Revealing China’s fast and innovative technological progress and its secrets to success

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods. Asia is my home now. 60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking Place all day, every day.

Right now, let's go, Jio! Duncan Clark, ladies and gentlemen, straight from Gongti in Beijing. Welcome to the pod, my old friend. Looking well. Nice to see you.

Hi, Bali. Hi, I should say. Yes, thank you. You get that all the time, I guess.

Already off the bat, our mutual old friend. Kaiser Guo, who's going to be on the podcast next week. He has described you as posterously quotable. And since, you know, I've probably seen your name in print talking about China more than any other, you know, alive or dead human. So it's pretty legendary and I always enjoy your comments. So I look forward to this. And, you know, before we get into like what you're working on now in China, let's talk about the origin story. Bitten by a radioactive Chinese spider back in the day, how you went from the UK, US, and France here to the Middle Kingdom.

Yeah. So my accent gives away that I'm a bit of a mix. I'm a Brit that grew up in England, New Jersey, and Paris. You know, spot the odd one out. New Jersey's great. So from 16 to 18, I was in Paris. So then I went to university in London. But before I went to university, I actually spent a summer in Japan. So my sister was an expat in Japan in those heady days of the late '80s with her husband, actually. And so I got a glimpse of The Japan threat excitement that was, in a way, it's sort of foreshadowing of kind of the stuff we're dealing with now, the same phobias. So it's kind of interesting, but I definitely got my Asia bug in Japan, even though it was a very brief time. But it was then after graduating in London from LSE, I joined Morgan Stanley and worked in Europe. I mean, in London and around Europe for 3 years. And I was thinking again about Japan, but of course Japan had begun its long slide down, you know, during the '90s.

So it was early '90s, yeah.

It was. And then there was an opening actually in Hong Kong. Morgan Stanley Hong Kong was a small outpost at that point. my boss, the late, unfortunately, Joe Josephson, called me, wanted me to come out. My boss in London said, yeah, you know, Hong Kong, it's really a backwater. It's going nowhere. And it was very small. I mean, it was a tiny little spot really, particularly for banking because Japan still had this, you know, Asia back then was Japan and non-Japan Asia. Can you imagine? So there was sort of other, and within other, China didn't even figure. It was more about Southeast Asia, you know? So Hong Kong was minimal, but I just happened to, when I moved to Hong Kong, Despite the protestations of my former boss in London, basically the beginning of the China wave began. Specifically, a guy called Barton Biggs came out, you know, who moved the markets with his comments saying that China is a big country, literally. So he's really preposterously quotable. The Hong Kong stock market went up 40% on those words, China is a big country. So there wasn't much depth in research back then in '93. But Hong Kong was sort of discovered, and that was the first big wave of foreign capital coming in, really. Hong Kong, but to China. This was the beginning of the you know post Tiananmen, you know three four years post the reboot, if you will, of the China business story. And so I just happened to arrive in Hong Kong at that time, and so my one year in Hong Kong became moving to Beijing the following year, and then I never left.

Yeah, but if I may, you say just happened, but you made that despite you know like you had the chutzpah to do it. Like what was it? Because it was Japan and you could smell it.

Well, I guess, I mean, I think the interesting thing, to be honest, the people I got on most with in the Hong Kong office were mainland Chinese, and there were very few. There were only about 3 or 4 initially. I think actually weirdly, and you know this, you're the master of this, but it was the sense of humor. I actually found the humor of the Beifangren, particularly Dongbei Ren, you know, I just really resonated with mainland Chinese in Hong Kong. I had actually studied a bit of Cantonese before moving to Hong Kong thinking, you know, I'd get the lingo and all that, but I pretty quickly realized, you know, of course, This was, you know, '93 heading to '94. I was a Brit. I arrived. I didn't need a visa. I could just show up, of course. But I knew, you know, there was an expiration date in '97. And it kind of amazed me how few expats there were concerned or interested that much, frankly, in the mainland. It was more of a, you know, place to play golf or buy, you know, cheap knockoffs or something. And that was reflected by some of the, frankly, the Hong Kong mindset also, which I understand, you know, because maybe kids of immigrants or they had fled themselves.

Yeah, they had fled. Yeah, like swum over. Yeah.

So yeah, I made a first trip to China, I think mainland, I think it was September. Whenever Beijing lost the first Olympic bid that it had, I was here because I was thrown out of a taxi when they thought this was an anti-Chinese conspiracy when they announced this. Beijing had this very troubled bid for the Olympics. So it would've been, I guess, when Sydney had it. This is going so far back. But Beijing, as you know, barely had a round subway line and a long one, and that was it.

Yeah, I showed up in December of '93. Yeah. And it was definitely much closer to Mao than to now, for sure.

That's a good way of putting it. And what my job in Hong Kong was doing was technology and telecom kind of financing, which I'd done in Europe. And then I was, you know, we were looking around Asia, we were doing stuff. And the presumption was that, you know, China would just follow the same model. We get AT&T or, you know, big clients come in and just buy like Northern China and build it out. You know how naive we were. But, you know, China had other plans to build up its own, you know, what became these behemoths of, you know, China Mobile, China Unicom, and so on. But, you know, they did it by financing in Hong Kong initially and then overseas. And I was involved in helping set up those financing structures. So Morgan Stanley worked with the, what is now the NDRC government. So we basically created a structure where China could raise capital to build out telecoms because there were only 200,000 cell phones in the whole country when I moved here. And remember they were, you know, they called them the Gorbachev, right? They were $3,000 devices that were weapons as much as anything else, you know? So it was like government officials, Westerners, and mafiosi who were carrying these things around. I don't know which is the most mafiosi in those 3, but anyway, I take that back. But it was, you know, the rough days of China opening. And so it was really that opportunity. Also a late unfortunate colleague, Lauren Bessette, who was working at Morgan Stanley, was my boss on this sort of project. And she introduced me to her friends in Beijing. Tragically, she died along with JFK Jr. and his wife because she was the sister of his wife.

