Taken from the pirateinvestor.com website, here's an article by Porter Stansberry about his trip to China:
I think it's a really fun read (..for those of us who can, of course..).........
Notes from China
You know how in James Bond films, the guy who picks up Bond from the airport when he first flies out to his assignment is almost always a bad guy...?
The first thing I see in Nanjing, China as I leave the airport after a two-day trip from the U.S., is an impossibly large Chinese man with my name on a sign.
He?s waiting for me in the lobby of the airport, in a crowd of probably a thousand Chinese people. He doesn?t speak a word of English ? but I?m the only white guy in the whole room ? so it?s not hard for him to I.D. me. He takes my bag ? which ways about 30 pounds ? slings it over his shoulder like it?s weightless. Then he grabs me by the collar and starts pulling me ? by the collar ? through the crowd towards the street.
Right in front of the airport ? and I mean right in front ? there?s a single parking space with an enormous black Audi sedan parked in it. It?s like the principle?s parking spot from elementary school ? it?s not 10 yards from the front door of the airport.
My ?guide? runs me to the rear of the car, does his best Secret Service saving Ronny number circa ?81, throwing me into the backseat. I hear the trunk open, feel my bag being deposited in the trunk, and then my guide mysteriously walks back into the airport. The front passenger door opens and a tiny Chinese woman gets in. I don?t know where she came from, but she doesn?t speak to me. She just sits.
I?m sitting in the catbird parking spot in Nanjing, China in a huge black German car. Hundreds of Chinese people are walking past the car staring at me.
I?m not sure what I should do.
Obviously, I can?t leave. Where would I go?
But I?m thinking about Bond. What if the big Chinese guy killed the real guy who was supposed to meet me?what if that pretty girl sitting in the front seat is the one I?m supposed to sleep with to save the world?
Too late. I see my guide approaching?and he?s got another poor white guy by the collar.
I watch them approach and it?s clear that the white guy isn?t happy about being pulled towards the car. No matter. Our guide slings him into the backseat, the same as me. The trunk opens again. Another bag goes in.
I introduce myself to the new guy. Turns out the new guy is one of the geologists on our trip, David Coffin. He looks like a geologist ? he?s about 45, medium height, slightly overweight with reddish blond thinning air and a red beard. His most distinguishing characteristic is his voice, which is the deep raspy growl of a long-time smoker. And when he got into the car, his growl was pissed.
David was trying to us the ATM machine in the Airport lobby when our guide spotted him, and carried him off to the car, sans ATM card, which was left in the machine.
Try telling a 275 pound Chinese man who doesn?t speak English and has never used an ATM machine that you have to wait for your card. Can?t be done.
There wasn?t even time to go back and see if the machine ate the card or not, because we took off as soon as the trunk closed over David?s bag.
Luckily the toll road back from the airport was empty.
It was lucky because our driver was apparently trying to see how fast the Audi would go. We were doing in excess of 100 miles per hour the whole way, barely slowing to go through the tolls, or to avoid the goats. Despite the high rate of speed, it still took us 40 minutes to get into the city. The airport is a long way from town.
But the drive was interesting. The road into Nanjing looks like a huge industrial accident.
Imagine the French countryside after a nuclear war and you?d be pretty close. There aren?t any trees. And the ground all seems tilled because it has a very dark mottled color to it. There are a few hills, some of which have enormous gouges in them, where a bulldozer or steam shovel has ripped part of the land away. And the houses I saw were all identical concrete boxes. There were thousands and thousands of them.
The geologist later told me that you won?t see any wildlife in China anywhere near a city because during the cultural revolution when nearly 30 million people starved to death, the people ate every living thing they could find. It seems to me like they ate all of the trees too.
The landscape was moon-like. There weren?t any side roads or any other cars. I didn?t see any people, either, but there was smoke coming out of most of the houses.
The road into town doesn?t prepare you for Nanjing, which is paradoxically a large and modern city. As I write this, I can see a dozen large skyscrapers ? all new ? from my hotel room. I?d estimate the city?s population to be between four and six million people. Could be much larger ? about the size of New York City, in other words.
The hotel, by the way, is very nice. Like most you?d find in a large city, anywhere in the world. The Nanjing Grand has twenty-four stories, very good service and excellent food.
