The more I asked around, the more I realized that every relationships formed among those who work within the Party system in China is saturated by calculations of benefit and loss. Whitney had been extraordinary useful to her friends. She’d arranged for promotions for scores of people inside the CCP and the government. She’d managed their careers and spent countless hours strategizing with them about the next move. But now she was in danger, they’d dropped her like a stone.
A woman of outsize talent in a patriarchal society, she’d played the roulette-like political environment of the New China with unparalleled skill, parlaying an alliance with the family of a political titan into almost unimaginable success. Until she didn’t. She’d understood the real China, until she didn’t.
As the Communists tightened their grip on the nation, he, like many of the well-off, had a chance to flee. But my grandfather balked at the prospect of becoming a lowly refuge. To him, Hong Kong, a favored destination for migrants from Shanghai, could never compare with his home city, then known as the Paris of the East. Buying into Communist propaganda that the Party would partner with members of the capitalist class to build the “New China,” he decided to stay.
My father never forgave his dad for that fateful decision, holding that his naive belief in the Party cost my dad his youth.
The Communists took over his company and assigned him a job as a rickshaw driver at one of the factories he’d owned. The Communists were masters at that kind of treatment, designed to destroy a man’s most prized possessions — his dignity and self-respect.
My mother had a far happier childhood than my father. Like my grandmother, my mother was a gregarious sort. She was popular among her schoolmates and possessed a sunny view on life. Her personality was almost the polar opposite of my dad’s, especially when it came to risk. My mother embraced it; my dad shunned it. My mother later developed uncannily good investment instincts that allowed my parents to ride real estate booms in both Hong Kong and Shanghai.
So, at home, I grew up in an environment of degradation and punishment. Compliments were as rare as eggs were at the time. My parents picked on me for my mistakes. “Don’t get cocky,” my mother said every time I tasted a little success. Eventually, most of my interactions with my parents became attempts to avoid criticism rather than win praise. It wasn’t about embracing achievement. It was about escaping failure. I constantly worried that I wasn’t good enough.
HK’s culture differed significantly from that of China. In Shanghai, my buddies and I always had our arms over one another’s shoulders and we were always into each other’s business. The whole concept of privacy didn’t really exist on the mainland. In the 1970s and 1980s, boys, even men, thought nothing of walking down the street holding hands.
HK was another world. I remember the first time I tried to put my arm around a HK kid my age. He jumped like he’d been electrocuted. “What are you doing?” he screeched. That was the first time it dawned on me that people associated with one another differently in HK. They had a more expansive sense of personal space and a less intrusive interpretation of friendship. Friendship on the mainland were, for lack of a better word, sticky. People barged into your life. If you looked fat, they’d announce it. If you were having financial troubles, they’d demand details. If you wanted a partner in crime, they’d volunteer. HK’s relationships weren’t as meddlesome. People gave one another room.
Cops and crooks, in HK at least, were cut from the same cloth.
The switch to HK was the first of many for me and, like swimming, moving became a constant in my life. Over the decade I’d move from Asia to America, back to Asia, and to Europe. This constant motion taught me to adapt, even to dramatic changes, and made me comfortable with people from all over the world. Losing my home at an early age taught me to find a piece of it wherever I’d be. I learned to roll with the tide and adapt to different cultures. I became a chameleon, adept at changing skins to match the place. If nothing else, my constant wandering gave me the assurance that new things wouldn’t kill me and that, no matter what, I was going to survive.
And at the end of practice, I’d climb out of the pool with a sense of accomplishment. As it had with my father, doggedness became one of my greatest strengths. Things may seem insurmountable, I told myself, but you’ll always get out of the pool.
People forever commented on my looks in that very blunt, very Chinese kind of way. If you’ve got lots of acne, they’d say, “Wow, so many pimples.” In my case, it was: “Wow, so tall and handsome.” It made me extremely self-conscious. It also saddled me with a powerful desire not only to live up to their image of me as “so tall and handsome” but also to ensure that they didn’t look down on me.
Wow, I thought, that could be me in 10 years, everybody passing me by, looking at me strangely. I promised myself that I never wanted to be someone like that, sticking out like an oddity. Until my mid-40s, I was driven by the fear of looking bad. That’s what Chinese mean when they use the term “to save face.” I was consumed by a desire to avoid disappointing people and to fit in. Still, I always felt people’s eyes trained on me.
In HK, business was pretty much the only career path. We didn’t have politicians and the civil service didn’t interest me. You couldn’t afford to become an artist; the colony was a cultural desert anyway. In HK’s hyper-competitive environment where people were primed to get ahead, business was the main avenue to prove oneself.
I had trouble getting — much less cracking — any jokes. I noticed that many Americans seemed to have a different view of friendship than people did in Asia. There was a fluffiness to American relations. Acquaintances at Wisconsin would greet me enthusiastically and act like we were best buddies. But if I was looking for someone to be more substantially involved in my life, I had a nagging sense that they wouldn’t be there.
Having arrived in the US immediately after the June 4 crackdown in China, as a student from Greater China I was eligible, thanks to an Executive Order signed by President Bush, for a green card. I passed on the chance. I felt too different in America and suspected I’d hit a glass ceiling if I remained. Frat culture permeated the business world, and from those parties I’d attended I sensed that I’d have little traction with my American bosses and peers.
We didn’t want to know how that happened as long as sales and profits increased. It wasn’t just ChinaVest, of course. Anyone doing business in China did it this way, circumventing the rules in search of profit. I quickly learned that in China all rules were bendable as long as you had what we Chinese called guanxi, or a connection into the system. And given that the state changed the rules all the time, no one gave the rules much weight.
Our guests were floored by the experience. Many were on their first trip to China and weren’t accustomed to this type of treatment, where the intent was to dazzle with flattery. One, the scion of a wealthy family from Ohio, turned to me and declared, “This is another world.” Theleen had learned this trick from the Chinese, who are masters at shock-and-awe hospitality. In so doing, Bob achieved his goal of making China seem like a riddle that only ChinaVest could solve.
For me, Robertson’s cultivation of Feng Bo peeled back the curtain on the inner workings of a political system that mouthed Communist slogans while the families of senior officials gorged themselves at the trough of economic reforms. These sons and daughters functioned like an aristocracy; they intermarried, lived lives disconnected from those of average Chinese, and made fortunes selling access to their parents, inside information, and regulatory approvals that were keys to wealth.
The Communist system of central control and economic planning struggled to adapt to the changing China. Old laws nog longer had relevance. But when the Party wrote the new laws, the ministries intentionally included vast gray areas so that if the authorities wanted to target anyone for prosecution, they always could.
Mayor Chen Xitong had been accused of embezzling millions of dollars in a scheme to build vacation homes for the Party elite. His real “crime” was that he led the “Beijing clique,” a Party faction that opposed the “Shanghai clique,” overseen by Party chieftain Jiang Zemin.
I was unprepared for the job. I knew no one in business or in the Party. I was barely 30 years old. I couldn’t even drink Moutai. I had to admit that I had no idea how to interact with adult mainland Chinese. They were another breed. I felt like an alien landing on another planet.
Returning to Shanghai, I met a senior manager at the Fuxing Group, an up-and-coming conglomerate. We had a pleasant chat over tea about their businesses, but it was clear he wasn’t interested in ChinaVest’s money. Fuxing was already rumored to be in bed with the family of President Jiang Zemin. They had no reason to let a foreign firm peer behind the curtain to see how they operated. Within 5 minutes of meeting me, that guy probably concluded: This idiot doesn’t know anything about China. He was right.
