CITY AND SUBURBAN
Heaven is high and the emperor's far away China copies the ICI model
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
TShanghai here is nothing like an arduous swan round the Far East to give you a new per- spective. I now realise that China has found a Western model. It is imitating Imperial Chemical Industries in the great company's heyday. Beijing is Millbank: the head office, imposing, amply staffed and a long way away from the factories. Here the purse-strings are held, careers made and broken, strategic designs elaborated and discarded. High up in the panelled corri- dors, a small group of ageing potentates is engaged in a power struggle, intriguing and manoeuvring over the succession. (In ICI, this struggle would begin as soon as a new chairman was appointed.) Shanghai is Billingham. This is where the dividend is earned. The great complex throbs with activity, hissing, bubbling and periodically letting off steam. The managers here see themselves as practical men, but they know that success here can mean promotion to head office. They do n6t want to find that, expanding and investing too fast, they have overstretched themselves and are running short of money. Head office has been cracking down on that sort of thing, and one or two unhappy subsidiaries have been put into liquidation, together with their managers. There is a Chinese proverb, Tian gao huangdi yuan, which translates as 'Heaven is high and the emperor is far away', but for all that, wise managers keep one wary eye on head office. It may be bureaucratic and remote, but they cross it at their peril.
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