But there was a new twist, one that I?d seen first at the Holiday Inn in Beijing. After you open the door to your room with the little plastic key card, you have to put the key into another slot just inside the room on the wall where you?d normally expect to see a light switch. When you put your key into this wall slot, all of the lights in the room turn on. And when you take your key out, the lights turn off. Mandatory efficiency lighting I guess. (Note: Doug Casey, who reviewed these notes and who travels to more countries in a year than most people do in their entire lives, assures me that this light switch/card do-hickey is SOP in most places, but I?d never seen it before). At dinner that first night in Nanjing, I finally met the cast of characters who?d be showing me around the rest of China.
There was a contingent of Canadian investment bankers led by Greg Hall from Yorkton Securities and his partner Dean Duke.
Greg was short and stout with short straight red hair. He?s the kind of guy that?s always smiling.
Dean was taller, with dark features and dark eyes. He looks like an aging fraternity boy. He?s going a little soft in his mid-30s and he is a heavy smoker.
Joining the analyst team of David Coffin (the geologist), and myself was Doug Casey.
I?ve known Doug since we spent some time together in New Orleans last October. (He introduced me to one of the most beautiful women I?ve ever met ? a drop dead gorgeous Canadian blond). He?s about 50, but tall and very lanky, which gives him a youthful appearance. He?s also a very quick thinker and he has a sharp wit. I was looking forward to spending time with Doug more than anyone else on the trip and as he sat down for dinner we shook hands and began a very friendly, biting banter with one another. The thing that I like most about Doug is that he thinks about everything. If it doesn?t make sense to him, he?ll tell you. And he isn?t afraid to call someone out on his or her bull. I?m the same way.
The white guys, who I describe above, all sat down at one of the round tables, while the Chinese contingent all sat together at the other table. Ken Kai, who I would later discover is a very aggressive entrepreneur, led the Chinese half of the group. He?s the CEO of Minco Mining, one of the two companies that were hosting the trip. Interestingly, Ken brought his wife along with him on the trip. Apparently they are inseparable.
The other important Chinese member of the group was Longbin. From the first moment I met him I could tell that something was very special about him ? kinda like when I first met Sjuggerud.
First, Longbin is exceptionally tall for a Chinese man and he has straight, bright teeth, which is very unusual. But beyond the superficial stuff, he radiated the kind of impressive intelligent energy that I?ve only seen in one or two other people in my entire life. You could tell right away that he was a genius. And as I learned more about what he?s done with his life, I found that my initial impression was dead on target. He?s one of the world?s leading experts in biotechnology, and he runs two separate research labs ? one at the University of Beijing and the other at the University of Massachusetts outside Amherst.
There were five or six other Chinese people at the first night?s dinner ? mostly money managers from Hong Kong and Vancouver, including folks from New World and Nomura.
These Asian guys were all very understated in the typically Asian fashion, except for Joe Tai, who is the investment manager of a venture capital group called Goldpac Investments out of Vancouver. He was wearing this wild shirt with zippers across his chest and he was constantly joking around with everyone at the table.
The Chinese contingent ordered for the round eyes ? which was dangerous. They love to watch us trying to figure out what we?re eating. I wasn?t sure about most of the stuff, but I know that we had bullfrog and I?m pretty sure that there was snake too. No dog, though.
The first dinner was also the start of my trouble with Chinese waitresses and beer.
Pouring a beer correctly isn?t that tough. You tilt the glass and pour the beer gently, trying not to cause too much foam to form. But during the dinner the waitress kept dumping beer into my glass from about six inches above the top of the glass, resulting in a massive foam head. Thus, I got half a glass of beer while my fellows all got tall glasses. Eventually I commented on my dilemma, getting laughs all around. And sure enough, when the next round came, everyone but me got a good pour.
After dinner, the round eyes all piled into cabs and went out to a club that Longbin told us about, Casablanca. (The cab ride, which was ten minutes or so through downtown Nanjing cost less than a dollar).
I knew that I was in for something unusual when we arrived because standing outside the club were a couple of bouncers and two very pretty Chinese girls dressed up in U.S.-looking gowns and ridiculous tiaras. They looked like they?d just been named Nanjing?s homecoming queens.
I guess I?m dense, but I didn?t realize that Longbin would take us straight to a whorehouse.
When we get up to the club, I see about 30 girls sitting at small tables on one end of the room, a long round bar, a bunch of tables on the other side of the bar and a dance floor with dual DJ booths. The music is western dance/pop and there are probably 20 people on the dance floor.
I figured that the chances of me striking up a conversation with one of the girls (I didn?t know they were prostitutes yet) standing in the midst of five older white guys was pretty slim. So I bailed on my group, went to the far end of the bar and sat down to have a drink.
