Inside Knowledge

Streetwise in Asia

Michael Backman
INSIDE KNOWLEDGE
Also by Michael Backman and published by Palgrave Macmillan:

BIG in Asia: 25 Strategies for Business Success (with Charlotte Butler)

The Asian Insider: Unconventional Wisdom for Asian Business
M ICHAEL B ACKMAN

Inside
Knowledge
STREETWISE IN ASIA
© Michael Backman 2005
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90
Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2005 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN-13: 978 1–4039–4237–1
ISBN-10: 1–4039–4237–4
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Creative Print & Design (Wales), Ebbw Vale
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: Getting Streetwise 1
2 You’re Who? Names in Asia 8

Part I Places 19
3 China Triumphant 21
4 China in Crisis 31
5 Asia’s Big New Frontier: The Stans of Central Asia 48
6 The Stans in Detail 57
7 Anwar Ibrahim: Malaysia’s Dark Cloud 77
8 Guns for Hire: Australian Expatriates 89
9 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 98

Part II Markets 111

10 Outsourcing: It Need not be India 113
11 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 124
12 Singapore, Malaysia, and the International Arms Industry 138
13 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 147
14 Diamonds, Jains, and Jews 160
15 From Starbucks to Coffee Bean: Asia’s Coffee Shop
Revolution 167

v
vi Contents
16 The Peculiar Market for Birds’ Nests 176
17 Wheeling and Dealing in Asian Distressed Debt 182
18 The Secrets of Asia’s Five-star Hotels and their Guests 191
19 Who Owns Patpong? Thailand’s Sex Industry 201
20 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads, and Bollywood 207
21 Making Money and Avoiding Prejudice: Asia’s Parsis 224
22 The Far East and other Nonsense 233

Notes 236
Bibliography 247
Index 250
 Acknowledgements

“How do you get your information?” is a question I’m often asked. The
answer is from everywhere. Rarely do I miss an opportunity for a detail
here or a scrap of information there. Friends and associates in Asia and
elsewhere who pass on their ideas or send information to me that they
think might be useful are an important source.
The following have provided ideas and anecdotes that have specifically
been used in preparation of this book: Eddie Chin, Alistair Nicholas,
Charlotte Butler, David Hale, Ritchie Ramesh, Yolanda Fernandez
Lommen, Raymond Yee, Geoff Backman, Berry Cameron, M. Shan-
mughalingam, Eric Pringle, Justin Doebele, Zaman Tambu, Salil Tripathi,
Michael Warby, Ilangoh Thanabalan, John Kidd, Sandra Chia, Anne
Richter, Cyrill Eltschinger, Fred Woollard, and Joni Djuanda. Thank you
to each of you.
And to Alison Anag who cares so much about my writing and whose
generosity and perceptiveness have helped to get me through, thank you also.
Various politicians and business figures in Asia have been helpful. Often
it is not appropriate to attribute their comments to them but I have done so
in the text where I can.
Stephen Rutt, Alastair Gordon, Steve Maginn, Anna van Boxel, Keren
Cheung, Regina Chan, and the rest of the team at Palgrave Macmillan
have put in their usual excellent effort. This is the third book of mine that
has been handled by Stephen and the others at Palgrave Macmillan. It
started with Big in Asia, which I co-wrote with my good friend Charlotte
Butler, and has grown into a series.
Finally, a big thank you to Rudolf Phua, his wife Catherine, and their

