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Mark O'Neill

Mr China

by Tim Clissold

Robinson $145

Tim Clissold captures well the first flood of foreign investment in China. His true story takes place just after  the southern tour of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1992, when mainland sentiment turned suddenly bullish  as US$400 million  poured in from American investors in one year.

Clissold, a Briton, helped run a fund with US$400 million in US capital invested in China. He was part of what became a common scenario - joint ventures in which foreigners who thought they could crack China and make it behave like the west found themselves with a majority stake but little control over their partners. Clissold arrived in Hong Kong in 1987 to work for Arthur Andersen and has been running businesses on the mainland for the past 12 years. He's now in charge of collecting distressed assets for a major foreign investment bank.

Clissold's company of the early 1990s  took majority stakes in 20 Chinese firms, most of them in the auto sector. His book describes vividly what happened to the money, and the Chinese and American personalities who controlled it. The contrast between the glitzy corporate world of Wall Street and the bitter bureaucratic battles in grimy Chinese factories  is a constant theme.

In many of the plants, majority ownership didn't translate into control of the operations, because the joint venture partners were unwilling to accept foreign control. In one  plant in Harbin, Clissold's company wanted to fire the factory chief, but could do so only after the Chinese directors had refused to meet three times. Then, the chief refused to leave the plant. With a new chief appointed by the board, the workers didn't know who to follow. Chaos ensued, and the plant collapsed. Clissold admits that he handled the  situation badly, realising he was too aggressive and should have let central government officials get involved.

One manager  at a Zhuhai plant  ran off with  a suitcase bulging with cash, leading to a court  case in which documents were tampered with.

To escape the pressure, Clissold took his family  to France for a holiday in 1998. He woke up one day with a fierce pain in his chest. He looks back at his heart attack as the lowest point of his career in China, the moment he realised he'd lost control of the US$400 million through his inability to rein in the Chinese partners and explain the issues to foreign investors.

After three months at home in England, he returned to China determined to recover as much of the investors' capital as possible - by turning the companies around or selling them. In a dispute over illegal land transfers in a city near Wuhan, he was barricaded in a room by angry workers for nine hours. In  a joint venture brewery, his opponent was a powerful   bureaucrat in her late 50s who took months to  make a decision, parodied him and accused him of talking in dog farts during a board meeting. Quality standards at the brewery collapsed.  Bottles  were wrongly labelled, half-empty or had leaves in them. The plant had to be sold.

Despite his travails, Clissold is keen to keep doing business on the mainland. He says he knows he will never be Mr China. But he understands he's no longer in the west, where  a contract is a contract, and he seems to have some handle on the fact that life in China 'is a constant negotiation'.



Mr China