Lan’s offer came when I’d already begun having doubts about a career in private equity. I felt as if I were standing on a riverbank watching the flow of a modernizing country rush by. Having become an associate at ChinaVest and then its chief rep in Beijing, I saw how my life would unfold. I figured I’d be promoted to party by 40 and a few years later I’d be renting a mansion in HK like my bosses were. Such a scenario left little room for imagination. In the private equity industry, we always said we were 30K feet from the trenches. But I itched to be down there fighting, not just as an investor but as the builder of a business. I wanted to be part of the China story, not simply someone seeking to profit from it. What’s more, I’d always enjoyed exploring the unknowns. I wanted a new challenge. I wanted to do something tremendous. And I was living through a period of time in China when the tremendous was possible. I also felt that to be a good investor, I needed experience as an entrepreneur. In the VC industry at that time, everyone could run the numbers, but only a few could run a business. I wanted to be that guy.
We were using proprietary software, but after one of our employees quit, a new company opened up selling the same service at a lower price. Who could we rely on to protect us? Nobody.
My father saw his return home as a triumph. He’d left China as a schoolteacher under the cloud of a bad class background. He’d worked his way up from a laborer in a warehouse to the representative of a multibillion-dollar business. He was returning to China as what his friends called a meiguo maiban.
Everything was going up except me. I’d grown accustomed to progress, but I had to admit defeat. For the first time in my lief, I read self-help books, consuming everything from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People to the Chinese philosophers Confucius and Mencius to the Buddhist spiritual Nan Huai-Chin. I undertook a journey of self-criticism and self-discovery. It was then that I finally grasped the meaning of the Chinese proverb “if you want to jump, you must learn to bow.”
Still, she was a force of nature. Her eyes sparkled with insight and energy. Compared to my past girlfriends, intellectually and spiritually, Whitney was on a completely different plane. She’d read the books I was reading. She had a philosophical understanding of how China worked and could explain to me why people in China reacted differently than people outside its borders. She built a bridge that reconnected me to my beloved homeland. Given that this was a transformative period of my life, I was wide open to her charms.
Whitney gave the impression of having gained access to the engine of China’s growth. For me, she was the first one who lifted the hood. She knew the officials whom I’d only read about in newspapers. She knew others whom I’d never heard of. This was a new world. I wanted to learn and Whitney seemed eager to be my guide.
I began visiting Beijing again. The more I saw of Whitney, the more I was impressed. She could reel off complete paragraphs from the works of Chinese philosophers, Confucius and Mencius, and the French enlightenment thinker Montesquieu. She signed me up to help her company raise money. I began advising her on financial matters.
She steered me, in a way no one else had in the past, to look clinically at my personal life. “You need a better approach.” She and I actually did a SWOT analysis, a checklist used to assess a business. Separately, we broke down the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to our emotional ties. Then we compared notes.
Whitney’s argument appealed to my analytical side. She seemed to have a magic formula for success, which was especially intriguing because my formula had clearly lost its mojo. Whitney’s view of passion, love, and sex was that we could grow into them, but it wouldn’t be the glue that would bind us. What would cement the relationship would be its underlying logic — did our personalities match; did we share value, desire the same ends, and agree on the means? If so, everything else would follow.
She told me I needed heft, so I tried my best to conform to the Chinese aphorism “an old head on young shoulders.”
One day we were riding together in a car and I was looking out the window as I did sometimes, with my mind blank.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied.
She sat up, turned to me, and declared, “That’s not right. Your mind should always be working.”
She was constantly planning the next step, whom to call, what to say, how to operate. She wasn’t one move ahead; she was ten. I embraced that way of thinking, too. After a while, it became second nature. Such an approach to life did have a downside, though. In the early days, we thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. But the more we focused on the future, the more our minds lost the capacity to be in the now. We paid less attention to us, and more on the outside world.
Men in power constantly chased women. Unmarried women in China with a little money were all assumed to be sleeping around. Being attached to someone was a shield. But even after we started going out, the advances didn’t stop. Communist China had spent decades repressing the desires — material and sexual — of its people. Now they were erupting at the same time. “Even the air in Beijing contains hormones” went an expression at the time.
She always spoke glowingly of her mother partially because she was worried that I, having been raised in the big city of Shanghai, would look down on her.
Working for the president of a Chinese university gave Whitney a priceless education in how to deal with Chinese officials, a skill she’d hone to perfection. She learned how to alter her attitude, tone of voice, and language depending on her interlocutor. Nanjing Polytechnic was closely associated with the PLA, so she also got a crash course in handling military officers.
Shandong taught Whitney a valuable lesson, similar to the one that learned in HK. She discovered that the only ones who truly succeeded in China were people with guanxi, connections into the system. Still, she didn’t like the life of a deputy county chief. She was forced to drink so much that she broke out in hives. She was sexually harassed. And when the county chief was arrested and sentenced to jail on corruption charges, the backstabbing and rumormongering became intolerable.
That experience killed any desire on her part to work for the government. It planted deep inside her a visceral fear of the Chinese system and a commitment, as she put it, to ensure that “if you pulled my corpse out of my coffin and whipped it, you’d still find no dirt.” She decided that a career in business was the way to go.
Courtesy of the PLA, Whitney got her first state of the high life. She shopped for designer brands at the Wangfu Hotel in Beijing, a joint venture between HK’s Peninsula Group and the Chinese army. She attended lavish dinners. Brick by brick, she constructed the facade of a high-powered deal maker with guanxi.
Whitney wrote her ambition into the Chinese name of her company — Tai Hong. Those two words came from a sentence written by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, who observed that a human life could be as weighty as Mount Tai or as trifling as a feather. That was how she saw herself and ultimately me. We’d come from nothing, and if we ended up making nothing out of our lives, it wouldn’t matter. So why not go for it all? That was her life’s motto, and without that kind of attitude she’d never have been able to pull herself from the bottom of the pile to the top. Her hometown wasn’t even a third-tier city. Her family was broken. In my opinion, her half brother were good-for-nothing. But, by God, she wasn’t going to be as trifling as a feather; she and I were going to be as weighty as Mount Tai.
And she networked like mad, cadging invitations to exclusive functions with senior officials of the CCP.
Whitney discovered that to unlock the door to success in China she needed two keys. One was political heft. In China, entrepreneurs only succeeded if they pandered to the interests of the Communist Party. Whether it be a shopkeeper in a corner store or a tech genius in China’s SV, everyone needed sponsors inside the system. The second requirement was the ability to execute once an opportunity arose. Only by possessing both keys would success be possible. That’s what Whitney set out to do and how I entered the picture.
Chauffeurs are important in China. Chatty drivers have been responsible for the downfall of many officials, so it’s important to keep them happy.
Whitney knew that when cultivating someone powerful in China, the pursuer should never appear too eager. Other people would harass their targets and refuse to take a hint. But Whitney knew the psychology of China’s elite. With so many people angling to profit from a connection with Auntie Zhang, Whitney needed to separate herself from the pack. She was a fantastic judge of character. She’d baited the hook with a smash performance during their first meeting. Now with her line in the water, she waited.
After a week, Auntie Zhang bit. She called Whitney and scolded her for not reaching out. “We had such a good talk,” she said. “Why didn’t you contact me? I’ve been thinking of you.” Auntie Zhang suggested they meet again. This time the setting was more intimate: a quiet dinner for two.
Whitney was a master at teasing out the details of other people’s lives, a key competence in a world where forming relationships was crucial to success. Once she’d decided that Auntie Zhang was a target worthy of cultivation, Whitney set out to learn everything she could about her.
