my first in China. Logic tells me it should mainly pass unnoticed. Chinese New Year, which falls this year on Valentine’s Day, is the most important holiday of the year, and is so deeply engrained in the consciousness that when Chinese say “next year”, they usually mean some time after Chinese new year, which has no fixed date on the Gregorian calendar. It begins either in January or February, depending on cycles of the moon. The New Year holiday lasts seven days in China. 

So while there’s no cultural imperative to celebrate New Year’s Eve, I do expect restaurants, bars and shopping areas to be unusually raucous on Thursday night, much as they were on Christmas and Halloween. Like a college fraternity, China seems determined to seize any excuse to throw a party. 

Shenzhen is such a relentless modern city that it’s often hard to discern the influence of 3,000 years of Chinese history and culture. The skyline is so futuristic that it often resembles the home planet of a higher civilization.(See photo above, of the City Center and buildings near CFC’s office). 

But, of course, this is still a part of China, with all its embedded messages and references to a history longer and richer than any other. It just takes a little wisdom to perceive it. I can’t lay claim to any such wisdom. Luckily, though, I have a friend here who has both the historical knowledge and scholar’s temperament to properly put modern Shenzhen into a more classically Chinese context. 

This friend, Zhen Qinan, has had a exemplary career in the financial industry, first as part of the working team formed in 1990 to establish the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and then as head of a joint venture between four Chinese financial firms and Merrill Lynch, where he worked with leading Chinese companies like Huawei and Taitai Pharmaceutical. 

These days, Qinan is semi-retired. I try to spend time with him whenever I can. He’s warm and thoughtful, and I know now from experience that he’ll offer astoundingly wise insights to even my most mundane questions. How mundane? Over a meal at one of Shenzhen’s better Sichuan places, I commented on how lucky we were to be in a city with so many good restaurants, even by Chinese standards. 

If I had to come up with reasons why, I would settle for the fact Shenzhen is richer than other cities, and has a population drawn from all parts of China. Qinan, however, offered a much richer explanation, rooted in his learning and respect for Chinese history. 

Shenzhen is part of an unbroken tradition, reaching back at least 1,200 years, of commercial centers in China having the best food and also the most beautiful women. So, in their day, the great trading cities along the Grand Canal – Hangzhou, Suzhou, Yangzhou — were particularly renowned as places with the finest and most varied cuisine, and the most desirable women. This reputation has remained largely intact in those cities, even as the commercial locus of China shifted elsewhere. 

The reason then, and the reason now, is the same: in wealthier commercial cities, there’s a heightened appreciation, as well as larger audience, for the pleasures that money can buy. Qinan is from Xian, and to drive home the point, he drew the comparison for me between Shenzhen and his home city.

Xian was always a center of learning and political power, rather than a city with vibrant trade and a large, successful merchant class. As a result, the food, though still quite delicious, has always been a little more basic, less expensive, less intricate, less subtle than that of the trading centers to the east, along the Grand Canal. There’s just not enough money around to support a thriving community of top-quality chefs and restaurants. They migrate to where the money is. 

The same logic, of course, applies to why beautiful women are more prevalent in rich commercial cities in China. Traditionally, beautiful women went to Suzhou, Hangzhou or Yangzhou to find a rich patron to take them as a subsidiary wife. They then produced better-looking children, on average, so creating a virtuous cycle. Let the process run, uninterrupted, for several centuries and the results would be that the cities gained a reputation, probably grounded in fact, for having particularly good-looking ladies. 

To this day, Chinese will always aver that Suzhou has the most beautiful women in the country. I haven’t been to Suzhou in over 25 years, so I can’t say if the reputation is deserved or not. But, I do know that most Chinese believe this to be true of Suzhou, even though, of course, few will have ever been there to see for themselves. 

While concubinage is officially no more in China, there is still a similar process at work in today’s Shenzhen. Concubines are no more. Polygamy is outlawed. Today, the term is 二奶 “er nai”, or “second lady”. It’s analogous to a mistress. Shenzhen, I’m told, has more “er nai” than any other city in China. These tend to be pretty girls in their early 20s who come to Shenzhen from all over China, and often end up clothed, housed, fed and otherwise supported financially by an older, usually married man. Nowhere else in the world (not Paris, Milan, or other centers of mistress culture) have I ever seen so many dreary older men in the company of stunningly beautiful women. 

Shenzhen has more “er nai” both because it’s the richest city in China, and also because there are a lot of men from neighboring Hong Kong who either live or work here, during the week. Part of the standard “expat package” would seem to be taking a Chinese girl as a mistress. I’m told the going rate, in terms of monthly cash stipend, is at least $1,000 a month, with apartment, car and clothing budget extra. That’s about five times more than a woman of similar age can make working in one of Shenzhen’s factories.

One other difference from the China of yore: these women will usually return to their home village with quite a nice nest-egg, marry locally and start a family. This then creates a “job opening”. The man will now find a new “er nai” and so start again the process of clothing, feeding and housing an attractive woman new to Shenzhen.   

