Guo's China path: philosopher, FX chief, bank boss
Wed May 25, 2005 06:35 AM ET
By Tamora Vidaillet and Victoria Bi
BEIJING (Reuters) - From the windswept plains of northern China to the top of its biggest property lender, China Construction Bank (CCB.UL: Quote, Profile, Research) , via the hallowed halls of Oxford, Guo Shuqing has come a long way.
As China's foreign exchange regulator between 2001 and March 2005, Guo was a central figure shaping policy on the yuan at a time when financial markets were watching every move in Beijing for signs of a change in the currency's dollar peg.
Now one of China's big bank bosses, Guo still has a ringside view of China's reforms given the importance Beijing attaches to cleaning up its banks before it risks unshackling the yuan.
Alternating between Chinese and fluent English in an interview with Reuters, Guo says he has been so swamped by work that he has hardly left Beijing since he was parachuted into China Construction Bank in March to replace a chairman who left after allegations of fraud.
The most difficult part of the job was managing relations with the sprawling bank's 330,000 staff, many of whom were just not cut out for the service culture Guo is trying to instil.
"Some of them are not suitable. Some of them will have to go," Guo said. He admitted that the changes he was making were leading to conflicts in the bank: "People are worried about their new jobs and their new working conditions."
If Guo is feeling the pressure, he doesn't let it show -- despite a toothache. Wearing a well-cut western suit and a dark, red-dotted tie, Guo laughs easily as he maps out plans to sell shares in the bank, China's largest property lender, by November.
Naming such a high-profile boss underscores Beijing's determination to lick the bank into shape using the $22.5 billion of cash it pumped into the bank in late 2003.
Analysts say the 48-year-old former philosophy graduate of Nankai University is well placed to rise to the challenge.
A member of the Communist Party for over two decades, Guo was sent to work in the countryside in his native Inner Mongolia for four years from 1974 in the final phase of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1986 he spent a year at Oxford's St. Antony's College as a visiting fellow before working his way up the party bureaucracy through various think-tanks.
After a stint as deputy governor of the impoverished southern province of Guizhou -- where Chinese President Hu Jintao cut his political teeth -- Guo was named head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and became a vice governor of the central bank, the People's Bank of China.
A compilation of Guo's academic articles stretching back over two decades has just been published.
Guo will need his wits about him to turn around China Construction Bank, whose previous chairman, Zhang Enzhao, resigned after allegations that he took kickbacks. Zhang's predecessor, Wang Xuebing, was jailed for corruption in 2002.
Whereas Zhang's style when meeting the press was to read out a long prepared statement and then sidestep questions, the affable Guo thinks nothing of asking interviewers questions of his own. (Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Shanghai)
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