Wen’s personality saved him. It’s probably going too far to say that at heart he was a political eunuch. However, he was extraordinarily careful; he never insulted or threatened anyone. He managed up and avoided any association with political factions. More so than most officials, he stayed in his lane. To get to his position, he obviously had to have ambition, but it was a restrained type of ambition that didn’t threaten his comrades at the Party’s heights.
As premier, Wen cultivated a man-of-the-people image. When a massive earthquake rocked Sichuan Province in 2008, Wen sped to the scene wearing a rumpled jacket and track shoes. Chinese people took to calling him Grandpa Wen.
I was amazed at Whitney’s capacity to insinuate herself into Auntie Zhang’s world. It was like one of those Chinese soap operas about life at the imperial court, where ladies-in-waiting vied for the attention of the empress. Hundreds of people wanted to get close to Auntie Zhang, but Whitney bested them all. It was a painstaking process of cultivation and of anticipating her needs, all based on Whitney’s intimate knowledge of Auntie Zhang’s life and family. Before Auntie Zhang realized she even required something, Whitney provided it. After she did that a few times, Auntie Zhang was hooked.
Whitney shared with me her plan to groom Auntie Zhang and others in the Party hierarchy. Navigating human relations in China was such an intricate affair at that level that Whitney needed someone she could trust absolutely with whom she could strategize. Every relationship came with its own calculations and its own dimensions. We pored over these issues together, gauging what our counter-parties wanted, what motivated them, and how to get them to help our cause. “Should I approach her this way or that?” she’d asked me. “How do you think she’s going to react?” I became the one person in the world with whom she could explore these issues. It brought us closer and heightened our intimacy; it was us against the world.
Serving Auntie Zhang at the center of power in China became Whitney’s life. Every time Auntie needed her, Whitney was there. She submerged herself into Auntie Zhang’s world and everything else fell away. Both of us became like this, catering to the whims of others. We were like the fish that clean the teeth of crocodiles.
At the time, Auntie Zhang was the most important piece on the chessboard of Whitney’s professional life. Whitney aimed to be a master of the game in Beijing. There were potentially huge financial payoffs and an enormous boost in prestige. But there was also the mental challenge of figuring out how to work the system, solving the puzzle presented by Communist China as best as she could. Whitney was driven to embrace this challenge and she did it with a ferocity few in Beijing could match.
Years later, Whitney and Auntie Zhang would try to get Liu promoted to a vice-ministerial position, meaning he’d become a “high-ranking official” or a gaogan. That jump is the most important in any official’s career. Not only does it promise a more generous pension and access to the best hospitals, best medical care, and best food; it also portends entree into the halls of political power. However, Liu’s promotion didn’t materialize. Still, thanks to his marriage to Lily, he saw a China he never would have seen.
Whitney was worried that hangers-on like Huang would bring calamity onto the Wens. He was too brash; be brandished his connections to the Wen clan like a weapon. One day, he got into a traffic accident on Chang’an Street, the main east-west boulevard that bisects the heart of Beijing. A police officer responded to the scene and Huang accosted him, causing a lot of embarrassment to the Wens. Whitney and I prided ourselves on being discreet. We didn’t try to sell our access for a quick buck, and we kept a low profile; we were in it for the long haul. But not Huang. People like him were dangerous because they attracted too much heat.
Whitney looked to Auntie Zhang as a mother figure. In introducing me before we’d gotten engaged, Whitney was giving Auntie Zhang veto power over the most intimate decision of her life. If I was going to be Whitney’s husband, I needed Auntie Zhang’s blessing. In China, at that level, trust is first and foremost. If Auntie Zhang felt that she couldn’t trust me, my relationship with Whitney would have ended then and there.
Subconsciously, Whitney seemed to be modeling our relationship on that of the Wens. Auntie Zhang had pursued Wen Jiabao because he was serious minded and competent, someone in whose chariot she could ride as he headed off to glory. So, too, Whitney looked at me as a man, in a very patriarchal society, who could help a capable and ambitious woman, like her, realize her dreams.
In theory, the Wens were responsible for putting up 30% of the capital as well, but they rarely did. In the few instances that they provided capital, it was always after the project was a sure bet. Auntie Zhang never took any risk, so we deducted their investment stake when we distributed the profits.
Nothing was on paper; it was all done on trust. The arrangement generally followed the “industry standard.” Other families of high-ranking Party members extracted a similar percentage in exchange for their political influence. The template was always fungible and could be tweaked to accommodate investment opportunities as they arose.
Chinese officials, executives at state-owned companies, and private businessmen who were close to the Party presented insiders like Auntie Zhang with opportunities all the time, but the deals weren’t as sweet as those available to China’s red aristocrats. The red aristocrats got access to monopoly businesses. An example would be the contract to provide a kind of mineral water, called Tibet 5100, on China’s high-speed rail network. That reportedly was landed by relatives of Deng Xiaoping, who paid next to nothing for the rights to bottle the water in Tibet. From 2008 to 2010, the Ministry of Railways bought 200M bottles of the stuff. When the company listed on the HKSE in 2011, its market cap was $1.5B. The Deng family never commented on reports that it was linked to the firm. Anyway, Auntie Zhang couldn’t muster that kind of juice.
Our deals required more work. None was sure bets. You needed judgment on two levels. The first was basic due diligence. That was where I came in. I analyzed the industry and had a good sense of the market. I did the legwork, visiting the site and delving into the details. The second type of judgment was an ability to size up a proposal’s political cost.
People trafficking in prospects always wanted something. To get a deal, would it be worth aligning ourselves with someone’s political faction or personal network? Would it be worth owing someone a favor that he or she would eventually come to collect? That was Whitney’s expertise and Auntie Zhang relied on her counsel as they conducted lengthly guesstimates of what potential partners would expected in exchange for providing us access to an opportunity.
As our relationship deepened, Whitney and I became far more than “white gloves,” shielding Auntie Zhang’s business activity from unwanted publicity. We became partners. We provide finance, direction, judgment, and critically, execution. Auntie Zhang gave us political cover. We liked to say Auntie Zhang was our “air force” and we were the “infantry,” slugging it out in the trenches. Still, there was a big difference between the Wens and other leading Communist clans. Auntie Zhang’s air force might have had shock value on paper — thanks to its connection to the office of the nation’s premier. But she couldn’t rely on her husband to drop any bombs.
Neither Whitney nor I felt much discomfort spending more than $1K on lunch. To me, it was just the cost of doing business in China in the 2000s. That’s how things were done. A big element was the Chinese concept of “face.” Everybody knew we were paying ridiculous prices for the soup, the fish, and even the veggies. And it was precisely that fact that gave our guest face. If I’d been buying lunch for my own personal consumption, I would have looked at it as a value proposition. But I wasn’t there for fun, I was there for business, and if I wanted to do business in Beijing, that’s what lunch cost.
It’s hard to exaggerate just how much we needed capital in those days. This was a problem common to every entrepreneur in China. Given the multitude of investment opportunities during the boom-boom days of China’s economic rise, all of us were leveraged to the hilt. It was a sign of how crazy the Chinese market was and how much enthusiasm about China’s future coursed through society and the financial world. Everybody was laying maximum bets, and because of that, everyone was short of cash. Of course, many bets didn’t pan out. Two-thirds of the people on China’s 100 wealthiest list would be replaced every year due to poor business decisions, criminality, and / or politically motivated prosecutions, or because they’d mistakenly aligned themselves with a Party faction that had lost its pull.
