Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length
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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (90%); ECONOMIC GROWTH (78%); TRENDS (78%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (77%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (75%); TELEVISION INDUSTRY (68%); LITERACY & ILLITERACY (62%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%); LITERATURE (62%); POVERTY RATES (67%) Books and Literature; Reviews COMPANY: FINANCIAL TIMES GROUP (83%); CNINSURE INC (93%) TICKER: CISG (NASDAQ) (93%) INDUSTRY: NAICS511110 NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS (83%); SIC2711 NEWSPAPERS: PUBLISHING, OR PUBLISHING & PRINTING (83%) PERSON: William Grimes; Edward Luce GEOGRAPHIC: NEW DELHI, INDIA (79%) INDIA (99%); CHINA (94%) LOAD-DATE: January 17, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: Edward Luce (Photo by Martin Simon) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1215 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Bo Yibo, 98, Leader Who Helped Reshape Chinese Economy BYLINE: By JOSEPH KAHN SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Pg. 14 LENGTH: 903 words DATELINE: BEIJING, Jan. 16 Bo Yibo, the last of the Eight Immortals, Communist Party leaders who steered China through a politically volatile shift from Maoism to today's market-oriented economic boom, died Monday. He was 98. His death was announced Tuesday evening by the official news agency Xinhua. As one of the elderly but immensely influential party veterans who hovered above the country's appointed leadership in the 1980s and 90s, Mr. Bo helped Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who died in 1997, overcome elite opposition to capitalist-style economic reforms. Also like Deng, Mr. Bo had little tolerance for political liberalization. He played an important role in purging Hu Yaobang, a popular party leader who favored faster political change, in 1987. Mr. Bo also defended the army crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989, which left hundreds of people dead. The Eight Immortals were an informal group of senior Communist Party leaders who were purged during Mao's Cultural Revolution but experienced a second political life after Mr. Deng's return to power in 1978. All had participated in the Long March, the grueling 5,000-mile flight from Nationalist forces that saved the party from annihilation in China's civil war. All supported, to varying degrees, the policy of ''reform and opening'' that laid the foundation for China's newfound prosperity. Mr. Bo protected the Communist Party's monopoly on power even as he embraced ideologically variable ideas for enlivening the economy, a mix of rigidity and flexibility that has helped the party stay in control despite its internal upheavals and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His death is not likely to bring an end to the tradition of retired party leaders intervening in the affairs of the younger officials. But he was among the last of the Long March veterans whose unassailable revolutionary credentials meant that he could anoint a young official for higher office, or help topple a seemingly entrenched party boss who offended his elders. The subject of political gossip for many years, Mr. Bo lived long enough to see the party evolve into a more institutional and bureaucratic entity that did not hang to the same degree on the whispered whims of its elders. Young people in China rarely appear to discuss high-level politics, and the few remaining Long March survivors who served in high office are generally ignored. But his influence has been passed on to a new generation. He is the father of Bo Xilai, the commerce minister, and is thought to have cut political deals to help his son ascend the hierarchy. A native of Shanxi Province in the northwest, Mr. Bo joined the Communist Party in 1925, when he was 17. After run-ins with the Nationalist police during party organizing activities in the eastern part of the country, he helped the retreating Communists establish a stronghold in Shanxi. During World War II, Mr. Bo set up the Shanxi Suicide Squad, a guerrilla group that fought Japanese troops then occupying China. He also lured a powerful Shanxi-based warlord, Yan Xishan, into the Red Army, increasing its military strength by some 200,000 troops. When the Communists took power in 1949, Mr. Bo served as the first finance minister. He held numerous similar posts, including vice premier under Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, until early 1965, when he was labeled a ''rightist'' for supporting open trade with Western countries. During the ensuing Cultural Revolution, he and his family were sent to prison and lived in miserable conditions for nearly 15 years. His wife was beaten to death in custody. Deng returned him to his old post of vice premier in 1979. Mr. Bo helped carry out the ''reform and opening'' policy that permitted broader trade and investment flows and allowed some entrepreneurial economic activity. He became one of Deng's top political lieutenants. He was also a lead author of a definitive early