Hu 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 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.
Chapter 76 RONNY GOULD
The Plan Page 76