Anyone running a sizable business was bound to be violating some type of law, whether it be environmental, tax, or labor. So while the returns could be lofty, you were always vulnerable. When the Chinese government passes a law it invariably makes it retroactive, so events that occurred years ago that had been unregulated could become crimes today.
Nonetheless, those challenges made no dent in the consensus that everything in China was pointing up. The 2000s were a decade of non-stop, double-digit growth, of huge ambition and tremendous success, of one of the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. If you weren’t fully leveraged, you were falling behind. If you weren’t fully leveraged, you were stupid.
Whitney had continued to make a decent profit of some R2M a year selling IBM mainframe equipment to China’s telecommunications companies, but we were still short of cash. In fact, so short that even after Whitney and I moved in together to an upscale apartment in the Oriental Plaza in 2003, we continued to mooch from my parents: $100K here, $200K there, just to tide us over.
By my logic and Whitney’s, the accoutrements of a high-end lifestyle served our business interests. If you wanted to go for the maximum deal in China, you couldn’t seem weak. Who’d run with you then? No one. Putting on airs was part of the game.
Whitney’s conspicuous consumption also had a deeply psychological dimension. She carried a chip on her shoulder because of her humble background. At some level she always worried about being looked down upon. She was on a crusade to “show ‘em.” Whitney’s cars, jewelry, and, later on, artwork weren’t just about consumption. They were about fortifying herself against the world, standing as a rampart against people’s sneers.
And with Beijing’s streets constantly jammed, having high-status plates was a must. With the right plates, you could cruise down the bus-only lane, drive on sidewalks, make an illegal U-turn, run a red light, and park in a no-parking zone near a favored restaurant.
In a nation finely attuned to status, a vehicle with a “A 8027” turned heads. The “A” meant we came from Beijing’s urban core. The 80 meant that the car belonged to someone of a minister’s rank or higher. And 027 was a low number, which implied that we were connected in some way to the State Council, China’s cabinet. That’s why Whitney needed the police chief to sign off. It looked like our Audi belonged to a high-ranking official. In the West, if you have money, you can buy vanity plates. Not in China. You need guanxi.
For us, owning all this stuff was a talking point to prove to people in our inner circle that we, too, belonged at the apex of Chinese society and were beyond the contempt of those of more noble birth. Indeed, in our lives, everything had to be top-of-the-line.
The fact that Auntie Zhang was incapable of relieving him of those shares, which ultimately ballooned in value to tens of millions of dollars, spoke to the relative weakness of the Wen clan.
Wen Jiabao was in theory number two in the Party hierarchy, but his lack of Communist lineage and his somewhat passive disposition made him less of a player than others at his level. Wen’s comrades at the Party’s heights routinely marshaled the entire judicial system of the nation for their personal benefit, employing corruption and other kind of criminal probes to dispose of political opponents. Wen either couldn’t or wouldn’t engage in that kind of chicanery. No one in the family had thought to inform its most powerful member what was going on with Ping An or any other deals. When things went south or when people like the HK financier stole millions of his wife, Wen couldn’t be relied to step in.
COSCO’s sale to us wasn’t too dissimilar from deals like this overseas. Private sales of stock in unlisted firms are not done publicly. A large Chinese SOE is not going to announce that it wants to sell one of its investments to dress up its balance sheet and then offer the shares in a public auction. Only people within a limited network are going to get wind of it — no matter whether the deal is done in Beijing, London, or New York.
When Ping An listed on the HKSE, the share price jumped to 8 times what we paid for. We’d invested $12M, and all of a sudden we were looking at almost $100M.
In the West, a wedding such as ours would have been an event, a chance for people to see and be seen. But in China, where information is tightly held and fear permeates the system, we had to be careful. In China, connections constitute the foundation of life; we didn’t want to divulge ours to potential competitors or the public at large.
Sun didn’t lack for ambition or self-regard. In a relatively short period, he’d gone from what was essentially a dead-end academic position at the Ministry of Agriculture, to managing a district with more than 1M people, to playing a central role in China’s capital.
Outsiders believed that the real estate business in China was a license to print money. They were ignorant of the challenges that made it so risky. It was highly regulated and policy changes came in unpredictable waves.
She came up with an idea: Why not shelve the highway and combine the airport’s cargo zone with that of Shunyi to create a massive and far more efficient center for moving products into and out of China? This would be an air cargo center with forklifts buzzing here and there, bonded warehouses, export and import processing centers, and quarantine capabilities along with tight security. Obviously, to realize this vision we’d have to convince the airport and Shunyi to end their war.
Peiying crisscrossed China in a private plane, cutting in front of international airliners as he took off from Beijing. “Boss Li is ready to fly,” went the call from the control tower as his jet maneuvered around wide-bodies to the front of the runway.
Peiying had a high opinion of himself. He magnified his legend by refusing an invitation to dine with the chief of police of Beijing, not necessarily a wise move. Still, as a leader of some 40K employees, Peiying maintained a man-of-the-people air. He was beloved at the airport for raising salaries and running it like a real business.
Peiying made the arrangements for all of China’s Party pooh-bahs flying into Beijing. Each time a political heavyweight landed, Peiying would be in the room. He used his face time to great advantage. As the top honcho at so many airports, Peiying controlled access to monopoly business. He sliced them like cake, doling them out to the relatives of top government officials. He helped the family of Jiang Zemin secure a license to sell duty-free product in Beijing via a firm called Sunrise. This was a model for the type of business the red aristocracy liked.
I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never built anything before, much less a logistics hub at a big urban airport that needed a strict delineation between tariff-free imports and those subject to tax. There were security concerns as well. I reached out to airports around Asia and the world. I traveled to Frankfurt, Seoul, Amsterdam, HK, and other facilities seeking guidance. I considered the possibility of bringing in a foreign partner with experience in this industry. I dropped that idea when several offered very little capital for a very big stake.
I needed to learn everything from scratch. How tall should the warehouses be? What is the ideal distance between columns to allow a forklift to maneuver? What’s the height of a loading dock? The width of the roads? I had a huge dream in front of me, but in the winter of 2004, a whole year after we’d come up with the scheme, we still hadn’t broken ground. And building wouldn’t even be the hardest part. Far more torturous was getting the approvals.
To construct Beijing’s Airport City, we needed 7 seven ministries to sign off on almost anything we planned. And within these ministries there were layers upon layers of authorizations. In all, we needed 150 different chops, and every one was a story. It took 3 years just to start construction and even after that there were roadblocks aplenty. I stationed people outside the offices of officials from whom we needed a stamp. I sent people to hospitals to get chops form bedridden bureaucrats. My employees waited for months trying to curry favor with officials, bringing them fine teas, doing their errands, taking them to saunas, looking after their wives and kids.
Friends at the Shunyi government laughed at me. There is no way that a representative from a state-owned firm would go through this rigmarole, they observed, just to get a project moving. In state offices, everyone is punching the lock, they said. Nobody really cares whether the project files or not. But not us, for Whitney and me, this was an entrepreneurial endeavor. This was our big chance.
To make the most of it, I had to get on my hands and knees in front of these guys no matter their rank. For sure, it was dehumanizing. And other than a faint halo, the Wens provided little else. This differed from the family of China’s then president, Jiang Zemin. His representatives demanded obedience.
Throughout the airport project, I, like all businessmen in China, paid extremely close attention to the macroeconomic policies and the political whims of the central government. Every time we requested an approval, our application had to show how the project aligned with the shifting political and economic priorities of the CCP.
Often, these things are very subjective. But they illustrate how every major aspect of the economy was controlled by the state, despite all the talk about capitalism in China. Any project of significance in China needed the approval of an organization called the National Development and Reform Commission, which had bureaus at all levels of the government: in the major cities, all 32 provinces, and Beijing.
