This book is the fantastic story of Tim Clissold, spending 248 Million Dollars of someone else’s money in corporate industrial Joint Ventures in China in the 1990’s. Most of the money was lost forever.
Clissold narrates his adventures with the legendary Wall Street investor Jack Perkowski during some intense years, just as China was opening up to foreign investment. They got screwed in every possible way and I think that they learned more than anyone else. One of the companies I work with today is a reminiscence from one of the joint ventures in the book, so I feel much sympathy and gratitude towards the entrepreneurs who went in first in China.
The book is a collection of hilarious episodes of improbable encounters and unfathomable opportunities, painted with a backdrop of tragedy because we know that this business will fail too in the end, despite the heroic efforts from the team to make it fly.
He describes in a very personal and revealing way the dream that many of us nurture, to become “Mr. China” – the one who knows the mystic ways of the Middle Kingdom. I was also seduced by the magical characters that turns any street into a mystical land when I walked around in Beijing in 1994. 厕所 looks so much more exciting, promising and spiritual than the sign “WC”. In my eyes, it could just as well be the entrance to a lost Buddhist temple, if it weren’t for the smell of course.
But the point that he makes is that we want China to be special. I think this is very important. We want to be seduced and mystified and to stop thinking. We want to believe that all Chinese are spiritual and long-term-thinkers and different from us.
In the end, we are all humans, and I am deeply convinced that the similarities are larger than the differences.
Goran Christiansson's Blog 