They were in the plane.

Yeah, unfortunately.

She was flying.

Wow.

Fascinating, man.

Yeah. But the reason I mentioned that, because she, you know, she was from Greenwich, Connecticut. She was a very sort of fancy East Coast, but she loved China. I mean, she had actually traveled around China. She would take overnight trains for 2 days. You know, she just loved the adventure and not many people did. I think to go back to Hong Kong in '93, it's acquired taste. There was a big gap. You know, you left Hong Kong, you arrived in Beijing. Firstly, when you landed, you, because it was so dark, like, well, you could feel it immediately with a really bumpy runway, but there were no lights. So it was really night and day. And that gap, very few people wanted to, you know, frankly live in the mainland. Even Shanghai was, you know, really early days. It was a construction site for those highways. And, you know, so it was tough, as you know.

So I remember when I first got to Hong Kong in '96. I was an illegal immigrant. I didn't have my work visa yet, and I was going illegally back to Macau for a visa run. But then before the handover, they were being more scrutiny for illegal immigrants.

Oh, more so.

So they're asking people for their IDs cuz they thought they might be from the mainland, but I was going scot-free. And then I read this article in the South China Morning Post. This woman gets arrested for assaulting a police officer because she said, yeah, here's my ID. Why did you ask me? He said, well, because you dress like you're from the mainland. And she went, she went ballistic. Right. And then like, but you know, the crazy thing is now Now, if you tell a Hong Kong Chinese person, hey, you dress like you're from the mainland, they're like, oh yeah, this is a knockoff. This isn't real Prada, right? It's like how the turntables have turntabled, right?

It took some visionary outsiders actually. And one particular guy, Jack Wadsworth, who was chairman of Morgan Stanley in Asia, he'd lived in Japan also, but he had the vision along with others at Morgan Stanley to create the first joint venture investment bank, right? CICC, which is still a major player in China with John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley. So it took actually outsiders. It wasn't like the Hong Kong crowd really. It was people in New York thinking big and thinking long-term. By the way, that trend has continued with, you know, very ambitious and assertive, you know, New York-based people thinking differently about China. Yeah.

Like Ray Dalio loves China as well too, and really involved. That's great. Excellent. Wow. That's a terrific origin story. Like you were really not just part of the whole growth of, you know, what's happening in China, but the whole growth of finance as well too, which is so critical. Yeah.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, they're a bit like, if you look at the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, you know, they all went to school together in that, you know, Whampoa Military Academy, which I visited recently in Guangzhou. Everything comes from that same root. You can say the same thing, Morgan Stanley and Goldman, you know, they kind of sprouted. So a lot of the early professionals in this opening up came from those 2 places and a few others. And the same we'll talk about later with technology, right? You had a few tech companies and they became these trees, you know, so it's interesting to go back to finance and tech. That's really what I've been focusing on the last 27 years here.

So I remember when I moved to, you know, I was there in '96 to 2000 in Hong Kong and I'd heard your name around. Then I moved to Beijing and you were already An OG in Beijing. You had this networking event at the Capital Club, correct? And it was just absolutely just blue chip, just incredible speakers, you know, incredible attendees. And you were holding court there in this, you know, I think at one point the tallest building in Beijing. But you really like cracked it early on. That was my sort of impression of you of like, wow, this guy's got a great network, amazing. You know, company and skills. And like, tell me about that. Like, that was part of you. Then you started BDA, right?

So basically, I did the year Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, and our big mission was by the end of the year for me was to run this conference on telecom financing. And so the B in BDA is a guy called Zhang Bo. His father had been governor of Anhui, I think, and finance minister. But the son was the one of the first wave of Chinese to go to the U.S., I think '79, '80, and he did a PhD at UT Austin. Anyway. There was this group of people that went to study in the U.S., including, you know, founders of Netcom later and things like that, who believed in technology as the way forward. Frankly, you know, the political stuff, as I mentioned, you know, post-'89, you know, they tried that route. It didn't look like that was going to be the way forward. So some of those people, like the founder of AsiaInfo and others, they embraced technology. And so there was quite a lot of people looking at technology as a way for China to sort of break out of its still very difficult situation economically and socially and politically even. But in the end, it became, you know, the economy and society that changed profoundly through technology. But the basis for that, having a network, you know, just as I said, there were no telecom, you know, no mobile phones. There were long waiting lists, 6 months for a phone line, a regular fixed line phone. You had to pay huge deposits. So we had this conference in the summer of '94 at the China World Hotel where I then founded my company, BDA, in the business center, which is now Aria Restaurant. But we basically inked a deal that Morgan Stanley would Hire me and this guy, both who had helped on this conference, was instrumental. We had you know these vice ministers and vice premier came actually to launch this conference because China knew it needed to figure out. This is the Chinese have a word for this: the信息化 or informatization. You remember the minister Wu Jichuan at the time? So if you didn't have this network level, nothing else would happen. And so we were focusing on that network level. So I stayed on for I thought it would be one year at BDA, you know, with one client Morgan Stanley, and then. After '95, we started branching out, having our own clients. And so what was a 1-year kind of, you know, no-name company, just call it BDA with D being Duncan, A being Associates, you know, became this thing that, you know, never really stopped because we shifted from just pure telecoms to the whole world of technology. This was, you know, pagers initially, and then it was mobile phones. And then of course, famously, the internet was also coming around that time initially in academic channels. And then pretty quickly, dial-up started coming, you know, you probably used that early on in Beijing and then it became broadband and mobile and blah, blah, blah. So basically I came for the telecom, stayed for the internet.

Excellent. I think James Ding from AsiaInfo, I think that was the first event that I went to. Were they the first company to list on NASDAQ?

