China Private Equity

Two factors are paramount in explaining the phenomenal economic success of China over the last thirty years: smart government policies and the abundant ingenuity, hard work, talent and entrepreneurial drive of the Chinese people.

A day doesn’t go by without me seeing at first hand that entrepreneurial genius at work in China. The inner workings of government, however, are generally invisible to me as an outsider.

During a recent trip to Shandong, however, I had the privilege of seeing part of China’s government up close, doing what it often does best – constructing and carrying out policies that allow businesses to thrive in China.

In all countries, governments makes the rules and sets the conditions under which business succeed and fail. China is no different. One obvious difference: China’s government clearly must be doing a lot right for the country to deliver the greatest sustained period of economic growth ever recorded.  How was this achieved? The simple answer is that China’s government began 30 years ago to scrap a rigid socialist system for a free market economy.

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is the official phrase. It’s no set doctrine, but mainly a pragmatic pursuit of policies to foster global competitiveness, employment and rising living standards in China. China government invites its citizens to evaluate it on this basis, using statistics, to judge how well it manages the economy.

Most would agree, including me,  the government is doing an outstanding job. How it does so,  however, is very much of a mystery.

Over the course of four days, I met with the mayors and Communist Party Secretaries of three of Shandong’s larger and more prosperous cities: Weifang, Laiwu and Linyi. These were working meetings, not diplomatic meet-and-greets. I was the only non-Chinese in these meetings. I was traveling at the invitation of the chairman of one of our clients. This client already has extensive and highly-successful operations in Shandong, with revenues there in the last two years of over Rmb 1 billion.

“We are here to serve you”. This is the statement I heard repeated in each city by the Party Secretary and the Mayor.  This is neither an idle boast nor an empty promise. In every instance where I’ve been in meetings with senior figures in the Chinese government, I’ve been deeply impressed by their competence, directness and sense of purpose in offering to do whatever it takes to help improve the conditions for investment and so raise local living standards.

The meetings with Shandong political leadership had an overlapping two-way purpose: to facilitate my client’s expansion plans in Shandong, and to allow the Party Secretary and Mayor of each city to lay out in plain language the economic development agenda for the next few years. They did this confidently, effectively, forcefully.

I’ve never before heard political leaders speak with such a single-minded focus, as well as evident sincerity,  on their priorities to improve the life, work and leisure of their citizens. There was no self-aggrandizement, no insincere black-slapping, no empty platitudes, indeed nothing that could be construed as expressions of naked self-interest, or the exclusive interest of the party they represent.

There is a good reason for this: political careers in China are made and lost in part on how well the local economy performs, as measured by objective statistics. The metrics include not just local gdp growth, but also the growth in living and recreation space per person, the completion of large local infrastructure projects on time and on budget, urban beautification programs like planting trees and cleaning up local waterways.

Political success in China must be tangible, measureable. And the improvements must come quickly enough – generally within 2-3 years – to boost an official’s chance to continue to climb the rungs.

Arguably, most political careers, including in the US, are determined by how well political leaders deliver for their citizens.  The clear difference in China, from what I can see,  is that it’s a much more data-driven process, more like how management are rewarded or penalized inside a big company. As Peter Drucker, perhaps the wisest thinker about management famously said, “You can only manage what you can measure.”

China is often run by the Communist Party  like one large centralized corporation. The command-and-control methods of management appear similar. While a vastly oversimplifies things, the meetings I attended with political leaders in Shandong were very familiar in many respects to business meetings I’ve attended. The local leaders articulated the goal, which in each case is to keep local gdp growing at well above China’s national average. All three cities are now doing so.

The infrastructure would need to be continuously upgraded to achieve this. As each city gets richer, of course, it gets correspondingly harder to generate such large annual leaps in output. So, projects grow in scale to the truly monumental. In Weifang, for example, the Party Secretary outlines plans to build a new greenfield port and industrial center outside the city that would one day house over one million people in spacious new apartment buildings.

In each city, the planning goals were uniformly ambitious. The political leaders left no doubt that private business should and must play a big part in the process.  They pledged not just help removing any administrative obstacles, but also to make land available at concessionary prices for private sector projects that would create large number of jobs.

The three cities I visited – Weifang, Laiwu and Linyi – are all thriving, not just economically, but also in these more human terms. The cities are for the most part clean, pretty, with newly-built urban infrastructure of roads, housing, parks.

Many outside China have likely never heard of these places. But, Linyi and Weifang, with populations of 11 million and 8 million respectively,  are both larger than any city in the US and Europe.

