Red Roulette By Shum Desmond-pdfread.net

Getting to know some of the participants in the AsiaInfo deal gave me a taste
of the recipe China would follow as it powered its way into the future—one
centered on marrying entrepreneurial talent with political connections. Edward
Tian was a key ingredient. Even before AsiaInfo listed in New York, a Chinese
state-owned company founded by Jiang Mianheng, the son of China’s
Communist Party boss, Jiang Zemin, had lured him away to join a rm called
Netcom that had been given the mission of leapfrogging China into the
forefront of information technology by laying ber-optic cable throughout the
country. Some of the cities Netcom wired with broadband had never had phone
service before. Over a ten-month period in the early 2000s, Netcom workers laid
six thousand miles of ber-optic cable and connected China’s seventeen largest
cities to the World Wide Web.
Tian’s ability to manage a telecommunications rm and articulate a vision
was essential to the success of this staggering task. But Tian’s e orts with
Netcom wouldn’t have succeeded without Jiang Mianheng. It was this
combination of Tian’s can-do spirit and Jiang’s political pedigree that would
drive China’s rise. The marriage of know-how with political backing became a
template for China’s march into the future and a way for ambitious men and
women like me to make something of our lives.
The AsiaInfo deal also showed that foreign rms could play this game as well.
They were just as interested in using the sons and daughters of high-ranking
Chinese o cials to curry favor inside the system.
One of the bankers brought in by AsiaInfo to work on the transaction was a
young man named Feng Bo. Feng’s father was a writer and editor named Feng
Zhijun, who’d been labeled a “rightist” in a political campaign in the 1950s and
sent to a labor camp. In 1976 with the arrest of the Gang of Four, the ultraleftists
who’d gathered around Mao, Feng Zhijun was freed and became a leading
member of the China Democratic League, one of the eight political parties that
the Chinese Communist Party had maintained after the 1949 revolution as the
window dressing of a pluralistic system. Feng Zhijun served on the Standing
Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature,
for ten years and had access to inside information about policy changes that
impacted foreign rms.