Very early. In fact, Porter, who I introduced, I think, to Alibaba later, Porter had been on that deal. And so I think, yeah, that was very early. I mean, there were some, don't forget the, of course, the China.com, you know, seminal event was in '99. That was the beginning of the China internet boom. There'd been some other companies before that, but that was really from '99 on. And then Sina, Sohu, NetEase, of course, you know, into 2000. But until then, yeah, people have been experimenting with different things. And, you know, China went through the Asian financial crisis a bit. '97, things slowed down. You know, you said you were already here. It was a bumpy road. It wasn't clear that China was going to sort of be on this trajectory. But I think the internet really, you know, changed all of that. So I kind of stuck around because the internet was very interesting. I'd actually kind of moved to Shanghai from '90, '96. Just was easier to live. I don't know about you. I mean, I was living initially, I had this almost expat package living in the Tianguo Hotel, you know, paid for by Morgan Stanley. It was great. And then that ended. I had to get my own clients. I moved out to Huajiaji by the Lido, you know, where occasionally the police would raid and, you know, had to like keep the lights off. I feel sometimes like I've had a sort of Anne Frank flashbacks and stuff because it was, it was tough. No, no offense to that, but it was scary. I mean, you know, you were living in a place where you could be, and people were, foreigners were marched off to the police station saying, you know, why didn't you register? And of course you couldn't register unless you were paying top dollar to be in a hotel or diplomatic compound. But it was fun in a way. I was in my 20s. It was still, it was very raw.

Yes.

It was exciting.

Wild West. Yeah, in the '90s, like that was, I was here, I was there, you know, for the last 8 days of FEC, the foreign exchange currency, like '93. That was like, you couldn't even use, you know, like strictly speaking. So yeah, it's fascinating how, you know, it really, like my thesis in this book is that it's kind of a 4-to-1 ratio, like 4 years in the West is a year in China. So 20 years, a generation is a half decade. And, you know, in some ways, if you look back You know, 28 years, it's almost like 100 years ago, right? It is like—

Bilbo Baggins were 11 to 1 today or something, right?

So yeah. Precious.

Yeah.

Let's not give up. China, I think maybe pickles us with their pollution. So maybe we don't look as aged as we have.

In a way, I mean, I guess you see this too. I mean, you know, when people complain and there are lots of, always, of course, people have also being far from home. There's always issues, you know, being lost in China or whatever, but it's so much easier. One can say at least on the physical level today than back then. In terms of where you can live, you know, the pollution is, you know, almost gone now. So, you know, kids these days, you know, they don't know what it's like.

We can both pretend we're those two guys up on the balcony at the Muppets and just get off my lawn, right? So I always knew you as, you know, an incredibly fun and eloquent and plugged-in person. I even remember that you turned me on to Google. We were doing either a hike or mountain biking, and you were like, yeah, I just do all my search through Google. And I was like, hmm. I got to check that out when I come back. But yeah, I mean, BDA has flourished since that. It's been how many years now? Almost 3 decades.

27 years. Yeah, we just moved from Kerry Center where we were for 21 years into the China World Tower 3A, as it's now called, because you can't call Tower 4 for Tower 4. It's 3B anyway. We're in the big tower looking down now at Kerry and because we wanted to be all on one floor. But yeah, we, you know, in a sense, we were initially very telecom tech focused. I guess the real breakthrough was the internet. And then SARS, you know, when SARS came along, people forget this, but this was the reboot of the internet companies, NetEase, Sina, who were making money from mobile messaging. You know, previously, you know, NetEase was almost delisted. You know, these internet companies.

I remember in the Cary Center, in the lobby, because I worked in the Cary Center, you worked in the Cary Center, Fritz Demopolis, who I've had on the podcast, also in the Cary Center. And Fritz is like, hey, come up to NetEase. And I remember going, I'm not going to go up to NetEase. Because I had been through the dot-com bust and I had laid off 87 people on my team. And I was like, I'm not going up to that place of Renren with a ridiculous like rain cloud over it. And finally one day I'm like, all right, I'll go up there. And I go up there and I'm like, wow, this is like, I feel some energy. Right. And there's like, they're making money off SMS. They're making money off games. Advertising's coming back. And it was the number one performing stock on NASDAQ that year. And I had an insider view of that. And I remember I had that exit and I'm like, if I threw 10 grand on that, You know, it would have been, you know, it went up.

I'm always the greater idiot. I was actually on their advisory board pre-IPO and they had an issue with their CFO and CEO. And so I thought, yeah, I should distance myself from this company. And, you know, Ding Lei is amazing. The founder, William Ding, is incredible, still doing incredible stuff. And he's a wonderful guy. And so that was a dumb move on my part. And then famously not buying the Alibaba shares at 30 cents, you know, but that's, you know, I've been to a lot of therapy.

Oh yeah. So can we peel into that? Because like of all the lawaai, I had Jack come and speak at this event that, um, Called I and I back in the day, right? You knew him way, way before that, right?

Yeah, it's through Ted Dean. So you remember Ted, of course, who's now back in Washington. Well, Ted and I had a column in the South China Morning Post called Beijing Bite, which we inherited from Christy Lestout, who is still at CNN. Christy and I think Steve Schreinkert had founded this gathering in Sanlitun at, I believe it was Cafe Cafe, my friend Annie Yu's. It was like the first cafe or bar in Sanlitun anyway. Lots of firsts here because there was nothing else happening. First internet cafe, first like internet gathering. And then Ted wrote about Alibaba for a column. I think he went down to Hangzhou to meet Jack and then he came back and said, you got to go meet this guy. And so I did and we hit it off and started working for him. I mean, formally, I think it was from January 2000. We met, I think in August or something of '99. And that was still the apartment. That story is kind of, I mean, like many stories of Alibaba is sort of magnified out of all proportion, but it was significant that, you know, he obviously became the face of this internet revolution, if you will, internationally. Even though he was late to the game in China. So, but yeah, it was thanks to Ted that I met him and we did that column for a few years. But, you know, it was because you had to kind of sell interest in China tech amazingly, right back then. People didn't imagine that anything interesting was happening there. And so that changed.

That's great. And then you wrote that, you know, blockbuster, excellent insider book, How Was the Jack Built? And I'd love to hear some anecdotes there. Like one of the things that made me so proud, but also filled with Like a jealous rage is that you went to New York City and gave a presentation about the book and Steve Martin was in the audience.