party history published in 1993. Politically conservative, Mr. Bo supported crackdowns on intellectuals and dissidents in the 1980s, and he backed Deng's decision to remove Hu Yaobang from his position as party general secretary in 1987. Mr. Bo wrote a lengthy report, called Document No. 3, that accused Mr. Hu of favoring ''bourgeois liberalization,'' a code word for Western-style political change. After Deng ordered troops to open fire on unarmed protesters in and around Tiananmen Square in June 1989, Mr. Bo threw his weight behind the crackdown, speaking publicly to defend the shootings. Yet he also backed Deng when recalcitrant Marxists tried to reassert control over economic planning in the aftermath of the shootings. Some party officials say his support for continued market-oriented reforms may have proved essential at a time when Deng's health and prestige were fading. Mr. Bo was thought to have supported President Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. But his focus may have shifted to leveraging his remaining influence to help his son rise up the ranks of provincial leaders. Bo Xilai served as mayor of Dalian and governor of Liaoning Province before being promoted to commerce minister in 2004. The younger Mr. Bo is viewed as a possible candidate for vice premier and perhaps a seat on the Politburo Standing Committee at the 17th Party Congress later this year. But as the son of an influential elder, he has had to overcome opposition within a party that formally frowns on nepotism. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: POLITICAL PARTIES (91%); POLITICS (89%); EMERGING MARKETS (78%); ARMIES (77%); DEATHS & OBITUARIES (91%); ECONOMIC POLICY (77%); ECONOMIC NEWS (77%); PROTESTS & DEMONSTRATIONS (75%); WAR & CONFLICT (74%); COMMERCE DEPARTMENTS (72%) Deaths (Obituaries); Biographical Information COMPANY: CNINSURE INC (93%) TICKER: CISG (NASDAQ) (93%) PERSON: Joseph Kahn GEOGRAPHIC: BEIJING, CHINA (90%) NORTH CENTRAL CHINA (93%) CHINA (98%) CATEGORY: Politics and Gov't (Foreign) Bo Yibo LOAD-DATE: January 17, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: Bo Yibo in Beijing in 1992. (Photo by China Daily, via Reuters) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1216 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final A Self-Made Billionaire Wrote Her Ticket On Recycled Cardboard BYLINE: By DAVID BARBOZA SECTION: Section C; Column 3; Business/Financial Desk; Blazing A Paper Trail In China; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1492 words DATELINE: HONG KONG Just five years ago, Zhang Yin and her husband were driving around the United States in a used Dodge minivan begging garbage dumps to give them their scrap paper. She and her husband, who was trained as a dentist, had formed a company in the 1990s to collect paper for recycling and ship it to China. It was a step up from life back in Hong Kong, where she had opened a paper trading company with $3,800 to cash in on China's chronic paper shortages. ''I remember what a man in the business told me back then,'' Ms. Zhang said. ''He said, 'Wastepaper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation.' '' Ms. Zhang took that memory all the way to the bank. As a result of her entrepreneurship, Zhang Yin (pronounced Jang Yeen) is now among the richest women anywhere in the world, including Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and eBay's chief executive, Meg Whitman. Her personal wealth is estimated at $1.5 billion or more, with members of her family worth billions more. Her companies take heaps of waste paper from the United States and Europe, ship it to China and recycle it into corrugated cardboard, which is then used for boxes that are packed with toys, electronics and furniture that is stamped ''Made in China'' and often shipped right back across the ocean to American consumers. After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again. Late last year, Forbes magazine named Ms. Zhang the wealthiest woman in China. She may even be the richest self-made woman in the world, challenging a handful of others, like Giuliana Benetton, who started the clothing company with her brothers, and Rosalia Mera, who co-founded Zara, the Spanish clothing retailer, with her former husband. Most of the world's richest women inherited their wealth: from the Walton women of Wal-Mart fame to the daughters of the men who created Mars candy bars, L'Oreal cosmetics and BMW. But not Ms. Zhang. A petite 49-year-old woman with a cherubic smile and a fancy for diamonds, she started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. Now she dominates the world's paper trade through her giant companies, one centered in Dongguan just outside Hong Kong and the other based in Los Angeles. ''She's a visionary,'' says Herman Woo, an analyst at BNP Paribas, which helped her paper company list shares in Hong Kong. ''She doesn't mind putting a lot of money in at the beginning, to build the company.'' That company, Nine Dragons Paper, is now China's biggest papermaker. The company raised nearly $500 million when it went public here last March with the help of Merrill Lynch. Since then, shares of Nine