Even though China had undertaken significant economic reforms, those Five-Year Plans remained important. And each level of China’s government — including the cabinet, provinces, cities, and counties — all issued their own Five-Year Plans, aligning them with the national blueprint. As the CEO of a joint venture involved in a big infrastructure project, I needed to show, in my applications to these many layers, how my project adhered to the spirit of the latest plan.
In some ways, China was little different from the rest of the world. Money, sex, and power drove people. Whitney and I could provide access to power, so needed to offer less money and arrange for less sex. We rarely gave cash. Instead, we doled out presents: a set of golf clubs for $10K here, a $15K watch there. On one trip to HK we bought half a dozen identical watches from the Carlson Watch Shop. This was pocket change to the people who accepted them. It wasn’t so much a bribe as a sign of our affection.
But even when we thought we’d smoothed things over with the bigwigs, we’d still confront problems at lower levels. Section chiefs, bureau chiefs, and division chiefs ran their departments like personal fiefdoms. They could give you a thousand reasons why an approval had been held up. They’d never refuse outright; they’d just tell you to wait. They wielded so much power that they were known throughout the Chinese system as the Bureau Chief Gang or the Chuzhang Bang.
We played a similar game with a vast array of bureaucrats. Each approval was obtained through connections. Each connection meant an investment in a personal relationship, which meant an awful lot of effort and even more Moutai. Forging personal ties and establishing guanxi was the most difficult part. Guanxi wasn’t a contractual relationship per se: it was a human-to-human connection, built painstakingly over time. You had to show genuine concern for the person. The tough part was that I had so many relationships that needed managing, but I also had a project on my back with a deadline. I had to squeeze all of these interactions into a pipe, and the diameter of the pipe was time. Obviously, I had to delegate, but the more I got directly involved in relationship building the more approvals we received.
But even when we obtained them at the national level, we still required the cooperation of officers on the ground. In fact, it often didn’t matter if the minister was on board. His underlings could always scotch the deal. They’d raise a bunch of totally legitimate, execution-level issues that sounded reasonable. Because the minister didn’t concern himself with minutiae, he’d just say, “sort it out as soon as you can.” In that way, control of the project leaked from the top of the bureaucracy to the bottom.
Chief Du hashed this out with me over dinner one night. “If you don’t give this to us,” he said with a big grin, “we’re not going to let you build.” All of our political backing couldn’t move him. In the end, his demands added $50M to the cost of the project, and that didn’t even take into account the cost of the land.
Obviously, when one part of the bureaucracy makes a killing, other parts smell blood, too. The quarantine department demanded 200K square feet of office space.
Having airport boss Li Peiying as the chairman of our joint venture gave us access to a huge pool of capital. The Beijing Capital International Airport Group opened up a line of credit for our project. Banks approved loans for us at an interest rate set for SOEs, which was at least 2 points lower than the rate set for private ventures.
The state-owned bureaucracy had a cardinal rule. Under the regulations set by the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which was responsible for all of China’s state-owned companies, each firm was supposed to generate a 6% return on equity every year. Smart SOE bosses hit the target because they understood that if they came in too low, they’d get sacked, but if their return was too high, foes would angle to get their jobs. Li Peiying violated that cardinal rule. He’d made his position a plum assignment because he’d done too good a job.
Without Li’s signature, we couldn’t draw on the loans that we’d already secured from our banks. All of us involved in the project began guessing about the implications of his disappearance. The vultures began to circle. Contractors lined up for money. The joint venture had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this venture and was on the hook for millions more and suddenly our bank account was down to $150K. Forget about the contractors, I couldn’t even make payroll for my staff. I woke up in the middle of the night in cold sweats wondering how I was going to make it through. My hair fell out in clumps, never to return.
Several buildings were sitting in the middle of our construction site, but their owners had refused to let us level them. The owners were connected with officials from the Shunyi District government. So even though the Shunyi government was our joint-venture partner, the locals were playing both sides against each other, waiting for a fat payoff.
“You’re stealing from a SOE. That’s like stealing from the state,” I said. “You can deny it, but I will give my proof to the cops and then you all can sort it out.” He cleared out the same day. You need to play the cards you’re dealt. I was learning how to be a boss in China.
I must have been the swimmer in me; I just kept paddling. I didn’t know when or whether I was going to reach the other side of the pool. But I saw no other way. I kept wining and dining the people I needed. Many days I’d go through one of bottle of Moutai at lunch and another at dinner — my liver be damned — in a desperate attempt to delay payments, smooth relations, or procure a loan. We stumbled along. Two breakthroughs saved us.
That meant a profit of more than $450M. But Whitney refused. She thought Ping An’s stock price wouldn’t stop rising. She and I had fundamentally different perceptions about risk. She never saw a potential downside to holding assets, but I’d lived through the Asian Financial Crisis of 2007. She and the rest of her generation of Chinese entrepreneurs had never experienced a downturn. If there was a down cycle, it was alway followed by a V-shaped recovery and a huge bounce back. I, however, wanted to limit our downside risk.
In April 2008, I hosted a group of officials from Shunyi and the airport on a “study tour” to the US. Such junkets were common in those days and an essential part of doing business in China. There was always a little study but the main goal for me was bonding, and for my guests it was the prospect of a pleasure-packed excursion to the USA.
Li saw me as his white knight. He was 50 then. Whenever I sat down to a meal with him, he placed me in the set of honor. And for his whole gang, I became the guy. Li’s circle viewed me as the defender of Shunyi because I’d rescued a “big brother” from certain death in an alien land. The negotiations over the project shifted. Discussions changed from “what are you going to do for me?” to “how do we solve this together?”
Li’s case allowed me to come into my own and taught me what was required to make the project a success. Whitney ran interference for me from the top down. But I also needed to work hard to get things moving from the ground up. Saving Li’s life was proof that it was on me to build one-on-one relationships not with just Li but with a whole slew of middle-aged chain-smoking heavy drinkers who’d rarely left Shunyi.
Being together with them for the sake of being together demonstrated that I was part of their group. I had to reacquaint myself with this kind of relationship. It was as if I were a boy back in Shanghai with my arms draped around my friends’ shoulders, gathering with people for no reason other than to bond with them, and doing it on a daily basis. The whole idea was to reinforce the sense of belonging.
This was critical in a system where the rules regarding what was legal and what was proscribed were full of vast areas of gray, and every time you wanted to accomplish anything you had to wade into the gray. In the West, laws are generally clear and courts are independent, so you know where the lines are. But in China, the rules were intentionally fuzzy, constantly changing, and always backdated. And the courts functioned as a tool of Party control. So that’s why building this sense of belonging was so crucial. To convince someone to venture into the gray zone with you, you first had to convince him or her to trust you. Only then could you take the leap together. To do that the two of you would research each other’s background. You’d talk to former colleagues and you’d spend hours cultivating each other so you could understand who each other really was.
The whole affair was lubricated with bottles of aged Moutai. As it had when I was in HK, the alcohol stripped away my natural reserve, and it brought me and these men closer. By the end of the evening, there I’d be holding hands with a 50-something bureaucrat, cracking off-color jokes, and slapping him on the back.
Whitney brought the mindset of a successful Chinese businesswoman to the project of getting pregnant in NY. She didn’t trust that she’d get good care unless she had a special connection with her doctor, so she cultivated the doctor’s entire family.