Right.

And he's wild and crazy. He's like my hero. Right. Did you guys chat after?

Did he— I know him through a friend, Amy Tan, who is an old friend of Steve's. And so, and I've befriended Amy randomly in Paris.

Amy Tan, the famous author.

She's a very close friend. We became very close friends. You know, she and her husband Lou are wonderful people and end up living near them in Sausalito because they're just such great people. And she's so, you know, includes everybody, wants to introduce people. And I just randomly met her in Paris through, I think it was Tom Crampton. So anyway, so through that I got to know, you know, see Steve Martin a few times and then she kindly invited him to the launch and he's a wonderful, he's very, you know, quiet and private person in reality. So, you know, but very kindly came along and, you know, held up the book, you know, so, but that was hosted at Amy's place in New York. So I'm, you know, very grateful to her. And my publisher I met through Amy, so I owe everything to her. In fact, you know, she's now, there's a new documentary actually came out about her recently produced by Jamie Redford, the son of Robert Redford, who also sadly passed away recently, but it's on PBS and You know, Amy would travel regularly to China and, you know, obviously has the Chinese heritage and connection and was fascinated by the new China that we, you know, we were living in, very different from the Shanghai stories.

And how did you guys—

Again, through Tom Crampton in Paris. So I think I missed a train in Paris and I had to crash at Tom Crampton's place. He said, you want to come to this book talk with Amy Tan? Like, sure. You know, and I chatted a bit with Amy after. She heard me, I think, speaking French because I grew up there. And then I guess I was on the phone in Chinese and she said, I hate you because you speak these languages. So hatred was the beginning of our relationship, but wonderful. I mean, they're just like family now. It's just, it's Super supportive. Yeah. So like, you know, mentor, I mean, particularly in the world of writing, I had no idea how to go about it. And so I, through her, I met Dan Hopper and her publisher. And so that was a very smooth process.

But you did well. It was such a fantastic book. And yeah, I've recently watched it, you know, Steve Martin and Martin Short put together really, really fun. And Martin's like an extreme extrovert and he talks about how Steve's actually an introvert. And it's funny that you point that out, but like share a few anecdotes with our listeners in podcast land, please, about the book and, you know, writing the book or whatever. I want to be the support.

book and your projects, because in a sense, the reason I wrote the book is because if it wasn't me, it was some other schmuck, basically. And the reason I mentioned that, when the IPO of Alibaba happened in 2014, there were, you know, talking heads on CNBC or Bloomberg or whatever, just saying stuff about Alibaba, about Jack, about the internet. It was just wrong. I mean, stuff about Jack saying, well, he went to Harvard University. I'm like, no, he didn't. You know, like they sort of mixed up the stories they'd heard about, you know, how Jack had applied to Harvard and didn't get in.

I already even heard they said there was a lie. Like they're like, there's no way that they're selling this much online. Like it's, he's defrauding investors. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Maybe you should check that a little bit because there's a lot of people in China with money and internet connections, right, that buy stuff.

But, you know, what you're doing is so important because unless we kind of, I hate to say, set the record straight, but just, you know, say it as we've seen it, you're going to have increasingly now with so little connection between China and the U.S. and the West right now. Unfortunately, these, you know, stick figure characterizations of individuals or frankly the whole country, it's quite dangerous in both directions, right? I mean, we could say the same thing about nationalists in China looking at the U.S. and so on. So I think it's important that we, you know, step up and, you know, one, showcase the positive experiences we've had here. Hopefully just more factually, just kind of when you can, you know, the solution to pollution is dilution, right? I mean, just adding light, not heat.

The solution to pollution is dilution. It's beautiful.

Just add fresh water, you know, just, we can help hopefully contribute to a deeper understanding, you know, because it is increasingly being twisted, you know, like the, what's happening here. And there's some bad stuff, you know, happening here. We can talk about.

So I saw this thing today, you know, Joe Biden's son Hunter is selling this art. And they're like, he's selling art through a gallery, and the gallery owner has ties to China, as if they're saying like ties. And I'm like, wait a second, I have ties to China. As a matter of fact, who doesn't have ties to China?

They're made in China; they're fake. Oh, sorry, I get your point.

But then I look at this guy who has ties to China, and his ties to China was he was quoted in China Daily in 2014 saying, "Yeah, I don't know much about Chinese art, but I'd like to you know learn more." So just saying that he has ties is a slur, right? And just like.

Illness in a way, or affliction. You know, one, I mean, I mentioned earlier the Japan phobia of the '80s. I mean, when you know Japanese were buying Rockefeller Center, for example, or Hawaii. But going deeper, and actually stuff I've learned about more through Amy Tan's experience as well, and hers, you know, going way back, of course, to the Chinese Exclusion Act. And you know, this is not new in a sense. This is like a new face of an old, you know, phobia being used. And you know, of course, like I totally believe in the importance of having a high wall and a small garden around national security and defense and all that. But this idea that anything. with ties to China, as you put it, is suspect. It's just, you know, very costly. Firstly, it's going to be very costly. But so being strategic about, you know, when we say ties to China, right? But yeah, so I think internet, I guess, was this, you know, again, it was an academic project initially. Okay. There was the origins of internet in DARPA and so on, but it, you know, in China was connected to the US at the Institute of High Energy Physics with SLAC at Stanford. So this started as an academic project and then it was, you know, it was naively wonderful at the beginning, the internet in the US and in China. And then, of course, over time, as it got bigger, it became more impactful. Government got involved, businesses got bigger. But, you know, the origin was this connectivity, right? And, you know, and look what happened when we do connect in ways, you know, there's so much positive that has come out of that. So hopefully, you know, we can still focus on that. And so that's why I think it's important to share experiences and from people who are here, who have lived here, who have more depth than, you know, there's a sort of Meryl Streep, I love Meryl Streep, but the Out of Africa, like I had a farm in Africa. I mean, it's a bit like when Meg Whitman, lived in Shanghai, which when, you know, eBay, I think it was the Marriott service department, 2 weeks or something. People want to brag about the time they spent in China before. Now they don't even mention China. I hardly know her. You know, we all want to have our China stories. It used to be positive ones. And now it's like, why I didn't go back or why I'm never going to go back. Now I've seen these surveys, people saying like, oh, I'm scared to travel there. And, you know, of course they may have reasons to, but it's just sad how far we've come from those heady days.