vii
viii Acknowledgements
team at Pansing Distribution in Singapore. Rudolf and Catherine are two
of the most decent people I’ve met in the book business. They and their
staff are utter professionals and are a real pleasure to work with. Writing a
book is just one part of a long process and there’s little point if at the other
end the book doesn’t receive the attention it should. The effort and the care
taken by Rudolf and Pansing make me want to keep writing. What more
can I say?
Facts
쐀 China is set to emerge second only to the United States as having the
world’s biggest population of English speakers. Imagine what that will
do to India’s business process outsourcing sector.
쐀 Kazakhstan has the world’s second largest oil field. Prior to 2000, no
one knew the field existed. Suddenly Kazakhstan matters.
쐀 China has 33 cities with populations of a million or more.
쐀 Eight out of ten of the world’s diamonds are cut and polished by
Indian Jain family companies in India.
쐀 There are more McDonald’s restaurants in Japan than there are in
Australia.There are more Chinese restaurants in Australia than there
are in Japan.
쐀 India, the world’s leading IT outsourcing country, has just a quarter of
the number of internet users of China. Both have billion plus
populations.
쐀 Casinos are banned in China. Neighbouring countries have responded
by ringing China with at least 50 legal casinos just inside their borders.
쐀 Adult literacy levels are higher in Mongolia and North Korea than in
Singapore.
쐀 China is an emerging investor in third world countries. One reason?
It is not constrained by foreign corrupt practices legislation.
쐀 Tetley Tea worldwide, like Asia’s largest IT outsourcing company Tata
Consultancy Services (TCS) is controlled by a series of Parsi
charitable trusts.
쐀 Food consumption rises in Asia’s Islamic nations during the Islamic
fasting month of Ramadan.
쐀 Prostitution is legal in Singapore and illegal in Thailand.

ix
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter Introduction:

1 Getting
Streetwise

A tsunami of historic proportions; embryonic legal systems; a shortage of

professional managers; the SARS and bird flu panics; arrogant govern-
ments that claim that Confucianism gives them carte blanche to clamp
down on media freedom, journalists, and the internet; and companies that
pay only lip service to corporate governance: these are some of the prob-
lems with which investors in Asia must contend, be they from Asia or
outside. But Asia is also home to economies that are changing at a
dramatic and exhilarating pace, with rapid increases in spending power,
and cultures and people that are a delight.
The biggest problem in Asia is information. Much of the region is an
information-scarce operating environment, not just for outsiders but for
everyone. It means that quality information is one of Asia’s most valuable
commodities. So the trick is to be streetwise. How? Information must be
gleaned from everywhere. In Asia, businesspeople matter, more so than
companies. Personalities are important as are personal relationships. It all
means that the scope of what can be considered business information is wider
in Asia than perhaps anywhere else. Who is connected with whom, what
interests them, and what are their involvements? It all helps to build a picture
of what’s really going on and, more importantly, what might happen next.
“Some people say that the sultans of Johor will never again serve as
Malaysia’s king,” I was told recently in Kuala Lumpur.
“Why not?”, I asked.
“They have Jewish blood, that’s the rumor.”
Jewish blood? This seemed a little far fetched for the Islamic sultanate
in the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsular that’s just opposite Singa-

1
2 Inside Knowledge
pore. Each of Malaysia’s nine hereditary rulers elect from their own
number the Yang di-Pertuan Agong or king of Malaysia who serves a five-
year term. Each is Muslim. It cannot be any other way.
Back in London I chatted with my step-mother-in-law who was visiting
from Australia. She’d spent time in London in the 1960s on a working
holiday. What kind of work did you do, I asked? One job that lasted for six
months involved keeping a wealthy, ageing Hungarian Jewish lady
company in her apartment in Grosvenor House on Park Lane.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“Oh, it was terribly dull”, she said. “I had to go there each day, sit with
her and keep her company. She rarely went out, although most afternoons
she would get all dressed up and then we would go downstairs and sit in
the foyer. We would watch people come and go, not that many did.
Christina Ford lived in the apartment next door but you never saw her. But
there was one aspect about the job that made it interesting. Mrs Mendel
was the mother of the sultana of Johor.”
“Really?”
“But she was Jewish you said?”
“She was very Jewish. Yehudi Menhuin, the violinist, was an occasional
visitor. Family members would sometimes visit. But the main event of the
week was the delivery each Thursday of kosher Hungarian sausages. They
arrived from Harrods which had them flown in from Budapest.”
And so this is how I came to confirm, from my own mother-in-law, that
the sultan of Johor had in fact been married to a Hungarian Jew and had a
mother-in-law by the name of Mrs Mendel. Small pieces of information on
Asia turn up all over the place.
It was Mrs Mendel’s daughter, Marcella, who became Sultan Ibrahim’s
fourth official wife. They married in the 1950s and had one daughter,
Meriam. The sultan was in his seventies. Why this should preclude future
sultans from becoming king isn’t clear. No doubt the rumor is just that.
After all, wasn’t the Prophet Muhammad’s tenth wife Jewish by birth? But
then rumor is just part of the information game. It’s a game that everyone
plays in Asia, no matter what their line of business.
Beach hawkers and souvenir sellers harass visitors to Bali incessantly
when they first arrive. But the pestering stops after a few days. Why?
Because as the hawkers themselves have told me, they determine how
long tourists have been on the island by the depth of their skin tans. The
new arrivals are the easiest targets: they are yet to buy their souvenirs, yet
to harden to the hawkers’ overtures, and, having just arrived, are cashed
up. Tourists find that the harassment eases as their stay progresses,
unaware that it is their changing skin tone that is the reason.
 Introduction: Getting Streetwise 3