Whitney and I needed to build a family story and a value set. We needed non-physical things — a belief system — to bind us together. One of the most successful families I came across was Indonesian; their secret, they said, lay in the fact that the family’s matriarch had founded her own religion. Money will dissipate, I learned, if we aren’t united by intangible things. I committed myself early to letting Ariston feel my love. I never really felt that from my parents, even though they sacrificed so much for me. I decided love would be the glue that bound Ariston and me. And I promised myself that I’d try to teach Ariston to achieve by embracing success, not fearing failure.
I sensed that many nouveau riche Chinese thirsted for knowledge about how to hold on to their newfound wealth. At the same time, they also confronted a yawning moral vacuum in a society that had destroyed traditional Chinese values, tossed aside Communist communitarian norms, and was focused solely on the pursuit of lucre.
She’d always been a big spender, but after the Ping An sale, her consumption hit a new level. We traveled the world on the lookout for expensive things to buy.
While Whitney collected things to show how far she’d come from her humble background, I acquired my expensive toys mostly out of curiosity. I wanted to know what owning a Ferrari felt like, so I bought one. What kind of mental state will that put me in, I wondered, owning a car most men only dream of? And once I owned one and found out what it was like, I ticked that box and moved on.
Whitney competed fiercely to buy Zeng’s paintings. One of her rivals was the French billionaire Francois Pinault, owner of the Gucci Group and one of the world’s most prominent collectors of modern art.
The Ping An deal was basically a fluke and proved a theory I — and others — had that wealthy people aren’t so much brilliant as lucky. We bought the stock not sure that it would go up and unaware that the company was planning and IPO. I was ready to dump our shares once the stock hit 4 times what we paid for it, but regulations didn’t allow it. We only garnered such a big return because we weren’t able to sell when I’d wanted.
Whitney taught me that if you wanted to do big things in China, you had to work within the system. If you wanted to participate in China’s rise, this was the only way to go. It was an inference drawn by every Chinese but also by foreigners and multinational corporations.
There’s a simplistic argument made these days that all of China’s rich are morally compromised. But if that’s the case, everyone who did business with, invested in, and engaged with China at that time was “morally compromised,” and that involves a large number of people, governments, and corporations from all over the world and even the people who held shares in those companies and filled their homes with made-in-China products, too. What the majority actually believed, I’d counter, was that China’s system was dovetailing with that of the West and that as time passed it would become more transparent and more open as private enterprise grew to dominate the economy. That process has been aborted by the CCP and it probably was never in the cards anyway, but back then we didn’t know that.
We had the impression that China was evolving in a positive direction. We saw how capitalists like us were becoming essential to its moderation. Entrepreneurs were creating most of the new jobs and much of the wealth. Sure, we read the criticism of the Party in the Western press. But we felt like we were living in a different country than the one depicted in the Washington Post or the New York Times. Whitney and I were convinced things were improving. Today was better than yesterday and this year was better than last year. The official Chinese defense was “Look how far we have come.” And we agreed. The whole society shared our optimism.
Paulson and others interpreted Wang’s and Zhu’s moves as a way to privatize China’s economy. But actually, the Party’s goal, apropos of Deng Lin’s worries, was to save the state-owned sector so that it could remain the economic pillar of the Party’s continued rule. This was one of the many instances where Westerners thought they were helping China evolve toward a more pluralistic society with a freer market when in reality they Party was actually employing Western financial techniques to strengthen its rule.
No sooner had Wen become premier in 2003 than we began discussing what would happen when he retired in 10 years. Whitney saw the need to broaden our web of connections so we could add pieces on her chessboard. Wang Qishan fit the bill.
Whitney found that Wang’s views on China’s trajectory aligned with her own. Wang predicted that China’s SOEs would one day be sold off and advised Whitney to put aside capital so that when the time came we could invest. Wang described the Chinese economic system as a giant game of musical chairs. At a certain point, he predicted, the music would stop and the Party would be forced to accept large-scale privatization. We’d need to be prepared.
Getting Sun a minister’s position was hard work. To become a minister in China you need an unwavering advocate on the Standing Committee of the Politburo and you need to make sure that none of the other members opposes your rise.
All pretenders to China’s throne needed time out in the provinces, running a mini-empire, before they took on the grand task of running all of China themselves.
In China, officials never reveal their ambitions in public. Biding one’s time is a key tenant of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. But behind closed doors, Sun moved aggressively. He paid special attention to one contender, whose CV mirrored that of Sun.
During his many trips to the capital, Sun sought Whitney out. He was obsessed with Hu’s meteoric rise. Late at night, Whitney and Sun would meet at a teahouse on the east side of Beijing to discuss how Sun could beat Hu for the top spot.
The life of an ambitious official involved constant dining out. On many evenings in Beijing, Sun would attend 3 dinners. One at 5:00 featured subordinates, people who had request or needed things to do. A second dinner at 6:30 was reserved for his superiors or political equals. Important political business was transacted in these gatherings. The third dinner at 8:00 was with people with whom he felt more comfortable. By the time he arrived there, he’d already be reasonably drunk, so he’d want an environment where he could drop his guard. Around 10:00, after the final meal, Sun would text Whitney and they’d meet in a private room at the teahouse and linger past midnight.
Seeing Whitney at that late hour underscored how much Sun valued their ties. It showed that they were so friendly that they could disperse with the formality of a meal and focus on the content of their communication: how to help Sun move his pieces on China’s political chessboard. Whitney noticed how tense Sun was, how worried he became at one point when he fell several months behind Hu in promotions, and how intent he was on catching up.
There we bought Sun a pair of fancy fur-lined boots. Jilin was famed for its cold winters and we wanted Sun to know we were thinking of him.
We were always doing things like this; we had an internal checklist of those who needed to be thrown chum. Every trip abroad was a chance to find a baube for one of our contacts, to deepen the connection and show we cared. Back in the early day of our relationship, Whitney had criticized me for letting my mind idle. But I’ve changed, adopting her view that we needed to keep our eyes on the prize, seeking opportunities to serve our masters in the CCP.
Whitney wasn’t simply content to cultivate China’s rooks, knights, kings, and queens. Pawns were important, too, and she actively worked on the aids to China’s powerful. Called mishu or “secretaries” in Chinese, assistants control access to their bosses, shape their agendas, and can sway key decision. Along with the Gang of Wives and Bureau Chiefs Gang, the Assistants Gang constitutes a third pillar of power in China.
The success of Whitney’s contacts reinforced our sense that the opportunities in the new China were going to be endless as we worked hard to install allies in positions up and down the Party’s pecking order. I began to entertain broader ambitions than simply building a logistic hub for one of the world’s major airports. I started to consider the possibility of competing for other projects in China and overseas. I was also inspired to look beyond business to consider the prospect of using China’s entrepreneurial class as a force for winder changes. While embryonic, my thinking — and that of other capitalists — began to focus on how to work within the system to shape China’s future.
At Aspen, I learned how people with money had always participated in the political process. China’s system was the outlier in that sense, denying its capitalist class a say in the direction of the country. But those of us who identified as capitalists wanted a voice. We wanted protection for our property, our investments, and other rights. We wanted, if not an independent judiciary, at least a fair one where judgments were made on the basis of law and not on the whims of the local Party boss. We craved predictability in government policies because only then could we invest with confidence.
The two biggest issues for students from poor families were that despite their academic achievements, they often possessed low self-esteem and were socially awkward. If not dealt with, those issues would hinder their progress. Whitney and I met with them and shared our experiences. We organized outings for them, as well.
As Tsinghua’s Party boss, he rallied students easily and was gifted at coming up with slogans. “Be ambitious, enter the mainstream, climb the big stage, do great things, choose the right goal, persevere,” was how he began a speech to students in 2005. Chen’s central message was to encourage Tsinghua’s students to enter the Party system and serve the state.
