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To: GST who wrote (151365)	1/6/2003 10:28:07 AM
From: Bill Harmond	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

You forgot Sonus and eBay! I learned something really important when my wife objected to our move to Hong Kong and my joining Hutchison Whampoa. It was a sweet deal, too. And as you know there is no better connected or capitalized company in China than Hutchison Whampoa. None come close. I was enamored by China's furure. Still am. The thing I learned is that frontiers are not simply geographic. All that investment spending you talk about capitalizes on cheap labor. That's what China offers right now. Not real opportunity like the US has for centuries. You don't find people emigrating to China to find a better life. You find manufacturers building plants in China to capitalize on cheap labor. So far China's economy is a faint reflection of western economies, and the main attraction is low labor cost. The opportunity to sell into China is on the capital goods side. The infrastructure and maturity isn't there for a consumer society yet. Most importantly, capitalism without democracy has a dead end. Without the basic freedoms of collective thought and action there can be no inventiveness, no genuine organic progress. So yes, all those cranes are impressive, but I'll take the good old USA where people still want to come and reinvent themselves. Let me know when labor can organize there. When there's a government of the people and by the people. In my conversations with Richard Li, heir to the largest fortune in China, and the other execs at Hutchison I learned about their dual Canadian citizenship, their other homes in Vancouver, and the corporate backup systems around Asia. I don't think they'll ever need them, there is tremendous promise in China, but China has a long way to go. The USA is still where the new ideas are born.