Unfortunately I missed Longbin?s explanation of the club and how it worked. What he told everyone else was that the girls at the tables behind the bar would come and sit next to you for $200 RMB, or about $25 dollars. You could touch them, but you wouldn?t be leaving the bar with them. On the other hand, the girls on the dance floor were available for whatever you wanted at prices that were negotiable. There were even private rooms available for this sort of thing.
But remember -- I didn?t hear any of this. So when a girl (who spoke English) came and sat next to me before I even got my drink, I thought it was just because?well?you know?I thought she like me.
I gestured to the rest of the group ? hey look over here, I?ve already got a date.
I was a little confused when they all started laughing at me.
And I was even more confused when the girl started pulling on my shoulder asking me to go sit with her at a table. I wanted to sit at the bar. So she pulled up a stool. Then, right away, she asked if she could order some food. I though that was a little weird and I figured this girl must be the one psycho in the bar (maybe that?s why they were all laughing at me), so I walked away from the girl and I rejoined my group ? safety in numbers.
They asked me how things were going, and I said fine, just acting like I wasn?t really interested in the girl. I didn?t tell them about her sudden appetite and they didn?t tell me that I was having a beer in a whorehouse. I?m sure they were getting a kick out of my ignorance.
A few minutes later the girl came back over and asked me to sit with her at a table again. She said she wouldn?t order any food. I guess I felt badly that I?d walked away from her, so I went and sat with her. That?s when she put her hand on my leg and asked for $200 RMB. I suddenly realized what was going on. And I spent the rest of the night telling the girls that I wasn?t interested. Besides, I was supremely jet lagged at this point in the trip, so I was the first one to leave ? the cab ride home was just a dollar.
The next morning, after breakfast in the hotel, we all loaded into a large van and headed for Huaxin, which is a large biochemical production facility owned in partnership between a Canadian bulletin board stock (headed by Longbin) and Nanjing Medical, which is large Chinese drug store chain. (The Chinese Army formerly owned Huaxin?which made me wonder what kind of biochemical products had been manufactured in the plant before Longbin?s company and Nanjing Medical bought it).
The plant looked like an office building ? it?s a nine-story glass tower, indistinguishable from the thousands of other glass towers all across Nanjing. We inspected the one currently operational floor of the facility, which operates under clean room conditions, so we had to get all geared up to walk around, with pajamas and the plastic suits and funny shoes.
And since we?re giants compared to the Chinese, none of the gear even came close to fitting. My arms were sticking out from my sides and Doug couldn?t get his feet into his shoes. We looked idiotic. But we saw the plant and the bio-reactor where the company just completed its first production run of EPO, a drug used to combat anemia in dialysis patients.
Longbin aims to lower the cost of EPO through new production methods that he developed at the University of Massachusetts and thereby expand the applications of the drug to include treating pregnant women, surgery patients, etc. On their first production run they achieved drug yields about 10 times higher than the world?s leading EPO producer, the U.S.-biotech giant Amgen.
We returned to the hotel for lunch and then, starting around two o?clock, we had a four-hour meeting with Longbin and the rest of the company?s board of directors.
Longbin explained how the company is using a new ?vectoring? technology that he invented to produce EPO and how using similar technology they can produce several other drugs ? including insulin ? at dramatically lower prices than the current world prices for these drugs. I?ve seen similar presentations from many other companies, but I have never seen anyone as smart as Longbin doing the presenting. I was very impressed with his knowledge and their plan.
After the meeting we had another huge Chinese dinner with all of the fund managers, analysts, brokers and a whole entourage of local city officials, including the mayor. My guess is that Longbin and Ken Kai were showing off their impeccable political connections.
The next morning at breakfast David Coffin found one of the funniest headlines I?ve ever seen in a Chinese newspaper ?Kids Have Sex, Use Condoms.?
Ken arranged for us to spend the next two days essentially on holiday in Shanghai ? but first we had to get there. From Nanjing there?s a famous road to Shanghai ? the Nanjing Road it?s called. Ken figured that it would take us three hours by bus to get to Shanghai. We left at 9:30 am. We got to the hotel in Shanghai at about 6:00 pm. As one of the brokers from Vancouver said, ?that?s the longest three hour bus ride I?ve ever been on.?
But, on the way to Shanghai, we stopped and had another incredible Chinese meal at this little tiny village on the side of the road.
