One Billion Customers - James McGregor [42]
Then there was Fang Fenglei, the rough-hewn wheeler-dealer that Wang had insisted on bringing into the joint venture. Harrison Young may have been the CEO of the company, but it was pretty clear to most people working at CICC that Fang was the de facto boss. Fang’s father had been a farmer before World War II, but after attending school in a cave during the war, he eventually became a senior administrator of the Chinese army’s optics industry. When the Cultural Revolution closed China’s schools in 1968, Fang Fenglei was sent to the countryside to live with the peasants. In 1971, he joined the Chinese army. When the universities reopened in 1978, Fang left the army and studied Chinese language and international economics. He was assigned to the foreign trade ministry, which sent him to Henan province in 1982 to advise on system reforms. Fang worked his way up in the trade bureaucracy in Henan, eventually cobbling together his first deal in 1988, the merger of the province’s four biggest companies into one entity, in which Fang was second-in-command.
Fang met Wang Qishan when Wang came to Henan on a fact-finding mission for a rural reform policy development institute that he headed in Beijing. Fang eventually went to work for Wang as a troubleshooter at companies owned by China Construction Bank. Fang also began building a circle of friends among economic policy makers whom he met through his wife, whose father was a leading Chinese economist named Liu Guoguang. Wang sent Fang to the United States to learn how its financial system worked. While in the United States, Fang’s father-in-law introduced him to Edwin Lim. The two men got along well and spent hours discussing finance and economics. During a visit to Washington’s National Zoo they stood in front of the pandas and talked about the prospect of China building an investment bank that could do basic financing for state industries. When he returned to China, Fang suggested to Wang that his boss champion a joint-venture Chinese investment bank that would focus on restructuring Chinese state industry. He also persuaded his influential father-in-law to write a letter to Zhu Rongji and other top leaders suggesting that they study the U.S. investment banks as models for further Chinese financial reform.
At CICC, Fang, whose given name means “wind and thunder,” lived up to that moniker. He was in constant motion, working in the office by day and working the banquet circuit and karaoke bars at night. He was Wang Qishan’s eyes and ears. But Fang’s entrepreneurial energy and creativity also made him the bank’s key business driver, just as Wang had predicted. Much to their dismay, CICC’s Western-trained Chinese investment bankers were put under Fang’s tutelage. Many of them initially dismissed him as a rube who knew nothing about financial deals and capital markets. They quickly learned that he was a master of Chinese business style, a style that wasn’t the least bit familiar to them. The young bankers had been trained in the straightforward approach that characterizes Western business. But they found themselves sitting with Fang and potential clients at smoky dives, eating and drinking late into the night as Fang and his clients told stories about the Cultural Revolution and complained how rotten the government was in those days. Fang knew how to get potential clients to open up, to tell him what worried them and what made them happy. He knew that at different stages of their careers they had to do different things. Clients identified with Fang and trusted him.
He also kept a keen eye out for what was happening within CICC, asking questions, listening to gossip, feeling for the pulse of the operation. Even more so than Tang, the China Construction Bank employees at CICC knew to fear and respect Fang. He was the typical Chinese entrepreneur boss. Everybody had to listen to him and he had every detail under his control. As one of CICC’s founders put it, “he wanted everybody’s balls in his hands.”
Distrust worsened between the China Construction Bank faction and the CICC employees