Laiwu, is smaller, with a population of just over 1 million. However, it does like to do things in a big way. At lunch with the Party Secretary and Mayor, I sat at the largest round dining table I’ve ever seen. Sixteen of us ate at a table that was over four meters in diameter – so large that each person was served lunch individually, one small helping at a time, by a large team of waiters. 

Corruption and political chicanery exist in China, of course, as they do in US, Europe, Japan and everywhere else political officials with control over valuable resources interact with businessmen. But, in my experience during my three days meeting officials in Shandong, the local government is far more intent on lending a helping hand, rather than looking for back-handers.

China’s one-party political system is not to the taste of many Americans or Europeans.  But, if judged by standards of effectiveness, rather than electoral accountability, local governments in China routinely outperform their counterparts in the US.  For all the pretentions to public service, accountability and incorruptibility, US politics, especially at the local level, is infested by influence-peddling and political bribery in form of campaign contributions.

As I saw living for many years in Los Angeles, the second biggest city in the US, local officials act mainly in ways that favor a select few, and deliver only scant benefits to the society as a whole. LA is now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with degraded infrastructure, failing schools, punishingly high taxes. LA, like China, is also run as a one-party system, with a Democratic machine that pushed through election rules that make it all but impossible for the opposition Republic Party to gain control, no matter how badly the Democratic Party politicians mess up.

Given a choice, I’d take Shandong’s local bosses anytime. They are held to a higher, more transparent standard. Over the course of a four-to-five year term in office, they will often preside over real material improvements in citizens’ lives that few American politicians will deliver over the course of a career.

“Five years ago, all I had to worry about was producing enough to earn a small profit. Now I spend time dealing with employment issues, environmental regulations, tax policies, trying to increase market share and staying ahead of competitors. The pressure is much worse. ”

Welcome to the suddenly changed and increasingly pressured world of Chinese corporate management. 

This comment comes from the boss of a large, integrated chemical factory in Shandong. He and I were talking recently. He is still a relatively young guy of around 40. But, in his 15 year career as first an engineer, then a manager and finally as factory boss, he has seen the purpose, methods, scope, goals and responsibilities of Chinese management change from top to bottom. 

Like much else in China, company management has undergone a lifetime’s worth of change in a matter of a few years. It’s a byproduct of larger forces at work in China’s economy – the withdrawal of direct state planning and control, the ascendancy of the private sector, China’s entry to the WTO and the opening of China’s markets to imports, the rise of a vibrant consumer market. All of these have made planning and decision-making far more intricate and the stakes far higher for Chinese corporate managers, both in state-owned and private companies. 

In the case of my friend in Shandong, he is working for a company majority owned by the state. In theory, that should make his management tasks far easier. In most cases, the Chinese government – whether at national, provincial or local level – is a very lenient shareholder. In fact, they would appear to the ideal owner for any manager who is looking for easy ride. 

In China as elsewhere, when the state is the owner, no one is really in charge. The Chinese government is not looking for dividends. Most profits stay inside the company.  

Here’s the paradox that Chinese managers all live with: as undemanding as the Chinese government is as a shareholder, they are increasingly demanding as a regulator and law-maker. That is a big reason why corporate management has gotten so much more complex in China. In a short space of time, China has gone from a more laissez-faire stance to one with strict environmental, tax and labor laws that rival those of the US and Western Europe. 

True, these tougher regulations are not yet universally applied or enforced. But, any Chinese manager who chooses to act in total disregard of these rules will eventually find himself in deep, deep trouble. Take labor laws. China continues to introduce new forms of workplace protection that give important new rights to hired staff and restrict the prerogatives of management. Any Chinese with a complaint over pay or conditions can complain directly to the Laodong Ju, or Labor Bureau, a quasi-state body that enforces labor laws. 

The process is not without its hiccups. Management can still intimidate and threaten workers who seek redress. But, the system does work. 

Example: a friend of mine worked for several years as a salesperson for an electronics company based in Shenzhen. She was paid part in commission. She did her job well. For months, then years, the boss held back the commission payments, claiming cash flow problems. This is old style China management: don’t pay, offer excuses. This boss assumed he could continue indefinitely with this trickery, in part because the general view is that female workers in China are more easily cowed or mollified. 

Instead, my friend quit without warning,  went right to the Labor Bureau, which made one call to her ex-boss. No investigation. Just a phone call and a stern warning from the Labor Bureau. My friend got her money – about $20,000 in total – within a week. The boss will now have a much harder time doing what he’s always done – pad his own take-home by cheating workers out of what they are entitled to. Tyrannizing workers is no longer a workable HR strategy for a Chinese management team. 