Under his leadership, Tsinghua became the most prestigious university in China and a political heavyweight. In the mid-2000s, all 7 members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo were graduates, a fact that Chen never let anyone forget. Chen encouraged students to study military technology, especially rocket science, and join China’s military-industrial complex.
Whitney also tried to leverage Tsinghua’s alumni network. In 2008, she entered a PhD program at Tsinghua that Chen had established to groom future leaders. Whitney’s class list read like a who’s who of up-and-coming officials: a trusted assistant of Xi Jinping; the son of then Party General Secretary Hu Jintao; director generals; vice-ministers; a Party secretary from a city of 1.3M people. Whitney undertook this challenge as part of her never-ending search for more connections. Sure, we had the Wen family, but they wouldn’t be around forever. And the Tsinghua alumni network was one of the best in China.
The Beijing chapter was only one rung below the national level. The conference was basically a networking platform, like the Rotary Club in the US, and the membership was a sign that the Party saw you as a potentially useful agent of the Party’s influence.
I was amazed by certain things during my time at the conference. One was the brownnosing way in which people from HK addressed Chinese officials. Living in Beijing and working with mainland Chinese daily, I knew this was unnecessary. But it was the way rich people from HK believed they needed to act. It showed their superficial understanding of China, even though they were next-door neighbors. From a different perspective, it was yet another sign of how Party officials had taught the rest of the world to afford them and their country special treatment.
China’s bureaucracy was changing. In the past, local leaders would rise through the ranks. Li Peiying had worked his way up in the airport. Li Ping came from Shunyi. But it was hard for the central government to control these officials because of their roots in the community. As part of a campaign to centralize power, the Party began to parachute officials in from other regions. China’s state-run press agitated against what it called “dirt emperors,” local bigwigs who disregarded directives from Beijing. But the new brand of official created new problems because these characters arrived with the intention of staying for only a few years before moving out and up. They searched for quick wins to justify a promotion. For use, the old system had its drawbacks. There was corruption, and dirt emperors often would run a locality like their private fiefdom. But the local officials also understood their communities and knew what was needed and what wasn’t. Many had feelings for the place because they didn’t want to be cursed when they left power and retired nearby. They worked for the benefit of family and lifelong friends in the locality. They were willing to focus on long-term, legacy projects. And because of their ties to their community, they could get things done.
But the changes, subtle at first but then unrelenting, prompted me to reconsider. As the going got tougher in Beijing, as opposition to our ideas grew within the airport bureaucracy, my view shifted. I came to believe that in China a long-term business model wouldn’t work. I began to understand what some of my entrepreneur friends had been telling me all along: the smart way to do business in China was to build something, sell it, take money off the table, and go back in. If you invest $1 and you make $10, you take $7 out and reinvest $3. But if you keep $10 in, chances are you’ll lose it all.
The Party seemed increasingly threatened by entrepreneurs. A segment of society with means was getting more independent. Entrepreneurs like us were pushing for more freedom, more free speech, and in a direction that was less under the Party’s control. The Party was very uncomfortable with us wading into waters that it controlled.
The phone went dead. Song concluded that the security services were paying close attention to our activities. He advised us to limit the scope of our charity work to less controversial topics; we dropped foreign policy initiatives as an area of our endeavors.
The Party had other ways to push people like us back into line. Whereas we’d once dared to think that we could constitute an independent force, the Party made it clear that we were still just cogs in its machine, little screws in a big system designed to perpetuate the Party’s rule. Men like Jack Ma, or Pony Ma, might have untold wealth on paper, but they were compelled to serve the Party. Soon the Party would be passing laws such as national security legislation that obligated all companies in China, if directed, to spy for the state.
But to me the most convincing argument for the Party’s dictatorial lurch remains the nature of the CCP. The Party has an almost animal instinct toward repression and control. It’s one of the foundational tenets of a Leninist system. Anytime the Party can afford to swing toward repression, it will.
When Deng Xiaoping took over the mantle of leadership in China in the late 1970s, the state was effectively bankrupt. The economic changes Deng ushered in were driven not by any belief in the tenets of free-market capitalism but by necessity. To survive, the Party needed to loosen its grip on the economy. Even under Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, China’s SOEs were losing buckets of money, so private entrepreneurs like Whitney and me were still crucial to keep the economy afloat and unemployment down. But after the first term of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao ended in 2008-2009, and decades of double-digit growth, state-run firms stabilized and the Party no longer needed the private sector like it had in the past. Beijing also reformed its tax system so the central government took a bigger piece of the pie. With these developments, it was no longer essential for the Party to relax control over the economy and thus over society. Capitalists became more of a political threat because we were no longer required as an economic savior. The Party could again tighten its grip.
Li Peiying’s fatal mistake was speaking too much. Generally, if you’re arrested for corruption in China, you’re supposed to shut up. The CCP functions like the Mafia; it has its own code of omerta. But, I was told, Li Peiying revealed all his dealings with senior Chinese officials. The people handling the investigation didn’t know what to do with his testimony since it touched the Party’s highest levels, including the family of Jiang Zemin. Li also lacked the blood connections into the system that could have spared his life.
For me, the airport was a priceless education in how the Chinese system operated. One of my friends joked that just finishing the first phase, I’d already attained Buddhahood.
Chen’s downfall wasn’t about corruption, however. It was a political hit job masquerading as a criminal case. It came because Chen refused to swear allegiance to China’s then Party chief, Hu Jintao. Chen had been a major player in what was known as the Shanghai Gang, led by Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin. When Hu had taken over from Jiang in 2002 as Party chief, Jiang had declined to relinquish all of his Party posts, staying on as the chairman of the CMC for an additional 2 years. Jiang had also packed the Standing Committee of the Politburo with his cronies; for several years, Jiang’s men held 5 of its 9 seats, preventing Hu from doing anything without Jiang’s approval. So, in 2006, when Hu’s loyalists saw an opportunity to take down Chen Liangyu, a prominent Jiang loyalist, they struck.
Han had only been in office for several months, Auntie Zhang told us, before it was discovered that one of his family members had stashed more than $20M in a bank account in Australia. The Party couldn’t purge Han, too, because it would’ve been bad for the stability of the leading financial center of China to have both its Party secretary and its mayor ousted in swift succession. Auntie Zhang told us that Han Zheng was allowed to return to his old post as mayor while Xi Jinping was appointed Shanghai’s Party chief. Han Zheng, too, would be forgiven his sins; he joined the Politburo’s Standing Committee in 2017 and was appointed a vice-premier, showing that in China political alignment and loyalty trump everything else.
It tells you something about that special time that none of us were floored by the $100M price tag. Dropping this type of money among these jet-setters had become, if not routine, at least not totally out of the ordinary.
During the trip, our gang expressed little curiosity about Europe’s history or culture. My companions were part of the first generation of China’s wealthy: up-from-the-bootstraps entrepreneurs, like Xu; hard-nosed developers, like Little NingBo; and members of the Communist aristocracy. Daring was rewarded. Jail time was an occupational hazard. Education wasn’t a requirement. People like them weren’t interested in famous paintings in museum. They were all about putting their mark on the world. Anyway, it was time to shop.
Under the rules, the land could only be sold after public bids had been solicited. Bu the process could be managed to scare competitors off. First, the item for sale wasn’t actually land; it was a holding company that owned the Huadu Hotel, which itself owned the land. None of the potential buyers, except us, knew the liabilities of this holding company. To them, it was a black box. In the end, our bid of $130M was the only bid.
