CITY AND SUBURBAN
Fat cats and sweet and sour mice meet the unforbidden city
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Shanghai havehave been bumped out of my hotel by the Emperor of Japan. Rank has its privi- leges. He must count as a royal straight flush, and we are just a full house. This week, all the best people want to be in China. The party congress has put its stamp on a market economy — Chinese style, of course — and we need to get into the mar- ket. The Emperor's advantage is that he represents a defeated enemy. The Chinese know where they are with him. Which is one up. We at the time were allies, but, from the Chinese point of view, allies of the previous discredited management. Now we need to keep our historical memory in good flexible order. Britain is fielding, or so we keep saying, our largest trade mission since the historic embassy of Lord Macart- ney. Those in the back row then hurriedly try to fit dates to Macartney, and hope that whenever he was here he behaved himself. (I am told that he did nothing worse than to refuse to kowtow to the throne.) We also have some trouble explaining to a Middle Kingdom audience that London is in the world's central time-zone — an overrated commercial advantage, I have always thought, and one of the few that the City shares with Timbuktu. More cautiously, our next speaker says how advantageous it is that English is the language of the world's financial markets, and indeed sec- ond among the world's most widely spoken languages, after Chinese. For a day in Peking our leading exporters of goods, investment and services all pitch in togeth- er. We are doing our joint best to impress head office, which is Peking's role.
Innocent occupation
THEN my City friends and I, under the banner of British Invisibles, peel off south- wards to where we think the business is. (Shanghai thinks of Peking, or so I am told, as Milan thinks of Rome — a harsh judg- ment.) We are following the trail of the indomitable Deng Xiaoping, who earlier this year made what is now called his his- toric swing through the south. He came, he saw, he approved, he applied to what he saw of the market economy his dictum on cats — it does not matter (so he said) what colour they are, what matters is whether they catch mice. The cats here are fat cats, they have got mice coming out of their whiskers; they are guzzling them down so fast that on all previous form they will get heartburn. Worse things happen to cats. It makes a change to leave intractable reces- sion behind us and tour round the world's pacesetters of growth, telling them what to do next. Still, if the City had to depend on its home market there would be empty sad- dles in the old corral and empty chairs in the luncheon-rooms. For the City, the world beyond Sweetings and Wiltons has to be its oyster — which is why the team is here, full of remedial ideas for the world's largest surviving state industries without using rude words, like privatisation. (Just the techniques.) The mayor of Shanghai has expressed the hope and intention that in his term of office foreigners should be able to make money. An innocent occupa- tion, as Dr Johnson said.
Off-course winner
GOVERNOR Patten's visit to Peking is described to us as an occasion in which frank discussion made no headway. We feared as much. Meanwhile we find our- selves civilly received by the grandees who snubbed him, and are left to decide for our- selves whether this is a good sign or a bad
sign. Hong Kong's one undoubted success in Peking this week has been scored not by the Governor but by the Jockey Club. It handles the vast volume of betting which is generated by Hong Kong's two racecourses. Now it has installed its first electronic ter- minal for offcourse betting in Peking. This works like a cash-point machine. You put in your card, and then feed in your personal number and your selection for the 2.30. Given the Chinese love of gambling and their lack of racecourses, this will sweep the country. The British banks ought to apply it to their home market. At last a growth business and the chance to stimulate demand for credit. The slogan suggests itself: You can bet on your overdraft.
Little red book
THE MIDLAND BANK — which cannot call itself that here, because midland equals middle kingdom, and middle kingdom equals China, and there is a Bank of China already — has sent us round China with copies of its little red book. This is its splen- did English-Chinese dictionary of finance: which tells you just how to say 'jumbo risk' or 'protection of investors'. Brian Williamson, visiting from Lombard Street, is pleased to find that he is a piaoju jingjiren — bill broker — and also to find that the word for bill of exchange is the same as the word for beer. 'Member of Lloyd's' is in the dictionary, too, though the Chinese ver- sion's literal meaning is 'member of a labour co-operative'. That's the spirit.
Who dares, flies
TO FLY from Peking to Shanghai on Air China, which is nobody's favourite airline, has had the odd effect of making me nostal- gic for Dan-Air. I was one of its earlier cus- tomers, in the days when it was flying De Havilland Doves between Bristol and Liv- erpool, and was on Marks & Spencer's banned list. I would be asked to sit at the back of the aircraft, so as to weigh the tall down and assist the take-off. Only the other day Dan-Air got me all the way back from Toulouse. Now I find, at last, that I have survived Dan-Air. I had always expected it to he the other way about.
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