New environmental rules are, if anything,  even more disruptive of old lax ways of managing business in China. Managers who choose to improve margins by ignoring pollution standards are risking an early unpaid retirement. Example: a client of ours is the leading environmentally-friendly paper manufacturer in Shandong. Two years ago, he had 29 competitors in Shandong. Today, he has only three. 

The other 26 were shut down, virtually overnight, for violating environmental standards. The managers at those factories, most of which were around for many years, now likely understand better than most how much the craft of management has changed in China.  

Elsewhere in Shandong, my friend the chemical company boss, is now making another decision that was unimaginable when he began his career: he is working on a plan for a management buyout of the factory. The business is now 65%-owned by a large local coal mine, which in turn, is owned by the provincial government. 

The buy-out plan is still in its early stages. To succeed, he’ll need to persuade several levels of government – no one is quite sure how many – and also take over some significant liabilities, including debts of about $15mn.  It’s not clear if the current management will need to put up cash to buy the government’s controlling stake, or if, as preferred, they can pay in installments, using cash from the business. 

Servicing debt and having most of one’s wealth tied up in illiquid shares of one’s company are other adaptations now being learned by Chinese management. Each year, their working lives grow harder, more pressured and, for the more talented and nimble ones, far more financially rewarding.  Stride-for-stride with the modernization of China’s economy, Chinese corporate managers have gotten better faster than anywhere else, ever.

What is the most international city in China? Shanghai? Beijing? Surely, it must be Hong Kong? No, the most international city in China is one most people outside China have never heard of: Yiwu, in Zhejiang Province. 

Yiwu is about three hours southwest of Shanghai, with no sites of any importance, and a somewhat rundown city center. Few international tourists will ever set foot there. And yet, at this very moment, there are more foreigners thronging there than anywhere else in China. 

Yiwu, you see, is where the Third World comes to shop. In the last ten years, it’s become the nexus of a large, complicated global trade route, the main supply depot for tens of thousands of shops all across the world. Yiwu’s streets and hotels are filled everyday with thousands of traders from Africa, Russia and the Middle East. They come there to make money, which they do by buying goods by the container load in Yiwu to ship back and sell in their home countries.  

This is petty capitalism on a grand scale: thousands of foreign small businessmen buying from thousands of Yiwu merchants, who rent stalls in the huge market centers spread across the center of Yiwu. At a guess, there must be over 15,000 stalls in these market centers, each staffed by a local, each catering mainly to the foreigners who spend most of their days bargain hunting. 

Mainly, the stuff for sale caters to the taste of this foreign market. Little if any of it would find buyers in US, Western Europe or, increasingly, China itself. Indeed, from what I could tell, more of the world’s hideous clothing ends up for sale in Yiwu than anywhere else. There is enough polyester and other petrochemical-derived materials on display to power the world’s ocean shipping fleet for generations.

Besides clothing, there are a large number of stalls selling other basics of poorer economies, like printed plastic bags, cheap carpets, plastic jewelry, lighting and other house wares. If you wanted to know how people dress and furnish their homes in Isfahan, Aleppo, Izmir, Rostock or Accra, you could get a decent impression by walking through the market centers of Yiwu. 

How and why Yiwu became the center of this multi-billion dollar trade remains a mystery to me. Yiwu has no natural advantages of any kind: it’s far from main transports hubs, hemmed in by mountains, and never developed much of an industrial base. The main export ports of Ningbo and Shanghai are both over three hours away by truck.

Clearly, there was no central government diktat saying Yiwu would be China’s “window on the Third World”. It seems to have happened spontaneously. To accommodate all the foreign traders, basic English is much more widely spoken than anywhere else in China. Even the lady at the ticket booth in the Yiwu bus station can use English to sell a one-way bus ticket to Guangzhou to an African on his way home. 

The English is not always correct. Outside one of the many shops selling sex toys, I saw a sign reading  “Aduit uppiies”. I assume, from the customer base inside, they got the Arabic version correct on the sign. 

By the standards of other successful Chinese cities, Yiwu is more down-and-dirty. There are none of the showpiece infrastructure projects like new expressways and elaborate modern skyscrapers that proliferate in other Chinese cities. While clearly all this trade has made many in Yiwu very rich, the city looks like the China of twenty years ago. Its market stalls are not the kind of place where most Chinese care to shop these days. Chinese, especially urban-dwellers, like well-designed brand-name chain stores with higher-quality merchandise and slick packaging. 