Certainly. And like engagement is the only way forward. There's just absolutely, you know, like I said, I'm going to have Kaiser on next week and it's just, you know, redonkulous, but You know, of course, high walls around sensitive things. But you know, there really is you know so little sensitive, you know, so few sensitive areas when it really comes down to it. There's so many opportunities to engage and do commerce.

But that middle ground is shrinking, isn't it? I mean, you know, between being a useful idiot, you know, to China and being a China basher, you know that. I don't know if it's. It's not even ground left. I think it's like a tightrope. Yeah.

Well.

It is. And, you know, our friend Mitch, who's down in Hong Kong now, he said, you know, I'm neither a panda slugger nor a panda hugger, right? And I'm just, you know, I'm somewhere in the middle, but, you know, sometimes maybe you have to slug a little bit, you have to hug, but for the most part, you're just trying to—

We're definitely panda curious, you know.

Well played. That's great. So, hey, so talking about, you know, just sharing stories and anecdotes, like let rip with a few Jack Ma stories. I know that you have Given so many talks about your book and about your ties with Jack?

Well, I mean, I think it's interesting looking back, particularly given what happened with the non-IPO so far anyway of Ant, you know, what led up to that. I'm thinking how Jack, say in the last 10 years, is different from the, say, the previous 10 years that I knew him. And I think, of course, how could one person not change when you've become so, you know, frankly famous and wealthy, but also impactful on society? But I think, you know, the early Jack stories were, you know, it was a simpler time, I guess, you know, One specifically, I remember walking, we were both invited to speak at Harvard University in January and maybe giving, you know, people saying, well, he went to Harvard. Well, I went to Harvard too. I went there for a day. By the way, I like to say I went to HBS. People are, oh, very impressive. Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, right? That's my shtick. I didn't go to business school anyway, but Jack, he gave a talk, which of course brought the house down. But I remember walking on the Charles River, isn't it?

Yeah.

Along the riverbank there. I'm kidding. Charles, I know this is your town, but it was January and there was this people filming Jack as we're walking along. And I thought, hmm, is this something sent by Harvard to like document this event? Or is he that big a deal? And I asked him, he said, no, no, these are my friends. They've been filming me for 5 years. It's a bit like in those class photos, if somebody would like hold a, you know, those huge class photos, your whole high school class, and you'd be holding a hula hoop. People are like, why? Oh, 'cause I'm the one they're gonna circle in 10 years. He was like so confident and literally had these almost disciples. You know, I think this lady, I think she'd been with him in the previous 2 ventures. Again, Alibaba was his 3rd company at this point. I mean, people had followed him to these different companies, even they followed him to Beijing. Of course, he worked in Beijing before founding Alibaba because he had to, you know, that's how he met Jerry Yang and so on. But anyway, the point being that he had this charisma and I write about that in the book. I mean, it's this magnetic charisma both in China, in Chinese and in English. And I think that, you know, you mentioned Hutba.

Extraordinary.

And Blarney, he's Irish.

Yes, indeed. Right. I've filtered so many people through my gills, as have you, right? We enjoy, you know, talking to people like we're both cut of that same sort of like, yeah, I'll talk to anybody and I'm curious and I love it. But he is really such an extraordinary— like calling him one in a million is insulting because that means there's 1,400 people like him in China. There's like, he's one in 10 million or 100 million.

I mean, you know, and that became in the last 10 years, I guess, became part of the challenge in a way, both with the power of fintech as we've seen, you know, but also even in his international profile to the extent that when say David Cameron would visit or Macron, Hangzhou, you know, of course they would make a beeline to Alibaba. And if you do the experience there, they'll show you on the screens, you know, your country's products are selling now live here. And, you know, of course it's catnip to any politician. And then the problem is they would, oh, oh, I guess we should go see the party secretary. And it started to be a problem, you know, that his charisma was too strong actually and too compelling. And people call him on a first name basis. Of course he can speak English, you know. So I was involved a bit with David Cameron invited him to, you know, these pre-Brexit It you know years to Jack was part of the advisory group for business there, and you know many examples. The same Jack had the Légion d'honneur in Paris, and you know he outshone. Of course, he outshone the previous leader in China. We know who was not very charismatic individual by design, but of course that's changed. So adjusting to that, it didn't happen fast enough.

It seems yes. Fascinating how that's really you know Icarus.

That's the last chapter. It's Icon of Icarus in my book. I had to hedge my bets because you know you put a year into writing a book and like what if? But I think the last ten years, particularly since the Alipay. kind of transaction, which I mentioned in chapter 11 of the book, when, you know, it started to get a bit heavier into tensions with government and, and RG Barge. As you get big, you know, inevitably you're going to have more enemies in a sense, more rivals. And so like the early Jack stories that you and I knew, and, you know, when you had him down to Hong Kong and stuff, you know, it was a different time. But that charisma has been a constant. But the, the impact that he's had has just grown to some extent that that charisma became almost dangerous in a sense.

Fascinating. And, you know, you introduced our friend Porter Ersmann to Jack and he became his right-hand man for communications.

After he'd worked on the Asia Info deal with Scott Kronick, I think you also had on your—

Indeed, right?

Everything goes back to Scott Kronick, we should say. Like everybody at some point has either worked for Scott or is married to, you know, somebody who worked for me. Like 2 people worked for me were married to people at Ogilvy.

That guy, like, okay, maybe we have met somebody like Jack and that's Mr. Kronick, right?

He's welcoming him back, I think, hopefully in a few months from LA. Yeah.