We were on a mission to make this the best real estate project China had ever seen. We spared no expense to make it happen. We consciously set ourselves apart from other rich developers who hired designers and then let them make the decisions. The problem with that model was that designers and development company executives had never lived a life of luxury. Whitney and I had — for a decade. We knew that if we could mix our aesthetic with the professionalism of our team, the results would be hugely impressive.
In terms of social status, those would be completely different clients. The simply rich versus the megarich. Should they even mix in a common elevator and a common lobby or should there be separate entrances? And when it came to politics, would it be wise in a allegedly Communist country for people to shell out tens of millions of dollars on an apartment?
Building that team was one of the greatest things I’ve accomplished. Whitney focused on relationship building with Party bigwigs. But my team and I actually carried out the work. Whitney was not involved in much of that labor and that magnified her insecurity.
In the back of my mind, I always knew that at a certain point Auntie Zhang would sacrifice Whitney. I’d imagined, however, that by the time that pivot occurred, Whitney would have better protected herself. But I was wrong. Whitney had invested too much of herself in her relationship with Auntie Zhang. She’d also embraced what we Chinese called yiqi, the code of brotherhood, the same code I adhered to with my buddies in Shanghai. She willingly became the fall girl to prove that Auntie Zhang had been right to trust her for all these years.
Auntie Zhang told Whitney she was convinced someone was trying to destroy her family. She searched for a source of the story. Citing contacts inside China’s government, Auntie Zhang said that she believed her husband’s reputation had become collateral damage in a life-and-death power struggle inside the Party.
Wang went to Bo Xilai’s office and told him. Bo took that as an implicit threat. In his mind, as a loyal police chief, Wang should’ve just quashed the case and made it go away. Bo jumped up from behind his desk and slapped Wang with a force hard enough to puncture Wang’s eardrum. Bo then fired Wang and had him place under investigation for corruption.
In 2013, about a year after Xi Jinping had launched his anti-corruption campaign and a year after the Times story on the Wen family wealth, Auntie Zhang told us that she and her kids had “donated” all of their assets to the state in exchange for a guarantee that they wouldn’t be prosecuted. She said other red families had done the same. There was another reason behind this action. The Party wanted to rewrite history. In the future, if the Party faced allegations of tolerating systemic corruption, it could claim that these red families, in “donating” their wealth to China, had only been serving the state. All this seemed pretty surreal to Whitney and me. But then again, China’s Communists had a long record of stealing private property and distorting the truth.
Getting one’s fortune told was all the rage among China’s elite. People at the top of China’s pyramid hired soothsayers, qigong masters, and purveyors of all sorts of hocus-pocus. In its 70 years in power, the Party had destroyed traditional Chinese values and had essentially outlawed religion. In the vacuum, superstition took hold. In an unpredictable system, where a person can go from top to bottom in a flash, totems promising to make sense of life become very appealing.
Again, this was China, where no one missed an opportunity to try for a bigger fish, and, if snubbed, no one forgot a slight.
Like all laws born in mainland China, it was purposely vague, full of gray areas, that gave the Party wide latitude to prosecute anyone it disliked.
If you think about it, that is deeply troubling — that so many of HK’s people were selling out the territory’s future and no one felt enough remorse to say, “It’s time to stop.” We’re doing China’s bidding purely out of self-interest. But it also tells you how much we feared the CCP and the possible repercussions of saying no and speaking out. We all went along with a system that we knew was wrong because to do otherwise would have cost us — and everyone around us, including loved ones — their livelihood, freedom, and, who knows, even their lives. The price just seemed too high.
In Sun’s case, from the day he made minister of agriculture in 2006 he’d focused like a laser om moving up the chain. He’d told Whitney that as long as he didn’t slip up, he was going to end up on the Politburo’s Standing Committee and if he wasn’t going to be president he’d be the premier. He made every move with his eyes on the prize.
The Party alleged that Sun paid for prostitutes and took bribes. But we knew him sell. He didn’t lust for money or sex. He lusted after power. Why would he run after women or a few million dollars when he had a nation of 1.4B people potentially in his grasp.
From what Whitney and I had observed, the guys who succumbed to the temptations of corruption were usually about to retire and seeking to feather their nests, not the ones vying to rule the country. We’d watched Sun spend his career carefully insulating himself against allegations of malfeasance. While he was in Shunyi, he had done influential people favors by doling out land parcels, but in a strictly legal sense that wasn’t corruption. But Xi Jinping and his minions had apparently decided to concoct a case against him, so there was nothing he could do. Throughout China’s history, so many emperors have killed off princes. This was just more of the same.
That give-no-quarter feature is a function of the Communist system. From an early age, we Chinese are pitted against one another in a rat race and told that only the strong survive. We’re not taught to cooperate, or to be team players. Rather, we learn how to divide the world into enemies and allies — and that alliances are temporary and allies expendable. We’re prepared to inform on our parents, teachers, and friends if the Party tells us to. And we’re instructed that the only thing that matters is winning and that only suckers suffer moral qualms. This is the guiding philosophy that has kept the Party in power since 1949. Machiavelli would have been at home in China because from birth we learn that the end justifies the means. China under the Party is a coldhearted place.
The second is how much politics played a role in these events. Whitney got the divorce case moved to Beijing because she thought she could play her guanxi game and determine the settlement. Right in the middle of one hearing, the judge excuse himself to take a call. Here it comes, I said to myself. She’s making a move behind the scenes to get the judge to rule in her favor.
Wolfgang and I used to talk about the Chinese system and he regaled me with stories of plying Party bigwigs with prostitutes. He noted that a particularly effective way to bond with a Party official was to share a room with him and several girls at once. He saw the shortcomings of the system, its corruption, and how it twisted people’s souls. He wouldn’t defend China in terms of ideology or values, but he was happy to be mining his bloodline to make a mint. I imagined him as being a bit like Michael Corleone in the Godfather. In my view, Wolfgang was a reluctant mobster.
For years, Western commentators insisted that people like Wolfgang who’d been educated overseas were agents of change in China — that they’d imported universal values from the West and push China in a better direction. But people like Wolfgang never saw themselves in that role. His interest was in China’s remaining the way it was. That’s what made him a very rich man and allowed him to reap the benefits of two systems at once, the freedoms of the West and the managed duopolies of authoritarian China.
The more I saw of Wolfgang and others like him, the more I viewed them as highly competent enablers of an increasingly toxic affliction, Chinese Communism. In exchange for a pot of gold, they’d sold their souls. Whitney and I had played by the rules they and their parents had set, and we’d prospered. But we knew the rules were skewed. Whitney was comfortable staying inside this skewed system; I wanted out.
If I’d learned one thing from my research into family legacies, it was this: no parent ever regretted that they’d spent too much time with their kids.
Whitney still dropped hints to my mother that she was interested in patching things up. After such an acrimonious divorce, it was ironic that she still wanted me back. It showed that on some level, she really valued what we’d built together and what I’d brought to her life. Underneath it all, I suspected, was a loneliness and a fear of having to fight the business battles and the Chinese system on her own.
As a car waited outside to whisk them to the airport, Whitney offered a wan smile. “I am the body that delivered him into the world,” she said. “Now he’s going to go on without me.”
Also calling into question the system’s essential morality is the Party’s opaque mechanism for investigating its members. The process is run by the Central Discipline Inspection Commission. In 1994, the Party instituted an investigative system called shuanggui that allow investigators to hold people suspected of violating Party regulations. But shuanggui is not limited by any law. Technically, detentions can last forever.