u Jintao was given the works, the full treatment. President Sarkozy spared
no expense with the pomp and ceremony, a guard of honour complete with
cavalry in shining breastplates and plumed helmets, a state dinner,
Versailles and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, who towered over the diminutive Madam Tao
both in height and glamour.
Billions of euros’ worth of business deals were signed during the Chinese leader’s
state visit in the company of a large delegation of businessmen. Hu Jintao then
headed for Portugal leaving certain very rich members of the delegation to pursue
their own business in London, where they were received as honoured guests in the
City at a lavish reception held for the launch of the INI Europa Property Fund at
Saint Mary Axe.
The guests’ limousines were met in the forecourt by liveried guards and whisked
up to the one hundred and eighty metre high dome. The party was princely, rivers
of Champagne flowed and a late lunch was served in the two-level private
restaurant under the supervision of the country’s leading chefs. The guest list
included ambassadors, bankers, investors, Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern
sheiks as well as the Chinese billionaires freshly arrived from Paris.
The focal point of the reception was a huge architect’s model of the Gould
Tower, its glass façade brilliantly reflecting a myriad of judiciously placed
spotlights. It was billed as the reincarnation of London’s mega commercial
property market.
Fitzwilliams joined by Tarasov led Michael Lo and James Wang, billionaires
from Shanghai and Shenzhen, up the broad stairway to the glass dome and the bar.
Night was falling and the glow of the sky provided a dramatically beautiful and
unimpeded view of the City as the two hosts pointed out the landmarks: St Pauls,
Tower Bridge, the Thames, and last but not least the Bank of England, which they
pointed to as if they enjoyed a special relationship with the Old Lady of
Threadneedle Street.
Barton spotted Kennedy describing the Gould Tower to a rich Chinese
industrialist, who although he spoke passable English was assisted by an attractive
interpreter. Kennedy’s attention was more concentrated on the interpreter, who as
it turned out was the businessman’s daughter, immediately testing his fledgling
Mandarin, overlooking the fact the guests were Cantonese.
As he observed the show, John Francis found himself wondering what leaders
and bankers were doing courting China’s nouveaux riche businessmen,
representatives of a peasant-based agrarian economy run by a Communist
H
dictatorship? He could not deny the miracle of the Middle Kingdom, which in a
few decades had transformed its coastal regions into a dynamic, modern, highly
competitive, manufacturing economy, leveraged by the renminbi, its currency,
pegged at an unfairly low rate of exchange against the dollar and by extensions all
other Western currencies.
After a century of chaos, war and revolution, a vast and powerful nation had
emerged, flooding the world with tsunami of cheap goods, creating perhaps the
greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the planet, with the emergence of an
army of nouveaux riche billionaires ready to swallow up great swathes of cities
like London, Paris or New York.
The West had become addicted to the goods manufactured by sweatshop labour,
where the paltry wages barely permitted Chinese workers to survive, generating
vast profits for their laoban, China’s nouveaux riche, a renaissance of the pre-war
mercantile class of Nationalist China, whose wealth was growing at an exponential
pace, patrons of the political leaders who had made them rich and a system that had
served them so well.
Few of the Westerners who piled into China understood the Chinese and the
dynamics of that country’s markets. Kennedy had long refused outward investment
and had avoided the kinds of losses China funds had experienced. The Shanghai
and Hong Kong markets had dropped; stocks had declined, mainly due to concern
about corporate governance and doubts about the Chinese economy and its high
inflation. In Kennedy’s mind the most interesting Chinese investments were those
outside of China, in the UK and Europe, as Chinese firms fought for market shares
and their owners looked for safe havens for their hot money.