Dragons have quadrupled, giving the company a market value of over $5 billion. (The Zhang family controls 72 percent of the company, which makes it one of the richest families in China.) Ms. Zhang's smaller, Los Angeles-based venture, America Chung Nam, is also one of the world's biggest paper trading companies, with ties to recycling yards in New York, Chicago and California. No other American company sends so much material to China, in as many containers, as America Chung Nam, which was named the top American exporter to China by volume for the fifth consecutive year in 2005, the most recent ranking, according to Piers Global Intelligence, which tracks import and export data. Now, with the paper industry shifting to China, where labor and land are cheaper, Ms. Zhang and Nine Dragons are vowing to take on the world's global paper giants, like International Paper, Weyerhaeuser and Smurfit Stone. ''My goal is to make Nine Dragons, in three to five years, the leader in containerboards,'' Ms. Zhang says emphatically in a short interview in her glistening Hong Kong office. ''My desire has always been to be the leader in an industry.'' In person, Ms. Zhang is filled with nervous energy and hearty laughs. But she rarely grants interviews, and when she does, they are brief and controlled by an army of handlers. Ms. Zhang is cagey about how she made her fortune. In a society known for close ties and hidden deals between government officials and business leaders, she says simply, ''I'm an honest businesswoman.'' Ms. Zhang was the oldest of eight children born into a military family from northern Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian border. During the brutal Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, her father was sent to prison, like millions of others who were branded ''counterrevolutionaries'' or ''capitalist roaders.'' When the Cultural Revolution came to a close in 1976, her father was released from prison and ''rehabilitated.'' She went to work as an accountant. After China's economic reforms got under way in the early 1980s, she moved to the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, one of the first areas in China allowed to experiment with capitalism. There she started working for a foreign-Chinese joint venture paper trading company. In 1985, she ventured to Hong Kong, which was then still a British colony. Ng Weiting, who was her partner in Hong Kong in the 1980s, says Ms. Zhang was driven and tough and had figured out how to get the best performance out of her workers. ''When her employees asked for a pay raise, she would grant it if it was reasonable,'' he recalled. ''But when her employees made mistakes, she would criticize them severely. She made it clear when to reward and when to punish.'' Analysts say Ms. Zhang's ebullient personality made her a great saleswoman and a sharp deal maker. There were occasional threats from competitors, yet being a woman was not a problem, she says. "Actually, I didn't find it difficult," she says. "I found men respected me." After Hong Kong's paper market proved too small for her ambitions, she moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and married for the second time, to Liu Ming Chung, who was born in Taiwan, grew up in Brazil and is fluent in English. Together, they formed America Chung Nam. At the time, China's fast-growing economy faced shortages of raw materials, and the country began looking overseas for scrap metal and used paper. Zhang Yin was an early mover, one of the first to sell scrap paper to China. China's own paper products are poor quality, often made from grass, bamboo or rice stalks, leaving it at a disadvantage against waste paper derived from wood pulp, the source of most paper made in the United States and Europe. America Chung Nam quickly made deals with American scrap yards and began shipping huge containers of paper back to China. The demand grew so fast that in 1995, Ms. Zhang (who also goes by her Hong Kong name, Cheung Yan) returned to China to found Nine Dragons, opening her first papermaking facility in Dongguan. Mr. Liu now serves at chief executive; Ms. Zhang is chairwoman. A decade later, the company has 11 giant papermaking machines, 5,300 employees, $1 billion in annual revenue and a huge facility under construction in the country's other booming export hub, the Yangtze River Delta area near Shanghai. Reported profits last year rose a whopping 349 percent to $175 million. Nine Dragons is now one of the world's fastest growing paper companies, and yet the company says it cannot keep up with demand for containerboard, the material used to make boxes, because of the booming growth in China's economy and exports. Foreign paper companies have been slow to build a sizable manufacturing base in China. Analysts doubt they will catch up any time soon. And Chinese manufacturers have advantages. They burn cheap coal rather than clean but expensive natural gas. And they are capitalizing on less expensive labor and the newest machinery, while papermakers in the United States and Europe are often using less efficient machines from the 1970s and 1980s. ''It's very difficult for U.S. companies to