Walking around Yiwu, you get the sense that at least 10% of the population is foreign. Nowhere else in China even comes close. The foreigners are mainly Arabs and Persians, but there are also many Africans and Russians crowding the streets, markets, restaurants and hotels. 

Yiwu has more “foreign food” restaurants than anywhere else in China. Most offer Arab and Turkish food. Indeed, much of downtown Yiwu has the feel of a Middle Eastern bazaar, with clutches of men sitting around smoking hookahs and fingering prayer beads.

You are as likely to hear “Salaam Alekum” as “ni hao” walking the streets of Yiwu. All kinds of services have sprung up in Yiwu to cater to the Middle Easterners. There are halal butchers, coffee shops selling Turkish coffee, manufacturers of the long Arab thawb worn by men. Less delightfully, a Chinese street portrait artist displays drawings of Barack Obama, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Osama Bin-Laden. 

I like Arab food, and have eaten a lot of it, both in the Middle East in London. Yiwu’s version was actually quite authentic and tasty. Inside the restaurant I went to, the loudspeakers were playing a recitation of the Koran. Arab and African men sat eating their lunch. There are few Arab women to be seen. 

African women, on the other hand, are thick on the ground, fulfilling their reputation as some of the most talented of all the world’s market traders. I spoke to one lady from Ghana, who comes to Yiwu three times a year, and buys enough each time to fill up a 40-foot container – kids and adult clothes, shoes, carpets, blankets. The profit margins are good. After deducting the $2,000 airfare, the $300 for a Chinese visa, food and lodging in China, plus the shipping costs back to Ghana (and the bribes needed to get the goods out of Ghanaian Customs) she still earns a tidy profit on each trip.

Her capitalist Odyssey, repeated thousands of times a week, with containers bound for the world’s most glamourless spots,  is what keeps Yiwu booming. There is nothing petty about the petty traders of Yiwu. 

It’s fair to say that Yiwu has built its wealth, to some extent, on the misfortune of others. The traders who make the long trip to Yiwu do so, mainly because their countries are criminally mismanaged. In these countries of the Middle East and Africa, there are no local manufacturers making goods at a price and quality that can match that of China, even when you factor in the high transport costs to get people and merchandise to and from Yiwu and the bribes and other levies that must be paid to make sure the items reach local store shelves. Prices in Yiwu are not particularly low, more “retail” than “wholesale”. The traders buy in relatively small quantities, meaning Yiwu merchants can charge higher prices and earn fatter margins for themselves.

 This sad and persistent reality of corruption, economic mismanagement and political tyranny in countries of the Middle East and Africa guarantees that Yiwu will continue to thrive for many years. Yiwu’s market economy was built by catering to places with no real market economy of their own.

Whenever possible on visits to Shanghai, I’ve always chosen to fly into Hongqiao Airport, rather than the larger, newer Pudong Airport. Shanghai is the only major city in China with two major commercial airports, and Hongqiao and Pudong couldn’t be more unalike. Or at least that was the case until a few weeks ago, when the new Hongqiao terminal and runway opened. I just flew in and out of this new building, and while it’s an impressively gleaming facility, I find myself mourning the loss of the old Hongqiao. 

Hongqiao was always a dowdy remnant of a bygone era in China, built over 20 years ago when the western part of Shanghai was still largely farmland. The first time I went to Hongqiao was 1982, to see my friend Fritz off. He was flying on PanAm Airlines to the US, back when there were very few international flights into and out of China. As I remember it, the PanAm 747 came gliding in like a metallic chimera, over the heads of peasants transplanting rice. 

Gradually, the city enveloped the airport and Hongqiao is now one of the few downtown airports in China, a short cab ride to the main business areas in Shanghai about 8 miles away. Its 1980s vintage terminal was also one of my favorite sites in China – a reflection, perhaps, of the fact I rarely get to travel to anywhere very scenic in China, but hop around from booming metropolis to booming metropolis.

The old terminal has a brute, utilitarian ugliness about it, fishhook-shaped, small, cramped and comfortingly ramshackle. It’s so past-its-prime, in fact, it would not be out of place at all in the US, with its outdated urban airports like LAX, Kennedy, LaGuardia, Midway. 

The comparison with Pudong, opened ten years ago 25 miles outside the center of Shanghai, was stark. At Pudong, you whizz along long corridors on motorized walkways, and travel downtown on the world’s only commercial Mag-Lev train. If Pudong is glass and steel, Hongqiao was cement and plastic. 

