by R. Passov
In 2010, the company for which I was then Treasurer was invited to send me to China. The purpose of the trip was to meet with senior members of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as well as the Shanghai stock exchange as a prelude to becoming the first US company to issue bonds to be traded on the Shanghai exchange.
Before discovering that there were numerous companies in line to be ‘first’ I met with a senior official of the NDRC. Along with my travel companion, a Chinese national who had relocated to New Jersey and worked on my team, I arrived at a palatial office exactly at the right time, only to wait perhaps as along as 45 minutes, maybe longer.
Eventually my companion and I were escorted into a cavernous conference room, in the center of which was an impossibly long table surrounded by as many as 40 high-backed, elaborately upholstered chairs. We were instructed to take seats away from the table against a far wall. After more waiting, a senior official entered the room followed by two assistants and proceeded to a chair at the very center of the table.
After the official was comfortably seated we were instructed by his assistants to move to the table and occupy the two seats directly across. One of the assistants left and our host began the meeting.
Introductions were short. The NDRC official knew who we were, and perhaps a lot more. I only knew that he was a Vice Chairman and according to my colleague ‘very, very senior.’ The Vice Chairman was politely condescending and direct: When, he wanted to know, would my company be able to commit to a securities offering.
I answered that we were excited at the opportunity to be first and ready to work through the issues remaining. When asked what those issues were, I offered the accounting and SEC reporting challenges along with potential solutions as well as the one for which the solution could only come from the NDRC: Whether or not we could take the proceeds out of China.
While the Vice Chair had no response to the first two challenges, other than to say they could be solved, he knew the answer to the last – No: The proceeds could only be used within China, ostensibly to further expand operations that likely were already de facto controlled by a Chinese partner.
After our meeting in Beijing, we flew to Shanghai to meet with senior officials of the Shanghai stock exchange. We were feted over an elaborate lunch that lasted hours and featured one delicacy after another. Our host, a young, confident entrepreneur, knew all there was to know about trading, clearing and listing requirements. There is a solution for everything, he said.
Before the end of lunch, it became apparent that the NDRC and the Shanghai Exchange had different views as to what should be done and who was in charge.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, ten years later, western companies are still vying to be first.
After our meeting with the stock exchange official, my companion took me sightseeing. Our first stop was a mall in central Shanghai. Toward the back of the mall, between two rows of shops, stands a two-story structure where Mao Zedong “lived … briefly in 1920, washing clothes to earn his keep.”
It seemed odd that such a revered setting would be tucked into the back of a shopping mall, and not in a pasture carved out from the rest of the city. What also seemed odd was the strange commercial feel to the commemoration – which says something about what lies under the skin of China.
A security guard stood at the entrance to the structure. As I was entering, he stopped me to ask questions: Are you an American? Yes, I answered. What do you do? I am the Treasurer of a global company. How many times have you been to China? This is my first time, I answered.
My security guard was amazed: You are the Treasurer of such a big company and you have never been to China. How could that be? He was expressing something that the sheer scale of Shanghai made so obvious: China was destined to be a very big part whatever the future may hold.
* * *
In 1989, the year I finished my graduate studies (for the second time), at the invitation of a friend I traveled to Yaoundé, Cameroon. I had met the friend during my first stint in grad school. I didn’t know it at the time but while he was my classmate, he was also a Fulbright Scholar and under the tutelage of a gentleman who worked for the USAID and perhaps for a different government agency – but that belongs in a different story.
A few times since I had left grad school (the first time) my friend had taken time away from his busy schedule attending meetings at the UN to scrambled across the country to visit me in San Francisco. So when he suggested that I allow him to return the hospitality by flying 12,000 miles to spend time near his ancestral home, I felt obliged.
I also felt privileged. My friend’s suits came from fine tailors in London. He knew how to read a wine list, and that combined with his cola-nut voice and deep, knowing smile caused the opposite sex to fall toward him. Of course I wanted to visit. I was still eligible for student health and somehow Berkeley arranged for my vaccination shots which left me under the weather for several few days. I packed a bag, flew to Paris, waited for a time, then flew to the Ivory Coast, waited again, then flew to Yaoundé.
I landed on a partially paved airstrip. My bag was thrown from the plane. My host arrived in a jeep and drove onto the landing strip. When asked what I would like to do first, I answered as any unread traveler from the West might: I’d like to shower, I said. Well, my host answered, today is Monday, I should have water again by Wednesday. When he saw the contents of my bag – sport coat, slacks, button down shirts – he let out a roar I can still hear today.
It was a fine trip. Over the course of two weeks, I lost ten pounds. When the time came to grab the machete and work our way through the northern forests, in search of his ancestral home, I begged off. I was honest: I don’t have the strength, I said.
To fill the time made available from not going into the forest we circled Yaoundé, going from home to home, where in each case the occupants, always woman, stopped their doings and turned their attentions to us. We ate, drank, laughed and talked, mostly in French (of which I know not a word), sometimes German (which I also don’t understand) and on occasion, English.
Near the end of my trip, running out of sites to see, my host hit upon going to the local basketball game, then played on the outskirts of the city, on a flat dirt field that somehow supported two basketball hoops. We didn’t see a game. Instead, a motley collection of tall young men took turns trying various acrobatics near the baskets.
I was sitting on bleachers, watching, my host’s attention caught in conversation with friends when a stranger sat beside me. Since no one in our party shoed him away, I assumed he was known to the group.
Although from the Sudan, Manute Bol, then at the top of his fame, perhaps the tallest player in the NBA, was offered up as local boy-made-good.
Everyone wants to be the next Manute, the stranger said, in perfect, soft English. Lots of young people think they’ll make it in the NBA. For a moment I was embarrassed by the reach of the NBA – how unfortunate it seemed that the young men I saw playing in tattered Nike wear were possessed by such effervescent dreams.
Then my stranger got down to business: It is not, he said, that you are smarter than us. In this country, he went on, we have room for perhaps five doctors, three engineers and one lawyer. So to be one of those, you have to be truly exceptional, not like in your country where a mediocre person such as yourself can prosper.
My first instinct was to look toward my friend, expecting that he would push the stranger on his way. By that didn’t happen. As though only seen by me, the stranger rose and walked on.
In our brief encounter, he had pierced my sense of place. I was the guest of honor, not by virtue of anything I had done but instead by pure luck. And yet, before that stranger made that so clear, my mind was telling me something different; that somehow, I was responsible for a certain arc in history when, in fact, my particular birth – its place and time – where no more my doing than any other aspect of the cosmos.
* * *
My first attempt at graduate school brought me to an MBA program for which I was woefully unsuited. In that year, 1984, approximately 65,000 students graduated from similar programs across the US. We fell into our careers. Even in a recession year, demand far outstripped supply.
Six years later, China opened its first MBA program. Today, about 200,000 MBA degrees per year are awarded in the US. My guess is at least twice as many are awarded in China, and perhaps twice again as many at other institutions across the globe. Unfortunately for today’s average graduate student, supply outstrips demand.
The second derivative of misfortune for today’s students in the US is that the relative size of their country’s footprint has shrunk. Getting that degree doesn’t even level the field; it simply affords a shot at a highly competitive, global foot race in which little about being American stands out.
Notwithstanding ongoing efforts to make America great again, my children will work very hard for a small chance at what I got by luck.
https://theworld.org/stories/2014-05-07/you-can-find-maos-old-apartment-inside-mall-shanghai