Mr. China by Tim Clissold Read Free Book Online

makers. Every
time we found something that looked promising, I wrote it up and sent it to investors in Hong Kong. But they never seemed to bite.
    Eventually I managed to persuade some fund managers from a big New York investment house to come up to Shanghai. It was an important visit, so one of my colleagues, Maneksh, flew out from
London. He’d been in India and brokered a few deals so I was glad of his company.
    The trip was a disaster. These bankers, still slightly jet-lagged from Wall Street, stared with disbelieving wonder at the chaotic traffic, gesticulating policemen and the waves of bicycles.
They kept checking their Rolexes, sighing unnaturally loudly and repeatedly looking through their air tickets as we sat sweltering in near-gridlock on Hengshan Road. They had sent me a fax
beforehand saying that they were interested in ‘real estate and consumer packaged goods’ so the first meeting I arranged was with the Land Bureau of the Shanghai Government.
    Despite the considerable power that came from controlling land during those times of spiralling property prices, the Land Bureau was in a dilapidated building at the end of the Bund, the
sweeping avenue that looks out over the river in Shanghai. It was squeezed in among the grand colonial buildings next to Suzhou Creek. The contrast between the bankers with their highly polished
shoes and designer silk ties and the bureau officials could not have been sharper. As we were led down a corridor with enormous old-fashioned frosted-glass lampshades like Olympic torches set into
the walls, the bankers noticed a huge gash in the ceiling with lath and plaster hanging through. In the meeting room, they settled on to a lumpy sofa with their knees tucked up to their chests.
Sitting between a pale green plastic thermos flask and a spittoon, they tried not to stare too hard at the torn brown curtains flapping limply in the windows or the suspicious-looking holes in the
skirting boards. The meeting started with the Deputy Bureau Chief offering them some melon seeds to chew on and it got worse from there on in. It didn’t last long; there was no way they were
ever going to get their heads around buying up land in Shanghai.
    As they left, muttering under their breath and shaking their heads, they asked what was next.
    ‘Er, the Rubber Bureau,’ I said.
    ‘So that’s consumer products, right?’
    ‘Kind of,’ I said nervously, not knowing quite how to break the news. I spent the next hour sweating quietly in the back of the car, hoping that the traffic would be so bad that
we’d have to call the meeting off. Then suddenly, out of the blue, inspiration seized me.
    ‘You know, the one-child policy is quite controversial in the West, isn’t it? But I reckon that the population here is so huge that it’d be kind of irresponsible just to ignore
it, don’t you think?’
    ‘Uh-huh!’
    ‘You know, in China, even though there’s the one-child policy, there are only seven condom factories. Amazing really, isn’t it?’
    ‘Uh-huh!’
    ‘Yeah, only seven in the whole of China,’ I went on.
    ‘What of it?’
    ‘Well, the whole condom production of China is only eight hundred million a year. There’s more than a billion people here, so there’s got to be, say, four hundred million
blokes out there all needing condoms. But that’s about two each a year. Must be a huge demand out there – if only we could figure out a way to get at it!’
    ‘You’re not saying-’
    ‘Well, you said you wanted consumer packaged goods!’
    ‘I do not believe we’re doing this’ they said, all exasperated sighs and rolling eyeballs. ‘I do not believe we’re doing this!’
    But by that time there was little prospect of escape. The traffic was running smoothly and we were miles from the hotel. As the car drove through the gates of the Shanghai Great Unison Condom
Factory, Madame Tao, who was in charge of foreign investment at the Rubber Bureau, came panting down the steps