Indeed. Indeed. Yeah.

So, but you know, Porter, this is inside baseball, but I mean, Ogilvy, you know, which by the way, I don't think was a major in the US, for example, a major PR firm, but in China had a huge Grew it to the biggest PR firm in Asia. Right.

Right. You know, and, uh, I think it was $120 million top line.

I mean, that's— Yeah.

Chris Weideman and, like, great team, great people. Yeah.

Amazing mafia. So, you know, we talked a little bit before about like these, you know, key people that get spawned kind of like the PayPal mafia. Um, you know, tell us about some of the, the things you've observed, you know, in addition to Jack with other internet players, you know. Yeah.

I mean, I think one thing that people don't give enough credit to, one, as I mentioned, the beginning of my company here, Vidya, was about this telecom layer. And so that was very important that, you know, this became the play Pen for all of us. If there wasn't, you know, decent broadband and decent, you know, 3, 4, and now 5G, you know, we wouldn't have been able to participate in this, you know, content and games and all of that stuff on top of it. So, you know, kudos to some of the, you know, boring, if you will, civil servants and sort of early, you know, but also the equipment guys. So don't forget the, you know, Motorola, for example, if you go back to the mid-'90s, they were selling $1 billion of paging equipment in '95 in China. So, you know, it was already a big player back then. Alcatel, these companies. But I would say specifically Motorola, they trained up a lot of Chinese engineers who came back, who became leaders in business. So the Motorola University was almost, you know, the Harvard, if you will, of China tech. And one of the big changes, of course, the last 10 years has been how the big Western tech players, you know, in a sense they've enabled these Chinese players to grow, but they haven't, of course, participated in the fruits to the same degree. But partly that's happening around the world. You know, the guys who built the networks, it's like the plumbers and the construction guys, you know, and all the IP. And of course there's all the controversy with Huawei and all that. But basically, you know, the Western players had helped build the infrastructure here, but it was the people they trained then took it to the next level in content and other stuff. And so, I mean, the positive story I see here is just the rise of Chinese entrepreneurs who, you know, well-trained, increasingly also well-financed, as you know, still a lot of, you know, US money coming in. And that, you know, story of China kind of creating its own dynamic and contrast with that, say Europe, where I'm originally from. I mean, we don't have big European tech companies with very few exceptions like Spotify or Skype before. And, you know, there's a big push to change that. that. But China, you know, didn't take the model where we just have to have, you know, dominant, say, U.S. content players. Of course, partly politics, but also, you know, just really entrepreneurial people who were well-trained and well-capitalized eventually. Initially not, the capital was scarce. But I think, you know, there's a positive story of how China, you know, pulled itself up in that. But, you know, companies like Motorola, Intel, Cisco even, you know, trained a generation really that are still very influential in the China tech scene.

Certainly, yeah, you could see a lot of entrepreneurs and tech execs coming out of those kind of factories.

And I guess when Google pulled out, of course, you know, when Google came, as you mentioned, I mean, I remember at the Beijing Hotel, I still have their lava lamp they gave us as their like lawn for Google. They changed the name of Google initially. It was something like a dog or something. But Google was actually doing better than people think, you know. I think they had maybe a third of the market, 40%. Okay, Baidu knew some stuff. But I think that was the beginning of a fundamental change when Google decided to leave, of course, for their own reasons. And, you know, we can talk about that. But I think I think that marks a big change also in how younger Chinese see the world, actually, because previous to that, there were frankly more sources available to them. And we start to see more, I think, of a closed mindset based on the information available to them post-Google's departure. And now, you know, we can talk about the rise of, you know, Xiaofenghong, like Little Pinks and nationalists. I think some of that is, you know, based on information that's available to them. And it's kind of sad in a sense. We, you know, I go back to this, you know, '90s, or let's say early 2000s, up through the Olympics, let's say, plus maybe a year or two, it was much more of an open operational time for, you know, West-East cooperation. And now we've had a, you know, solid decade of kind of the other way, I guess. And so I hope we can find some balance back, but it's going to be tricky because, you know, China is so big. So for the US, and, you know, you're from there, I mean, you have to adapt, I guess, to the fact there's another sun rising. You know, it's like looking out in the morning and seeing 2 suns rising. You've never seen that before. I mean, in Europe, you know, we, well, coming from Britain, we have a long experience of decline, you know, so we're the masters at that. We seem to be digging ourselves further in there, but, you know, we've been Between the Soviet Union, you—I mean—I grew up, you know, I could hear Radio Moscow, I could hear Voice of America, you know. But in the U.S., I think it's a psychological challenge for the U.S. to adapt, of course, to another big power in the world, and the rest of the world adapting to that new dynamic. So it's going to be very difficult, particularly in the field of technology. Yeah, well said.

And I think in the '80s, when I grew up, it was you know Russia's gonna you know destroy the world if Japan doesn't take it over first, right? And then the '90s was okay. Well, you know what? The wall fell, and Japan's in decline, and you know America's on the rise. And then I think after 9/11, America was really focused on the Middle East and didn't really notice China so much and really celebrated the Olympics. And then I think in the last decade, specifically in the last few years, like all of a sudden they're like, whoa, what, what happened? Where did that come from? So I think, you know, there's also, you know, I have an older friend who's like, you know what, like some of this like woke culture in the States, you know, it's like, okay, I understand a lot of the stuff that you're saying, but Like, give me a minute. I still, I have like 74 years of like doing stuff a different way. Like, let me absorb some of it, right?

Yeah. Even the language. I mean, every lang— right. I mean, every word is emotive. I mean, woke is a signal a person identifies himself and other people. Uh, unfortunately now language is, is splitting in terms.