But, again, all this now belongs to the past tense. The new Hongqiao Terminal is, if anything, more loudly and verbosely modern than Pudong when it opened. I had no idea it was even being built, it’s so far away from the old facility, on what was the back fringe of old Hongqiao. It’s a 20-minute shuttle ride between the two. All domestic flights now operate from the new terminal, and my hunch is that the old terminal will not be standing for very much longer. Civic leaders clearly came to see it as an eyesore, an embarrassingly “Third World” entry-point for a city busily striving to become the world’s next great commercial and financial capital. 

There was a rush to open the new Hongqiao, since next month, the Shanghai Expo opens. The roads leading to the new terminal are still under construction, as is the subway line. Vast expanses of ground in the front and to the sides of the new building are now just barren plots, waiting for parking lots, airport hotels and rental car facilities to populate them. Our cab driver had not been yet to the new terminal and couldn’t find the departures area. 

On entering, the first impression is of a very un-Shanghai-like emptiness. The new terminal must be at least ten times larger and three times taller than the old one. The line of check-in counters stretches for half-a-mile. You get a sense of what Jonah must have felt like entering the whale. Everywhere else in Shanghai is so jam-packed that you are part of a perpetual mob scene, breathing in someone else’s exhaust. Not here. It hints at a Shanghai of the future, a city not defined mainly by its enormous and densely-packed population, but by its modernity, efficiency and polish. 

That’s just it. What’s most special, and worth preserving, about old Hongqiao is that it belongs to the Shanghai that “was”, rather than the China that “will be”.  Even the name itself is a delightful throwback. Hongqiao means “Red Flag”, a name straight out of the Maoist lexicon. 

The old axiom is very apt: “you don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from”. When Hongqiao’s old terminal goes, so too will the last conspicuous reminder of the Shanghai of thirty years ago, a city,  ever so tentatively, starting down the road of economic reform. 

A tangible part of my own history in China will also disappear. Flying into Shanghai will never be the same.  

What are the most reckless and self-destructive words to use while doing business in China? “Let’s skip lunch and continue our meeting.”  Of course, I’m kidding, at least partly. But, there’s nothing frivolous about the fact food is a vital ingredient of business life in China. This is, after all, the country where people for hundreds of years have greeted each other with not with “Hello” but with the question “Have you eaten?”. 

China is no longer a country where food is in any way scarce. But, perhaps because of memories of years of scarcity or just because Chinese food is so damn delicious, the daily rhythms of life still revolves around mealtimes in a way no other country can quite match. This is as true in professional as personal life. 

It’s a certainty that any business appointment scheduled within 1-2 hours of mealtime inevitably will end up pausing for food. In practical terms, that means the only times during working hours that a meeting can be scheduled without a high probability of a meal being included is 9-10am, and 1:30-2:30pm.

At any other time, it’s understood that the meeting will either be shortened or lengthened so everyone participating can go share a meal together.  Any other outcome is just about inconceivable. Whatever else gets said in a meeting, however contentious it might be, one can always be sure that the words “我们吃饭吧” , or “let’s go eat”, will achieve a perfect level of agreement.  

Everyone happily trudges off to a nearby restaurant, and talk switches to everyone’s favorite topic: “what should we order?” Soon, the food begins to pile up on the table. Laughter and toasts to friendship and shared success are the most common sounds. The host gets the additional satisfaction and “face” of providing abundant hospitality to his guests.  

And yet, there are some modern business people in China that can and do conceive of meetings taking precedence over mealtime. Thankfully, they are quite few in number, probably no more than a handful among the 1.4 billion of us in China. I just happen to know more of them than most people. 

In my experience, those with this heterodox view that meals can be delayed or even skipped are mainly Chinese who’ve spent time at top universities in the US. There, they learn that in the US it’s a sign of serious intent to work through mealtimes. It’s a particularly American form of business machismo, and one I never much liked in my years in businesses there. Americans will readily keep talking, rather than break for food. Or, as common, someone will order takeout food, and the meeting will continue, unbroken, as pizza or sandwiches are spread out on the conference room table. 

Heaven help the fool who tries to change the subject, as the takeout food is passed around, to something not strictly related to the business matters under discussion. If as Americans will often remind you, “time is money”, the time spent eating is often regarded as uncompensated, devoid of value and anything but the most utilitarian of purposes. 

