Word: clissold
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bucks, the Wall Street big swinging whatevers, as well as their dogged assistants, really are different from you and me. It is the summer of 1993, and bankers in the West have woken up to the fact that something, economically speaking, is really happening in China. Tim Clissold, the author and, in this case, the dutiful assistant, is in the midst of a grand tour of China with his new boss, known by the pseudonym Pat in the book, but in real life a fellow named Jack Perkowski, who in the roaring '80s had risen to become head of investment...
...know I would, and I live here in China. Thankfully for the reader, Clissold and Pat are anything but normal. They are present at the creation of China's economic miracle, and they intend to ride it to riches, baijiu and rabbit ears notwithstanding. Clissold's memoir of his years with Perkowski-- 1995 to 2002--is an instant classic. The best "business" book previously written about China is probably Jim Mann's Beijing Jeep, an account of the ill-fated auto joint venture in China's early days of experimenting with capitalism. Mr. China (Harper Business; 252 pages) joins...
...make no mistake, Clissold reports from deep in the trenches. Eventually Pat invests in a variety of companies in China, dealing with everything from beer to brake pads; there's nothing glamorous about any of them. Clissold, a fluent Mandarin speaker, becomes Pat's chief troubleshooter--and there's plenty of trouble. (How does $58 million "disappearing" from the books of a company you've bought grab you?) This is the mid to late '90s, remember, when to many Chinese the definition of capitalism still seemed to be "The foreigner comes, gives me a lot of money, then goes away...
Among several brilliantly drawn characters is a bureaucrat--"the chief engineer of the First Light Industry Bureau" of the Beijing city government--a Madame Wu Hongbo, otherwise known to Clissold as "my old Chinese sparring partner." The accounts of his tangles with her--she "regulates" the Chinese partner with which Pat has bought a beer company--are hilarious, and sobering...
Readers of The World of William Clissold and Science of Life resent as presumptuous the judgment that, literary skill therein displayed is second-class...