Honeymooners are prime targets. They’re big spenders and usually are
interested in decorative items to adorn the new marital home. But how do
the hawkers ascertain who is newly wed and who is not? They look at visi-
tors’ wedding rings. If they are shiny and new, they know they have found a
target. And so for the hawkers on Bali, a tan or a shiny wedding band
convey competitive intelligence, commercially useful information.
It doesn’t matter whether you sell aircraft to airlines in China or
seashells to tourists at Kuta beach, much useful information about poten-
tial customers can be gained from their appearance and attire. Quick
decisions can then be made about how best to shape your pitch.
Succeeding in Asia is all about watching and noticing.
How many times have you walked into a shop in Asia and the proprietor
greets you by looking at your watch? He’s assessing how much you can
afford; how much time he should spend with you. When quality infor-
mation is in short supply, people develop proxy ways of finding out what
they need to know. They become streetwise, a skill that isn’t much needed
in the information-rich economies of the West.
No longer do all Sikh men outside India grow their hair and beards long
and wear turbans. Instead they are neatly trimmed and look like anyone
else, but for one exception: most still wear the kangan or kara, a thin metal
band usually made of pure silver but never of steel or gold, on the right
wrist. It is there on the right hand to remind the wearer to act wisely and
fairly because it is the right hand that is used to do most things. Muslim
men don’t wear gold or silk, Indonesians usually wear their wrist watches
on their right hands, Filipinos nearly always have a nickname. Details like
these lead to more details and soon one’s operating environment begins to
make sense. So information is available everywhere in Asia. It’s a question
of how to identify it and use it. That leads to the purpose of this book: the
harnessing of knowledge in Asia to provide a competitive advantage in
business, not just overtly business-oriented knowledge but all knowledge.

About this Book

Inside Knowledge is a companion book for The Asian Insider. But it’s not
necessary to have read The Asian Insider first. Like The Asian Insider, it is a
pot pourri, a smorgasbord if you like, a bit like Asia. It is not comprehensive.
How could it be? However, each of my Asia business books, Inside Asia,
The Asian Insider, Big in Asia (written with Charlotte Butler), and Asian
Eclipse, when considered together and as one body of work should provide
an almost encyclopedic coverage of much of the detail of business in Asia.
4 Inside Knowledge
Inside Knowledge provides detailed information on discrete areas related
to Asian business that go beyond the usual superficial treatments provided
by most business books. After all, Asia does not have the strict divisions
between the realms of business and non-business that the West does. The
predominance of family firms is one reason. Where does the family end and
the firm begin, particularly when most firms are managed by the family?
Leisure pursuits often provide opportunities for business networking. Golf
is the most celebrated example in Asia. But art collecting is another means
by which wealthy businesspeople in Asia are brought together. And so
many ostensibly non-business pursuits in Asia have a business component.
Inside Knowledge begins with a chapter on people’s names in Asia. This
is deliberate. Connections count for a lot in Asia and an obvious starting
point is understanding Asian naming structures which vary across the
region and can be as confusing to people in Asia as those from outside.
But there are some very practical considerations too. Surnames are in short
supply in some parts of Asia; many share the same name, something which
plays havoc with credit checks, for example.
Thereafter the book is divided into two parts: “Places” and “Markets.”
“Places” includes two chapters on China, one provides a positive account
and the other a negative. Too many people in business focus on China’s
positives but prudence dictates that the negatives must also be given due
consideration.
Chapters 5 and 6 look at the newly emerging economies of Central Asia,
most particularly Kazakhstan but also its neighbors. Why? Because Central
Asia has enormous potential and is only just beginning the path to prosperity
that the rest of Asia started decades ago. Information on Central Asia is hard
to come by so I’ve erred on the side of detail to help fill the information gap.
Chapter 7 looks at Malaysia and specifically the position of former
Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim now that he has been released from
jail. Why Anwar in particular? Because politics and business are so inex-
orably entwined in Malaysia. What happens in Malaysian politics
inevitably affects business.
Chapter 8 analyses the role that Australian expatriates play in Asia and
elsewhere. Australians have become prominent in the Asian offices of
accounting, law, and other professional services firms. In one sense,
Australians are becoming a commercial diaspora in their own right, much
like overseas Chinese or non-resident Indians. They have moved to occupy
economic space rather than geographic space, a borderless and mobile
commercial community in search of the challenges that evade them in their
own comparatively safe and well-developed home working environment.
Chapter 9 focuses on Nepal. The country is underresearched and a relat-
 Introduction: Getting Streetwise 5