Is it any wonder I’m so happy working in China? I love food generally, and Chinese food above all else. It’s been that way since I was a kid. These days, I often tell Chinese that adjusting to life in China has had its challenges for me, but I know that every day I will have at least two opportunities for transcendent happiness: lunch and dinner. 

So, not only do I accept that business meetings will usually include a break for a nice meal, I consider it one of the primary perks of my job. But, I do meet occasionally these US-educated Chinese who don’t share my view. They will ask if meetings can be scheduled so there won’t be the need to break for a meal, or if not, to make the mealtime as short and functional as possible, so “work can resume quickly”. 

This is misguided on so many levels that I worry how these folks, who I otherwise usually like and admire, will ever achieve real career success in China. The meals are often the most valuable and important part of a business meeting – precisely because they are unrushed, convivial and free of any intense discussion of business. 

Trust is a particularly vital component of business in China. Without it, most business transactions will never succeed, be it a private equity investment, a joint venture, a vendor-supplier relationship. Contracts are generally unenforceable. The most certain way to build that trust is to share a meal together — or, preferably, many meals together. 

To propose skipping a meal is a little like proposing to use sign language as the primary form of negotiation for a complex business deal: it’s possible, but likely to lead to first to misunderstanding, frustration and then, inevitably, to failure.

“Do Not Drive Tiredly”  That’s the message, in English, on large highway signs spanning the roadway in Jiangxi. I was charmed by the idiosyncratic English, and even more by the fact that almost all highway signs in China, including mundane ones announcing upcoming exits or defining the hard shoulder, are all bilingual, Chinese and English.

Based on my recent highway travels through part of Jiangxi Province, I was probably the only one who could get much value from the English. That’s because almost all the other traffic on the highway consisted of very large and heavily-loaded long-distance Chinese trucks. Passenger cars are few and far between. 

Highways are a recent phenomenon in China, of course. I’ve never seen anything quite like them, in my +30 years of driving around the US and lot of the rest of the developed world. The Chinese highways are mainly well-built and usually in pristine condition. Besides the English-language signs, another source of frequent delight are the life-size plastic policemen, pointing plastic radar guns at oncoming traffic. They’re planted in the highway’s central meridian as not-so-subtle reminders to avoid speeding– or as the sign calls it, again in English, “Overspeeding”.

It’s those large trucks, though, that really define for me the current experience of highway driving in China. Despite their huge size – the trailers often have 20-wheels, and seem to stretch the length of seven or eight passenger cars – the trucks are often buckling under the weight of their loads. Most of the time, the cargo hold is open at the top, and covered with a very large tarpaulin, in various colors, intricately tried to the bottom of the flatbed. The trucks have a tendency to wobble and weave as they move along the road – the result of either unbalanced loads or, more likely, less-skilled drivers.

Long-distance trucking may be among the fastest-growing new professions in China. It’s a safe bet few of today’s drivers have been behind the wheel for more than two or three years. Many have their own particular style of driving. Heavy, slow-moving trucks often canter along, 30mph below the speed limit,  in the left-hand passing lane. Their side-view mirrors – the only way the drivers can see traffic behind or alongside them – are often tilted at angles that seem to defeat the purpose.  

Few of the trucks have any kind of marking on them. The concept of a truck as a moving billboard is still an alien one in China. Not so the ordinary highway billboard, which is very common, as are advertisements posted on overpasses. 

China produces so much, including a huge percentage of the world’s manufactured goods, that it’s hard to imagine how all this stuff moved around before the expressway network was built. The traffic on many expressways, including the ones I was on in Jiangxi, must be over 90% trucks. That’s only going to increase, as more production in China is moved to cheaper, inland areas.

The expressways are already quite crowded. Often, they are only two lanes wide in each direction – which may have seemed more-than-adequate 10 years ago when first designed, but now seem to belong in the Pleistocene Age. Within ten years, these roads will almost certainly all need to be widened. That can cost almost as much, per kilometer, as building new expressways. 

China’s toll fees are among the highest ones I’ve seen. In Jiangxi, it’s 0.4 Renminbi ( or around five US cents) per kilometer for passenger cars, and more for trucks. So, financing all this construction won’t necessarily put a big dent in state revenues.  

Even with all the slow-moving truck traffic, the expressway network in China is a godsend. It makes distances much less foreboding than they used to be in China. It’s possible to average over 100 kilometers-an-hour. On the older, ordinary road network, you’d be lucky to average half that speed. Where the trucks thin out, you can “overspeed” at around 160kph, and rustle the plastic policemen in your backdraft.

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.