get into this business now,'' says Mr. Woo at BNP Paribas. ''I heard five or six years ago they looked at opportunities but they didn't do anything.'' ''Right now,'' Mr. Woo adds, ''the largest globally is Smurfit Stone. Weyerhaeuser is No. 2. By 2008, Nine Dragons could be No. 1.'' Analysts have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Ms. Zhang, though she came under some criticism for appointing her 25-year-old son as a nonexecutive member of the Nine Dragons board of directors. But Ms. Zhang vigorously defends the appointment, saying her son is qualified and Nine Dragons is, after all, a family company. She has a second son in high school. And her younger brother, Zhang Chang Fei, is the company's deputy chief executive, worth an estimated $900 million, according to Forbes. Ms. Zhang jumped to No. 5 this year in the Forbes ranking of the wealthiest people in China, from No. 107 last year, largely because of the huge public stock listing. She hasn't lost her ambition, though. Sometimes called the queen of trash, she doesn't disown the title. But, she said, ''Some day, I'd like to be known as the queen of containerboards.''
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1217 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Hong Kong and Shanghai Duel for Financial Capital BYLINE: By KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA; Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and David Barboza from Shanghai. SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 3 LENGTH: 1456 words DATELINE: HONG KONG, Jan. 15 Hong Kong and Shanghai are locked in an increasingly public struggle to become China's main financial center as a top-level committee in the capital, Beijing, prepares to meet later this month to map out a national financial regulatory strategy. On Monday, Hong Kong's highest government leaders and best-known business tycoons made the city's case at a series of televised conferences and briefings. They called for China to continue letting the biggest state-owned companies make their initial public offerings here, allow the Chinese currency, the yuan, to circulate more widely here and dismantle many remaining financial barriers between the mainland and Hong Kong, a former British colony. Shanghai's efforts have been less public. They have also been harmed by a spreading corruption scandal that has led to the arrest of the city's top Communist Party official and a growing number of business leaders. But as the traditional center of Chinese business life, Shanghai still has many allies in the capital. It has also emerged as the center of Chinese bond trading and as a favorite headquarters for Chinese and foreign companies. The jostling between the two cities is coming close to name calling. Ronald Arculli, chairman of the company that runs Hong Kong's stock exchanges, said that just as New York is the main financial center for the Americas even though Chicago or Toronto may not like it, Hong Kong is poised to become the main international financial center for Asia. Asked if he was suggesting that Hong Kong was becoming like New York and Shanghai like Chicago, Mr. Arculli said twice that this was his goal, adding, ''We stand a decent shot of making it there.'' That is hardly the view from Shanghai. City leaders and academics point out their biggest advantage: the currency circulating in the streets and markets is the yuan, which foreigners can buy and sell only with difficulty. Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, has its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar, which is linked to the United States dollar. The Hong Kong dollar is internationally convertible but cannot be easily exchanged for yuan on the mainland because of China's capital controls. ''The independent monetary system restricts Hong Kong's ambition to become the financial capital of the country,'' said Pan Yingli, a professor in the School of Management at Shanghai Jiaotong University. In back-to-back ceremonies and briefings Monday at the main government offices here and at the convention center, Hong Kong officials tried to exploit Shanghai's temporary political weakness and push Beijing into making Hong Kong the primary financial center of China. ''If we do not act now,'' David Li, chairman of the Bank of East Asia, warned at a government briefing, ''inertia will set in and business will gravitate to established financial centers overseas.'' Hong Kong and Shanghai are not just competing with each other -- they are also vying with Tokyo and Singapore to become the most important financial center in Asia. Each wants to be the place where investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and other big investors send their best and brightest to oversee trading during the hours after the sun sets in New York and before it rises in London. Each city has its strengths. Tokyo has the region's largest stock and bond markets, although they have attracted less attention lately because they lack the appeal of the Chinese economic boom. Singapore is the main center for trading oil and other energy products, and is an important hub for currency trading. But the most intense rivalry is between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Each strives to impress businesses and regulators that it is the best place for Chinese businesses to raise money and investors to give it to them. It is one of the oldest rivalries in Asia, dating back more than a century. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, these days HSBC, was started in Hong Kong on March 3, 1865, and opened for business in Shanghai a month later. While Shanghai overshadowed Hong Kong in many ways before World War II, Hong Kong regained leadership after the Communist takeover in 1949, and benefited from the emigration of thousands of Shanghai business people. And in the 1990's, the rise of a Shanghai faction of politicians in China, including President Jiang Zemin, resulted in many policies that favored their city. Since taking China's top jobs in late 2002 and 2003, President Hu Jintao has tried to limit Shanghai's influence. With the city mired in its corruption scandal, Hong Kong is trying to seize the initiative again. As Hong Kong's leaders repeated again and again Monday, Hong Kong has advantages now that include the rule of law, extensive financial expertise, a tradition of strong corporate governance, widespread knowledge of English and close ties to global markets. As a result of listings by big Chinese banks and other institutions, Hong Kong's main stock exchange had a greater volume of initial public offerings last year -- valued at $41.22 billion -- than any other stock exchange, although more money was raised in London over all. But while Hong Kong aspires to be an international financial center, it is sometimes derided in Asia as a one-legged stool -- a powerhouse in equities trading, including a doubling of trading in stocks and derivative warrants last year, but without another leg to stand on. Close to 200 bond issues are listed here, but local banks and insurance companies tend to buy them up when issued and then sit on them for years, with minimal trading. The local government runs a budget surplus, and while it has issued a small volume of bonds to help create a market, these also trade in very low volume. While corporate bond trading is still in its infancy in Shanghai as well, the trading of government debt securities there has picked up. The Chinese central bank has had to issue tens of billions of dollars worth of notes to sop up the enormous amounts in yuan it is pushing into the market to prevent China's currency from appreciating in value against other currencies. Hong Kong business leaders are dismissive of Shanghai's stock market -- Paul Chow, chief executive of the Hong Kong exchange, said in an interview Friday that it ''is predominantly a retail market, Hong Kong is not.'' But although Shanghai's stock market is still considerably smaller than Hong Kong's, it is also rising faster and was the world's top performer last year, up 130 percent. Shanghai has lost a couple rounds lately. The government authorized Hong Kong last Wednesday to begin trading bonds denominated in Chinese yuan, and has selected Tianjin, not Shanghai, for an experiment with limited convertibility of the yuan. Hong Kong also plans to start trading nondeliverable futures contracts on the yuan this summer, Mr. Chow said. And while officials directed General Motors in 1997 to open its initial Chinese car assembly plant in Shanghai, it steered Airbus last year to select Tianjin, a big port near Beijing, for an aircraft assembly plant. But Shanghai is becoming an important center of commodities trading. It has just passed Tokyo in the biggest market for trading natural rubber, testimony to the buying power of Chinese industrial companies. Hong Kong has very little commodities trading, losing much of its former role in international gold markets. Hong Kong gold prices were quoted around the world in the 1980s, but have become much less important as the handful of local gold traders continue to do business exclusively in Chinese and have not welcomed international banks and trading houses. Mainland China still has many restrictions on the private ownership of gold, slowing but not preventing the creation of a modern gold market in Shanghai with ambitions to become an important force in global trading. Shanghai is also setting up futures markets to allow Chinese traders to place bets on the direction of the country's interest rates. Experts said that Shanghai was likely to become an increasingly formidable competitor in years to come, and expressed doubt that Hong Kong leaders would succeed in persuading the Chinese government to give their city clear regulatory preference over its rival to the north. Beijing officials are still more likely to think of Shanghai than Hong Kong as a domestic financial market entitled to regulatory favors. ''Shanghai is in a temporary eclipse because of these political factors,'' said Jack Lange, a partner in the Hong Kong office of the Paul, Weiss law firm. ''But Shanghai is where it's happening -- if there is going to be a domestic financial center that gives Hong Kong a run for its money, it's going to be Shanghai.''
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