There were nine of us. We ordered at least ten courses, plus beers. When we finished we all guessed how much the bill would be. It was 110 yuan, or about $13 dollars. Unbelievable. The prawn the served us was alive when we walked into the restaurant. Basic goods and services are unbelievably cheap. After we ate folks were buying cigarettes and drinks for the road. I walked across the street to look in a little shop and I saw a huge string of firecrackers. I couldn?t resist. 200 firecrackers for just $1.5 yuan, or about twenty cents. As we were all getting in a line to get back into the van, I lit the string and gave everybody a thrill. A crowd of about twenty Chinese people gathered around to see who was lighting firecrackers and they all waved us off as we left, like we were on the Love Boat. That?s the best part about traveling in the third world: you?re always a spectacle.
But the real spectacle was awaiting us in Shanghai.
Shanghai has grown so fast that our driver couldn?t find his way to our hotel ? even though he?d been there two years ago and even though our hotel was the tallest building in town. While we were in Shanghai, there were around 1,000 skyscrapers being built. And talk about skyscrapers, the Grand Hyatt, where we were staying, is the tallest hotel in the world, topping out at 88 stories. I was staying in a room on the 67th floor, directly across from the Bund, the famous historic center of Shanghai on the bend of the Yangze river.
After we all checked in, we were sitting in a bar on the 54th floor having a drink. The hotel is brand new and exquisite. It has fantastic art and a wonderful modern art deco design. As we?re sitting there admiring the view, a blimp flies by. It?s beneath us.
Outside the city is completely lit: strobe lights ring all of the building in the Pudong district behind us and the Bund is lit with brightly colored strobes as well. Plus giant neon signs of all types dot the landscape. Sitting there having a drink was like being in a scene from the movie Bladerunner.
From the hotel we got into several cabs and drove into the historic district of the city, past the Bund. We had dinner inside one of those giant Chinese-looking buildings ? a kind of jumbo pagoda.
Going home to the Grand Hyatt Shanghai that night was as pleasant of a hotel experience as I?ve ever had. The view from my room was extraordinary. And the bathroom was incredible. There was a tub and one of those showers with three heads, plus lots of marble and glass. I called the office, and something horrible went wrong with posting my newsletter online, which was a bummer. But it didn?t keep me from getting a good night?s sleep.
The next day I was shanghaied.
But before I tell you about the girls of Shanghai and their games, I?ve got to mention the breakfast buffet at the Hyatt. First, it was by far the most expensive breakfast you can find in all of China. $200 yuan, or about $25 dollars. Remember that we bought a first-class lunch for nine people for roughly half that much. But the breakfast at the Hyatt is worth it. It was by far the best food I ate on the entire trip.
After breakfast the group went down to the new center of Shanghai, a space dominated by modern buildings and broad public squares. We walked from there to the largest shopping district of the city ? on Nanjing Road. For about two miles the road is lined with shops of every variety, selling the same crappy merchandise that you?ll find in emerging markets worldwide.
What?s unique about Nanjing Road is the scope of the operation. I can?t even estimate how many people were milling around out there that Saturday, but it could have easily been a million. Or two million. For miles there are people, shoulder to shoulder walking and shopping. About half way down the road there?s a giant television screen and I counted two separate McDonald?s.
There were also a few major department stores in addition to the shops on the street. The largest of these is New World, which is a ten-story department store that by itself makes an American mall seem small and quaint.
Again, I just can?t describe the scale of Shanghai ? everything is ten times larger than it should be. And still, it?s packed with people.
Shopping with a group of people is impossible, so I soon broke off on my own to look for bargains. I didn?t find any, but I still managed to spend $50. Remember -- I was shanghaied.
Within five minutes of leaving the group, as I was just walking down the street, three girls appeared beside me. Only one of them spoke English, but they were all very pretty. It seemed like the prettiest of them was very interested in me. We talked for a while ? they asked where I was from, what I was doing in Shanghai, al etc. The pretty girl put her arm around mine. Then they asked me if I wanted to go have some drinks. Of course, right?
Well, no. I was pretty suspicious, but I thought it might be an adventure to find out exactly what con these girls were going to run on me. I figured I would get mugged, which was fine because I didn?t have any money on me to speak of. And I thought that if I kept my eyes open and stayed in a crowded area, I could probably run away if things got too dicey.