And like, you don't even have to have like a really, you know, contrary position, but it's just something where it's like, okay, wait a second. Like, let me process this. And I I think a lot of people are in this kind of processing mode now of like, you know, what is China? Like, what's going on? Like, where do we fit, you know, relative to that? And of course there are some things that are just not okay, not kosher, you know, any sort of like, you know, espionage or sensitive military stuff, but like, hey, like I still get all of my, most of my goods from China as a consumer or, you know, and you know, there's, and like, what about the distinction between the government and the people as well too? Right. It's just a lot of people don't like the US government and what about The you know U.S. people, right? And it's just so much more nuanced, right?

I think because the dream that we had of ever closer cooperation, particularly in that post WTO you know 2001 run up to the Olympics, you know that didn't pan out, right? And you know of course the question now is like did we enable you know this bad outcome through that? Or frankly, you know I think should we be more scared of a China that's defensive? Yes, I think you know so if we can get back to a more cooperative. I don't know if that's possible, but I think we need to try at least to find the middle ground. The big challenge right now is the people-to-people contact is cut to maybe a few hundred people a day who are able to get in there. And those are only people who are residents here.

Wall Street Journal published that it may not open until 2025.

I mean, I managed to squeak back in here at the end of October from Paris, but there were, you know, there were 6 positive cases on the flight. They shut that route and then they closed the borders the next day. So we were lucky to get back in. But I think the problem also is like at student level, You know, the study of Chinese language, certainly at places like School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I believe that Japanese has again overtaken Chinese in terms of popularity, which relative to GDP and so, you know, it's amazing. And of course, you know, Westerners, for them to study Mandarin, there's not really at the end of that conveyor belt, a long conveyor belt to get, you know, get to anything approaching fluency. You know, it drops off. There's no dot.

It's been 25 years and I'm still on the conveyor belt.

It's a conveyor belt up Everest, I think, which breaks down and, you know, there's like Snakes and Ladders, right? So it's Chutes and Ladders, don't you? Snakes and Ladders in England. I forget. There's one of these English-American things.

I think it is Snakes and Ladders in the States and maybe Chutes and Ladders in the UK.

But that's important because if you think the people who are not learning Chinese now are not going to be doing stuff in 5, 10, 15 years. Partly that's because of the current situation with the borders being closed, also with the politics. But it's also that it's very difficult for Westerners, or let's say non-Chinese, to get a career in China or using Chinese when there are so many, amazingly, well. Chinese professionals who, by the way, often speak 2, 3, 4 languages, have been to some of the best schools in the world as well as in China. So in a sense, it's structurally very difficult. And this, you know, but there's been a real drop-off in, in that pipeline, of course, of future talent. And that's what I'm kind of worried about because then we don't see the connectivity, the understanding. This is why your books are important to share, you know, share stories and insight.

Yeah. So I'm a mentor at the Schwarzman School. Of course, you are as well. And it's so extraordinary, right? You know, Stephen Schwarzman, you know, founder of Blackstone, and like put that together. And the building itself might be one of the best, you know, structures inside of any university, 8-story courtyard. But, you know, the idea that, okay, we have 130 students and, you know, they're from all over the world, but, you know, a lot of them are American. And, you know, he's got people from West Point and from the Naval Academy, Annapolis, but also the equivalent in China, like living under the same roof. And, you know, the Chinese students of course are actually from those military academies or in their military outfits. But the, you know, I've been over there for lunch a couple of times and seen that. But of course, sizing each other up and like, you know, but 20 years from now it's like, oh, oh, hold on. Well, wait a second. Put that plastic cover back on the red button and like, hey, Xiaobo, are we really doing this? Like, you know what I mean? It's like that kind of dialogue, right? Because it's, it's about engagement and dialogue. And I think it's lost a lot of nuance and, you know, there needs to be a better bridge, you know, across. Yeah.

Yeah. If I, you know, promote one thing is the Asia Society that actually Fritz got me involved in a long time ago. I'm a global trustee now with Asia Society and Fritz is We're setting up Asia Society in France, actually, where I'm you know splitting my time now because there isn't a rep. There isn't a presence in the EU. There is in Zurich, but we'll be the first kind of EU presence for the Asia Society. But their mission—you go back to 1956. So John D. Rockefeller had this vision that Americans need to understand Asia better at a time when Asia was effectively an agrarian, still primarily society. This is post-Korean War, pre-Vietnam War for them. At a time when McCarthyism, you know, was still just running down. But he had the vision to say, look, we need to understand it, you know, culturally as well, and later became, you know, economics and policy. But that vision of somebody who, you know, frankly, because he was Rockefeller, could do that, you know, very few people could take that. But we need a new generation of brave people, I think. I mean, hopefully billionaires to back us, but, you know, who can actually try to be the bridge and using arts and culture education as the core without being naive. You know, you mentioned that some of the Schwarzman guys, when they go back to the US, they get interviewed by the FBI. And I don't know, maybe that's a good thing. But you know, it's just the level of fear, you know. So I salute people who've you know come out and studied in China. This last year's class of Schwartzman, of course, they had to do it from around the world. There's some crazy stories of where they were, but I guess hopefully they'll resume. But it looks like another year too. Yeah, it's gonna be wild.

They actually got pods together and they went to like North Carolina or Seoul or all these different places.

And it's tragic. People who stuck overseas, you know, see the WeChat groups and Facebook groups of people who you know couples separated. And you know, my friend who hasn't seen his wife in a year, and you know, journalists who can't leave. That's another tragic thing. I was separated from my.

boys for 9 months. Yeah. I couldn't get back in.

How did they feel about— no, I'm kidding. No, I'm sure they missed you.

No, it was actually funny because I, I actually bridged them where they were, which was online games, Steam games, and then memes. We basically communicated through memes. That's amazing. And then, uh, also video chats, but the video chats, you know, they were sort of like, you know, just kind of like grumpy, kind of like, yeah, they're too short, but not— they live here in Bali after being, you know, born and raised in China. But, uh, yeah, that was tough. And there's many, many stories like that of people being separated Yeah.

But I guess one thing we can say, the pandemic which we experienced in China with SARS, which now looks like a cough or something, but it did have a profound impact on technology as well. You know, as we mentioned, the growth of internet stuff and it, you know, it infused like a new vision for investments here and so on. So who knows? We don't know what the impact of this pandemic is yet, and we're still living it on the tail end of it, hopefully.