ively unknown quantity among those in business. Opportunity typically

lies where information is poorest. Just maybe Nepal is more than beauti-
ful scenery. The first step is to gain more than a passing knowledge about
the country.
“Markets,” this book’s second half, takes a look at various commodities,
products, and crazes that are either unique to Asia, have come to be domi-
nated by Asian countries, or have a particular Asian flavor. The first is
business process outsourcing in which firms in India have become world
leaders. But competitors are closing in. Chapter 10 looks at some of these
competitors, including emerging competition from China. Why is China
emerging as a player? To date, two factors have driven the international
outsourcing market: cost and English language abilities. One of the most
important dynamics in the world today, one which is yet to be fully recog-
nized, are the numbers of mainland Chinese who are learning English. The
trend is difficult to quantify but I suspect that within a surprisingly short
period, the nation with the largest number of English speakers after the
United States will not be India or the Philippines, but China.
Other markets addressed are those for Asian art and antiques, birds’ nests,
rare fish, diamonds, sandalwood, arms and munitions, and bad loans and
distressed debt. Hotels in Asia (a subject close to many business travelers’
hearts) are examined and how the behavior, attitude, and expectations of
guests differ according to their countries of origin. Chapter 15 covers the
phenomenal growth of Starbucks and its imitators across Asia. There is also
a chapter on Thailand’s sex industry and Bangkok’s well-known Patpong
night strip. Why? Because the matter of the ownership of Patpong fascinates
many, particularly as prostitution is actually illegal in Thailand. That
Patpong not only exists but is world renowned shows how what passes for
the law operates in Thailand, with all the attendant implications for business.
But of course the biggest game in town in Asia today is China and
China runs through many of the chapters. As mentioned, China is set to be
an important player in business process outsourcing. It is a leading foreign
investor in Central Asia where it is constructing oil and gas pipelines
inside Kazakhstan. The bid to snare mainland Chinese gamblers is why
Asia’s governments such as Singapore’s that have always opposed casinos
now plan to allow them. New demand from China is driving Southeast
Asia’s birds’ nest industry. The extraordinary boom that’s now underway
in Chinese art and antiques is largely underwritten by mainland Chinese
speculators. China also has the potential to revive Asia’s market for bad
loans and distressed debt, as billions in bad loans are carved from its banks
and sold off. The implications of China’s dramatic economic growth are
very wide indeed.
6 Inside Knowledge
Table 1.1 Comparing Asia: Who ranks where?
Country or Disposable Population Corruption Adult Ageing population
territory income (GDP (millions) (perceived literacy (median age of
per capita: corruption: rank (%) population, years)
purchasing out of 145 countries;
power parity the higher the rank,
basis, US$) the more corrupt)

