Chapter 75: Chapter 75

u 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

H

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.