But when I said yes, the first thing the girls did was steer me away from Nanjing Road and down several surprisingly quiet streets. At one point, right as we crossed a street, a man in a green jacket turned around as we passed him and then began walking towards me, from behind. I thought: here we go! I turned around and faced him, but he didn?t even look at me as he walked by.
No, the girls weren?t going to rob me that way. Instead they were taking me to what must have been the most expensive restaurant in town?and as soon as we sat down, they started ordering food. Lots of it. Even though I was on to them, I don?t speak a word of Mandarin ? so they were able to stick it to me pretty good. But it was worth it to learn what they were up to.
On my way back down Nanjing road, at least ten more groups of girls tried the exact same trick. The set up was always the same too. Three girls, one that spoke English very well and always the same basic lines ? and then the suggestion that we all go for drinks.
Later that evening we had dinner with a stock promoter.
We all met at the Regency East Asia Hotel in Shanghai, and the promoter asked to speak alone with Doug and myself. He?s putting a million dollars into a little Chinese
Internet company that offers educational tutorials online. The company?s got about 20,000 registered users and a big potential market, but the promoter didn?t understand how the Internet works. And all he really cared about was driving the share price up enough to list on the GEM market in Hong Kong. But he took us all out to dinner at M?s on the Bund, a chic, Australian steakhouse and the only place in China where I was able to eat a completely western style meal.
The next day I spent the morning at the gym in the Hyatt. Imagine running on a treadmill facing a window 590 feet above Shanghai. It was surreal.
In the afternoon we all headed back to the airport for a three-hour trip to Gansu province in western China. We were going to a small mining town between the foothills of the Himalayas and the Gobi desert. Essentially we were going as far away from Shanghai as the mind can imagine. I wasn?t eager to leave.
Flights inside China are very cheap, so Ken bumped us all up to first-class. They gave us all silk ties, but they wouldn?t let me use my computer on the plane. Apparently the airline is so new that the crew doesn?t have the rules down yet. David Coffin said the problem was in the language. The Chinese language doesn?t have tenses, which means it is difficult to communicate the idea that computers aren?t allowed during take-off and landing. To the Chinese it sounds more like computers aren?t allowed between take-off and landing.
I was interested to learn that the Chinese language is the only modern language that doesn?t use a phonetic alphabet ? something I consider very important when evaluating their culture. Language is one of the better measures of a culture. Languages of free people constantly innovate and grow ? English for example is the most complex language on earth. It has more words than many other languages combined. This allows English speakers to have precise meanings and complex explanations. It also allows us to have clear thinking and complex reasoning, an inherent cultural advantage.
David Coffin would probably call that argument xenophobic. He?s quite the Sinophile and generally took every question I asked about the differences between Anglo culture and Chinese culture as an attack on his hypothesis that in less than 15 years Shanghai will replace New York as the center of global commerce. I think that prediction is absurd ? at least until China has much more social mobility, liberty, and efficient capital markets. These things aren?t compatible with the current regime, despite their lip service. My guess is that it will take at least 50 years for China to develop an economy that is as sophisticated as America?s is today. And by then, America will be much, much more advanced. Well, it could be, at any rate.
My confidence in America?s superiority isn?t based on race ? as most people I discuss these issues with seem quick to believe. It?s not that white people are superior to yellow. It?s not that at all. The reason that America will remain on top, in fact, is because we?ll be able to attract the very best and brightest Chinese to immigrate, just as we have for most of the past 200 years. America?s 200-year history of property rights, free markets, and political freedom is our greatest competitive advantage and it?s unmatched anywhere in the world.
Many of the perceived advantages that David Coffin and other pro-China analysts believe will allow China to compete with the west are taken out of the context of economic usefulness. For example, it?s true that miners and drillers in China work for much less than their Canadian counterparts. But the differences aren?t great enough to make up for the fact that Canadian drillers are productive. What that means for company?s like Minco ? which we were in route to inspect ? is that they must find mineral that are much higher in grade, to make up for the many difficulties of doing business in China.
I had time to ponder these thoughts and more during our five-hour trip to western China. We landed outside the capital of Gansu province, Lanshuo. The airport is about 25 miles outside of town because the city is in the mountains ? there?s no place to land planes. We were headed to Baoyshin, the mining town, which was about two hours by car to the north.
Before we got in the van, I used the local facilitates, which were very interesting. Turns out that many bathrooms in China are actually latrines. You can imagine the stench. And, even more remarkably, there aren?t even toilets in these latrines, just porcelain-covered holes in the floor. One of Ken?s start-up companies is developing bio-chemical toilets that don?t require plumbing. If they can make them cheap enough, there?s certainly a market for them in China.