Food and sex. They are life’s two most basic drives, as well as the fuel that has kept China’s commercial centers buzzing for well over a thousand years.

I recently returned from a two-week stay in the US. I was very busy seeing friends and business colleagues, which means I was also very busy answering questions about China. 

China occupies a very special place in the minds of many Americans, including many who’ve never been. The level of curiosity in America about China is enormous. This contrasts notably with the indifference with which many Americans view the world abroad. For example, during the 14 years I spent in London, I never found my American friends to be very interested in what life was like in England. Not so China. 

But, this intense curiosity is not matched by a deep knowledge among Americans about the current situation in China. In fact, even among the most well-read and worldly-wise of my friends, the level of ignorance about today’s China is high. That’s largely because the American media, for the most part, does an execrable job covering China. The result is that most Americans have an excessive focus on what’s perceived to be “human rights problems” in China, and a vast under-appreciation of the monumental, positive changes that China is now undergoing. 

My local shoe repair guy in Shenzhen has a more nuanced understanding of the US than most educated Americans have about China. Every time I get my shoes polished, I end up discussing the genesis of the American credit crisis and the challenges President Obama faces in trying to change America’s health care system. In the US, the main topics of discussion about China reflect an exaggerated negative view of what’s going on. Nine times out of ten, people want to comment on pollution and product quality, as if China was one large Satanic mill turning out killer toys. 

Of course, the speed and scope of all the positive changes in China are so awesome it’s difficult for anyone, including Chinese, to fully appreciate just how far the country has come in a short time. But, in my experience, the American misapprehensions about China have a stale, time-worn quality about them, as if America’s view of China stop evolving about five years ago. 

A friend of mine, for example, writes about Chinese-American relations for a leading US publication. He talked about the issues he’s most busy writing about and what is of greatest concern to the Americans now guiding policy toward China. North Korea and Iran figured prominently in the discussion, and he relayed the US strategy to win China’s backing for the American position.

There was lots of talk of high-level diplomatic meetings and various quids-pro-quo. While all this is no doubt important to the safety of the world,  I couldn’t help feeling that it also demonstrated a lot of wishful thinking on America’s part, that China would still be, as it often once was,  highly responsive to America’s strategic needs. 

The US has long commanded significant leverage over China. But, that leverage is lessening by the day. One reason, of course, is China’s own rising economic and military power. But, less noticed and perhaps even more important is that China is less and less reliant on access to the US market to sustain its own economy.

China’s economy is increasingly driven by its own domestic market, rather than exports. This is why China could absorb without much dislocation the sharp fall in exports to the US over the last year. Exports will continue to play a larger role in China’s economy than in America’s. But, its economy is changing, and growing far more balanced. 

China will more and more resemble the US — a large, continent-sized economy that grows by meeting the needs of its own citizens, and providing a stable environment for business to invest. This change has many more years to run. The simple formula: China can listen less to what the US wants because it needs less of what the US has to offer in return. 

This, too, is a change that seems to have escaped the notice of most Americans, including those in a policy-making position. China isn’t simply being difficult or stubborn by failing to tow a US line. It’s also less concerned about calibrating its own policies to expand the markets for its exports to the US. The last time the US was in recession, China’s economy was also badly bruised. Not so this time. OEM exporters have suffered, but not the businesses that focus on selling to Chinese consumers. They’ve played a key role in keeping China’s economy healthy, while the US has faltered. 

Americans need to see China for what it is, not what it was. It’s a better, richer, cleaner, freer place than they think. Americans may just learn to like what they see..

Back in Beijing after an absence of two years. I know enough to expect big changes every time I return to Beijing, a city that is undergoing the most “meta” of metamorphoses. The most noticeable one this time, in the midst of a short and busy stay, is the completion of at least four new subway lines, and a high-speed train to the airport.

While crowded, the subway is a far better way to get around than above-ground, where the traffic situation in Beijing continues to worsen. This in spite of the fact that 20% of the city’s cars are kept off the street each weekday. Weekends are a free-for-all. With car sales in China running now at over one million per month, traffic is only going to worsen, especially in Beijing. 

Beijing is the most car-crazy city in China. The simple trope is: in Shanghai, people would rather spend money to live in a nicer place and then ride the bus. In Beijing, the opposite is true. Having four wheels under you matter more than the four walls around you. 

October is, famously, the nicest month of the year in Beijing. Daytimes are still warm, the air fresh and the sky often a shimmering blue. The streets are filled with vendors selling the wonderful assortment of autumn foods that have been an inseparable part of October in Beijing for hundreds of years: candied crabapples, persimmons, chestnuts. 

I’m here to participate in a private equity conference organized by and held at Tsinghua University. I readily accepted the invitation to appear, both because it’s an honor to be invited to speak at Tsinghua, and also because I wanted very much to return to the northwestern part of Beijing where the university is based. I was last here (gulp) 28 years ago, when I first arrived in China. I haven’t been back since. 