I think we can say that there was, you know, an immune response to SARS. I was back all for October, November. And I went to Chirfan for charity, right? This great, you know, a restaurant will give eight seats, and then, you know, it's free, but you pay for it, and all the money goes to charity. But then there's a four hundred person, you know, party at the Four Seasons Hotel at the end, and there I am, you know.

Oh, this October of just last year, right?

October of last year, and I was like, oh my God, I can't post this.

You felt like a Republican in Texas or something. Yeah, I know. You've changed. Spring Breaker in Florida. Yeah. Yeah. It was bizarre. I think I spoke to my friend Lee Yuan at the New York Times actually when I came back from, you know, two weeks in quarantine in Tianjin. And then within 2 days I had to host, it was for the China Britain Business Council or something I support here. And it was like a gathering of 250 people. Literally, I hadn't been in, you know, a room of more than 2 people, you know, for 6 months without masks or whatever. And, and there you were. And the number one thing I noticed unfortunately was halitosis from one person, you know, so masks have actually a beneficial impact. So I hopefully we can use that in future. We can just like, excuse me while I whip this out. Maybe they'll get the hint. It used to be like, can I offer you a mint? But now we also have, I'm going to wear this mask.

Yeah. I was hoping that handshaking would go away, you know, because then you go to, okay, I shake everybody's hand. Then you go to the bathroom, wash your hands. You come back, somebody shows a plate.

So I think, yeah, just the experience of the last, well, since I came back was about 8 months ago, you know, pretty much normal. And of course life with the QR code scan initially, and that's become more relaxed, but generally pretty normal life and thinking, and now watching, you know, people in the West certainly, you know, post-vaccination kind of emerging back into the light. So we feel like to some extent we're in the future. In China. And also at the beginning of the pandemic, I was able to, you know, go back to the UK and make sure my dad was safe. And, you know, because at the time people, this was in March of 2020, they were still dismissive of what this thing was. And so to some extent living in China, and maybe that's the, you know, with technology, but other stuff too, sometimes it is the future, you know, sometimes it's not, but it's be open to the idea of the trends, things happening here, good or bad, you know, maybe the future.

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, A big part of the book, right, is just awareness. Like things are happening really quickly in China, but this is actually what can be leveraged from that. There's actually a lot of good learnings, actionable learnings. And you know, this one quote that I love from Elon Musk is like, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the pace of innovation. And you know, the faster that one can experiment and launch and get data and feedback and rinse repeat, the faster one can innovate. And you know, China's really Really innovating at speed and scale that I think most people have no idea about. Right.

It's a new kind of innovation in a way. I mean, you know, we often think of innovation as invention in the labs and R&D and so on, but this kind of, you know, tweaking innovation. I mean, yeah, with all that data, you know, coming in and being able to tweak things and change, be very, very flexible. But yeah, so one thing I like to do is invest in early stage companies, but sometimes I haven't really invested much in China. But some of the things that you see in China.

Tell us about some of the investments you've done. Well, why?

I mean, it's often it's just based on an individual I meet, you know, because after having not really, you know, exploited fully the opportunity that Jack Ma gave me, I'm like very alert to very, you know, interesting people that I meet. And I'll be like, can I invest in that? You know, well, actually, can I work for you? And they say no. And then I'm above the age now that they'll hire me, you know, through Asia Society, actually at the demilitarized zone in between South and North Korea. I met a British journalist actually who used to be the Economist bureau chief there in Seoul. But through him, Daniel Tudor, I met a guy called Sung Yoon Lee, who basically founded this company called Radish Media, which basically similarly inspired by the mobile fiction revolution we saw in China, you know, with Pichanda and Tencent and so on. But he applied this in the West as a New York-based company with a strong engineering team in Korea. So within 5 years, I mean, the company was just acquired by Daum after, I think last year SoftBank invested and others. So, you know, Korea speed also is something. So I think, you know, business models that we see in Asia, you know, maybe China, maybe somewhere else in Asia, but China is obviously the biggest player. But applying that in the West, or increasingly not in the West but in the South, what we're seeing in Southeast Asia, what we're seeing in the Middle East. I think that you know Chinese entrepreneurs or Chinese business models are going even to West Africa.

They're getting money from Silicon Valley in Southeast Asia, but they're getting ideas from China, and then increasingly now more money from China. Right? So yeah, so I think the roadmap for China is actually much more compelling for these developing markets than the Silicon Valley one.

Yeah, and also you know they can't really penetrate you know U.S. or Europe to something. And we have seen, you know, some successes like AliExpress does really well in Southern Europe or in South America and Ukraine and Africa, but it, you know, they're not going to take on Amazon. They're not going to take on, you know, Amazon in Europe either. So yeah, we see that, but we see Chinese entrepreneurs are pushed actually from China by the intense competition here, or frankly, the new level of regulation that we're all reading about, you know, to go to other places. A bunch went to India. Of course, there was the, you know, border clash and the tragedy there. So maybe a billion dollars was lost actually by Chinese investors there. Uh, but boy, that, that seems to be easing a bit now, but also some of those people are in Ending up in Southeast Asia. I'm on a WeChat group with a few hundred of them in Southeast Asia. So obviously the rise of Grab, the rise of you know C and so on. We're seeing a you know China five ways. China South links, you know the global south, whatever, which is stupid term. But I mean basically it's it's you know not America, not Europe, not China. There's a lot to play with.

Absolutely great. Wow. Hey Duncan, it is always a pleasure, my friend. I just love likewise watching that turbocharge. Engine under the hood, you know. I wish I had it. Yeah. Thanks so much for that. To be continued. And I hope to give you a hug in person sometime.

We miss you here in Beijing. Come back soon.

Come and visit with Robin, my friend.

Ollie. Yeah.

Well, great to see you, buddy. All the best.

Thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks a lot.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show, season one at the speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. 再见，谢谢。