When we finally arrived in Baoyshin near midnight we were unhappy to learn that because of racial/economic tension, we couldn?t go to a bar without a police escort, and none could be arranged at the late hour, so we just turned in.
The next morning I found out that I?m as afraid of mines as I am of airplanes, for much the same reason.
Minco, which is basically a mineral exploration firm that?s controlled and managed by Ken Kai, has a joint venture at an old copper mine outside of Baoyshin, which has been the center of Chinese copper mining for centuries. Ken?s bringing in western mining technology to find new deposits and so far the company is doing very well having discovered $50 million or so of copper, zinc, silver and gold at the site.
After a short breakfast (including a very unusual bagel ? imagine an egg roll bagel and you?d be close) I found myself suiting up with big rubber boots and the mining version of a flight suit ? helmet included. The parts all fit much better than they had at the pharmaceutical plant in Nanjing. The people in this part of Western China are as tall as westerners and they have some western features ? like facial hair. The explanation I got was that Baoyshin is on the old spice road, the ancient pathway to Europe, thus the western biological influences.
I didn?t think that I?d be scared of the mine ? it?s just a hole in the ground. But until you?ve been 600 feet below rural China, trust me. It?s unnerving. And dark. And wet. And I didn?t see the point of being down there any longer than I had to be ? kinda like flying.
After the mine tour we went to look at some more prospective sites and I learned a lot about geology in the field, like how to spot the different zones of lava formations. Apparently ? according to David Coffin ? the stuff we saw was pretty impressive. Ken got excited too and was running up and down hills and breaking open rocks with his hammer.
I was just enjoying the scenery. Shanghai had been foggy ? but Baoyshin is basically a desert. The sky was perfectly blue and the air was clear. The topography was beautiful as well ? flat valleys surrounded by foothills that look like 1000-foot pup tents.
After being in one of the largest cities in the world just a day earlier (Shanghai has about 15 million residents) the silence of the desert hills was resounding. It?s really, really quite. There aren?t any trees to rustle in the breeze and there?s no wildlife to speak of outside Baoyshin or anywhere else in China for that matter.
We spent the day doing due-diligence on the mine, which bored the crap out of me. Try spending eight hours looking rocks in the middle of nowhere. But we got to ride around in these cool Chinese jeep things. And the lunch was impressive ? again.
That night we went to the local Chairman Mao restaurant. The chain is one of the fastest growing businesses in China, which makes me laugh hysterically. You?re naming your restaurant after one of the world?s greatest killers. But why not ? it?s marketing genius. Mao is still hugely popular in China. Ken told me that I?d have to bow to Mao?s statue when we went in the restaurant, as he?d heard enough of my political views by this point in the trip to know which buttons to push.
This restaurant was all about marketing. To work there you
have to be a beautiful. And you have to be single. It?s the Chinese equivalent of Hooters. But it?s much cheaper. Dinner for ten -- with drinks -- was just 140 yuan, or less than 20 bucks.
And we had time to arrange a trip to the local watering hole. It was pretty impressive. In fact, the bar in Baoyshin was more impressive than Nanjing?s Casablanca. Maybe it?s because innovation always happens on the fringe, but for whatever reason, the bar was pretty cool. (I was told that the governor?s daughter owns it). The most striking feature was the dancers. One guy and two girls did a series of choreographed numbers that were pretty good, and original.
At the bar I got to talk to Ken about his background. He left home for school at age 12. He graduated top in his class and was able to go to Beijing University. He was 15. By his early 20s he was working in the government ministry charged with financing all of China?s mining operations. Today Ken?s contacts from this job allow him to have his pick of mining projects all across China ? that?s Minco?s top competitive advantage.
Ken?s got brass balls. When he was 25 he left his job in the Ministry to go to grad school. He got into Harvard, but choose Queen?s College in Canada instead. It was a wise choice ? today China is run by what?s called the Queen?s Mafia, a loose association of friends that all went to Queen?s in the early 1990?s. Ken stands close to the center of this group and it is through these connections that his entrepreneurial ambitions are fulfilled.
Ken reminded me of my best friend Marco. They both have the rare gift of being able to get along with everyone, perhaps because their affection for others is genuine.
Early the next morning we were off again ? this time for Beijing and then back to Baltimore. The ride back through the hills ? this time in the daylight ? was bea |
