Red Roulette By Shum Desmond-pdfread.net

pens, writing pads, glassware, and ashtrays decorating their rooms. It was a small
price to pay for these rms’ continuing business.
I began returning to China looking for investment opportunities for the rm.
I went to Luoyang in Henan Province, famed for peonies and the Longmen
Buddhist grottoes, but by the time I arrived in the summer of 1995 it was a
grimy post-Communist dump. There I visited a motorcycle factory; the industry
was just beginning to take o as Chinese swapped pedal bikes for scooters. In
coastal Fujian Province, I dropped by a TV monitor factory that would grow
into the biggest manufacturer of computer screens in the world. In the
boondocks of central Anhui Province, long known as one of China’s poorest,
the only decent place I could nd to sleep was a police dormitory. Arriving back
in the provincial capital of Hefei, by no means a garden spot, I celebrated my
return to civilization in a shabby four-star hotel.
China was so poor that none of its nascent private businesses had highenough
revenue to be investment targets. Still, I could feel the energy, suppressed
for decades by Communism, waiting to be unleashed. All that aspiring
entrepreneurs needed was for the government to give them a chance.
I also felt that I was nally participating in something bigger than myself. I’d
come to a love of China early. So, naturally, I wanted to be a part of this new
China story. No one knew how it was going to turn out and, in returning to my
homeland, I certainly didn’t know whether I was going to accomplish my goal of
making something of myself. But it felt like the right thing to do.
The rst private mainland Chinese technology company ChinaVest took a
stake in was AsiaInfo, a rm that was building the backbone of China’s Internet.
Two Chinese students, Edward Tian, who had a PhD in natural resource
management from Texas Tech, and Ding Jian, who had a master’s degree in
information sciences from UCLA and an MBA from Cal Berkeley, founded the
rm in Texas in 1993. AsiaInfo’s selling point was its ability to marry software
and equipment from Dell, Cisco, and other rms to build a system that would
connect Chinese to one another and China to the rest of the world. The
Internet came to China in 1994. By the end of that year, thirty thousand people
were online. Today almost 1 billion people have access to an Internet connection
there, accounting for 20 percent of the world’s users.