Money Machine

Chapter 4A Special Time and Place

As I sat in a Hong Kong skyscraper and imagined negotiating the landmark purchase of a control stake in a Chinese bank, I thought of how many roads had been traveled to bring the right people together for this moment. And there was the road China had traveled from the late 1970s to the century's turn—it had journeyed from dire poverty to relative prosperity and even, in certain corners, to wealth. And my own path was intertwined with China's.

In 1975, when I got out of the Gobi Desert, China's gross domestic product stood at $163 billion—roughly on par with Canada, whose population was only 2.5% of China's. Bicycles ruled the roads of the nation's metropolises. The service sector hardly existed; after all, you were supposed to serve yourself in a proletarian society. It was difficult to obtain anything beyond the basics. Even by the time I arrived in Hong Kong in 1993, China was still a poor and developing country. Its GDP had tripled to $440 billion, but that was just one‐16th that of the United States, and a tenth of Japan's. Per‐capita income was $377 in China, a tiny fraction of that in the United States ($26,000) and Japan ($38,000). But things were rapidly changing.

By 2002, China's GDP had reached $1.47 trillion, nine times what it had been in 1975. Cities had mushroomed in size, and cars began to fill the streets. Anywhere you looked, you saw a forest of construction cranes in every direction, and a network of brand‐new highways, bridges, ...