The changes are so comprehensive that, but for a few old candy-striped smokestacks, nothing seems to remain from the early 1980s. The area around Tsinghua is now filled with shops and modernist glass towers. I remember the university district of Beijing (which houses both Tsinghua and Beijing University) as being very gray, remote and very somber,  with nothing either to comfort or disrupt the life of a student at China’s two most elite universities.  Now, it’s got a hip, Harvard Square kind of vibe.

Tsinghua has a special history, one that has always symbolized for me the unique nature of the relationship between US and China. The university was founded by the American government, using some of the indemnity paid by the Qing emperor following the Boxer Uprising in 1900. While the circumstances that led to the payment of the Boxer reparations are mainly ignoble, I’m nonetheless proud that my country used its relatively small share of the money to establish first a scholarship program for Chinese to study in the US, and then, later, to establish Tsinghua University. The Russians, Germans, British, French and Japanese, who collectively got 93% of the indemnity,  took their share of the money and did nothing of any kind to benefit China. 

Not always adequately or consistently, but America has mainly viewed its role in China as mentor and friend, the least barbarous of the foreign barbarians. 

The conference just ended. I’m going to huddle up against the nighttime cold, and go out to smell the roasted chestnuts, and dodge the fierce Mongolian winds that are juddering the trees.

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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.  

My Chinese language skills remain sub-standard. At best. But, that doesn’t prevent me from taking enormous pleasure in my wall-to-wall waking-hours’ immersion in Chinese. Often, it’s just the sound and cadences of Chinese local accents, which occur in extraordinary numbers and varieties. Even calling them “accents” doesn’t capture the bewildering array, since to an English speaker, the comparison that comes to mind is likely the difference between an English and American accent. In China, regional accents can be so extreme they are mutually incomprehensible. I often feel like the most common phrase I hear in Chinese is “What?”, accompanied by a puzzled expression that shows the listener didn’t catch a word of the Mandarin just spoken at him. 

In other words, I often feel like I’m in the majority in China that’s in the dark about the meaning of someone else’s spoken phrases. But, of course, that’s not quite the case. Chinese do just fine here. I stumble, fall flat, get back up and trip again. Again and again. That about sums up the path of my linguistic development. 

There are moments of transcendence as well. For example,  in Shenzhen recently, I listened in on pitches by six Chinese companies seeking private equity or venture funding. They were from different industries, but I heard repeatedly the phrase “shangye moshi” in the presentations. The first ten times or so, I just let it pass through my brain unmolested, assuming it was just another word that was outside my active vocabulary. Then it hit me. I knew both words: “shangye” means business, “moshi” means model, or method. Put them together, you get 商业模式, or “business model”, an increasingly common business jargon term in English that I now know was translated literally into Chinese. 

I never liked the term “business model” in English, and so rarely use it. Companies have a way of making money, it seems to me, not a “business model”. Models are static, not dynamic, ever-mutating structures, which is what most good companies must be in order to keep making money. 

But, my aversion to the term disappears in Chinese. I’ve taken it to using it quite often now. Why? For one thing, at my age, it’s rare that any new word will stick around long enough in my memory for me to use more than once. I’m on an email list that sends me seven Chinese words every day. I read today’s words about 15 minutes ago, and I’ve already forgotten half of them. By tomorrow, the rest will probably be gone also. So, the fact I’ve retained “shangye moshi” is already cause for minor celebration.

The other reason is that it does seem to fill a slight conceptual void in Chinese. Languages, including Chinese,  often import foreign phrases for this reason. Two other well-known Chinese examples of this are “lang man” and “you mo”, meaning “romantic” and “humor”, both of which entered as corrupted versions of the English original. Others have speculated about what this says about China, that it had no native words for “romantic” and “humor”, but I’ll leave that to theoreticians. 

With “shangye moshi”, the missing native concept in Chinese was likely a simple way of saying a company has a recurring source of profit. If so, of course, it’s a welcome addition to the Chinese language, and one hopes, to Chinese management strategy as well.

Courage. Determination. Tenacity. These are all qualities I find in abundance among the SME bosses I work with.

Their resolve and hard work, in building private companies of significant size and importance, seem super-human. Most of these companies were started a decade or more ago, when China was much less hospitable to private business, and the market economy was still in its infancy. The risks, at every stage, were large and close-to-hand. Still, they persevered, and eventually prospered. 

How did they do it?  I have no clear answer or insight, beyond the fact that all these men have uncommon intelligence and confidence. While firmly part of “the new China”, they are also, in one important respect, representative of the most classic of Chinese virtues.

These entrepreneurs personify an ideal beautifully described over 2,200 years ago, by the philosopher Mencius. 

 So it is whenever Heaven invests a person with great responsibilities, it first tries his resolve, exhausts his muscles and bones, starves his body, leaves him destitute and confounds his every endeavor. In this way, his patience and endurance are developed and his weaknesses are overcome.” *(see Chinese below)

*”天降大任于斯人也必先苦其心志劳其筋骨饿其体肤空乏其身行指乱其所为所以动心忍性曾益其所不能.” Thanks to my friend Cao Zhen for providing this.