Hong Kong 28,800 6.9 16 93.5 39.4

Japan 28,200 127.3 24 99.0 42.3
Singapore 23,700 4.4 5 92.5 36.2
Taiwan 23,400 22.7 equal 35 96.1 33.7
Macau 19,400 0.45 n.a. 94.5 35.2
Brunei 18,600 0.37 n.a. 93.9 26.7
South Korea 17,800 48.6 47 97.9 33.7
Malaysia 9,000 23.5 39 88.7 23.8
Thailand 6,900 64.9 equal 64 92.6 30.5
China 5,000 1,299.0 equal 71 90.9 31.8
Philippines 4,600 86.2 equal 102 92.6 22.1
Sri Lanka 3,700 19.9 equal 67 92.3 29.1
Indonesia 3,200 238.5 equal 133 87.9 26.1
India 2,900 1,065.1 equal 90 59.5 24.4
Vietnam 2,500 82.7 equal 102 90.3 24.9
Pakistan 2,100 159.2 equal 129 45.7 19.4
Bangladesh 1,900 141.3 equal 145 45.2 21.5
Cambodia 1,900 13.4 n.a. 69.4 19.5
Burma/Myanmar 1,800 42.7 equal 142 85.3 25.7
Mongolia 1,800 2.8 equal 85 97.8 23.9
Laos 1,700 6.1 n.a. 66.4 18.6
Nepal 1,400 27.1 equal 90 45.2 19.9
Bhutan 1,300 2.2 n.a. 42.2 20.3
North Korea 1,300 22.7 n.a. 99.0 31.4
East Timor 440 1.0 n.a. 58.6 20.0
*** *** *** *** *** ***
United States 37,800 293.0 equal 17 97.0 36.0
Australia 29,000 19.9 9 100.0 37.1
United Kingdom 27,700 60.3 11 99.0 38.7

Sources: CIA Factbook, 2005; Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index,

www.transparency.org.
 Introduction: Getting Streetwise 7

Chapter 21 looks at the role of Asia’s Parsis, a minority commercial

community that has become disproportionately wealthy compared to the
local majority population. And yet, not for them the race-based pogroms
that, say, Indonesia’s wealthy Chinese minority community sporadically
endure. Why? While building up wealth through trading and commerce is
important, the Parsis also show that it’s important to then share that
wealth, if for no other reason than self-preservation. It’s a fitting chapter to
end on. Corporate social responsibility might be the new catch phrase
among modern corporations today, but the Parsis have been doing it for
centuries. The Parsis provide a lesson for all.
 Chapter
2 You’re Who?
Names in Asia

Understanding people’s names is important when doing business in

foreign markets. Which part is the family name? The given name? The
honorific? What’s the correct form of address? This is true in Asia as much
as anywhere. And it’s the case for people in Asia as well as non-Asians,
on account of the diversity of names and name structures from country
to country.
Getting someone’s name right is not only important for politeness.
There are other implications for business. One is that many computer
programs such as those that send out bank statements tend to assume
Western-style naming patterns. Fields require a surname and a personal
name but what if an individual doesn’t have a surname?
Confusion over names also plays havoc with credit checks; due dili-
gence checks; establishing ownership of real estate, stocks, intellectual
and other property; database searches for directorships; checking criminal
records; establishing family links; checking employment histories; deter-
mining entitlement for things such as insurance policies, inheritance, and
dividend payments; and confirming academic records of prospective staff.
Governments must grapple with diversity in names too. The correct
identification of individuals is important to determine entitlement for
government benefits and pensions, tax obligations, voting eligibility,
marital status, paternity, and tracking funds in international money laun-
dering cases and funds linked to terrorists.

8
 You’re Who? Names in Asia 9

The Case for Surnames

Not all cultures routinely use surnames. Throughout history, greater ease
of tax collection has been the usual reason for the introduction of
surnames. Surnames were introduced in Britain, for example, in the
eleventh century by the Normans so that taxes could be more easily
collected from the local population.
In the Philippines, surnames are in short supply, thanks to a decision of
the Spanish Governor-General Narciso Claveria in 1849 to streamline
them and allow only a small number of permissible surnames, all of which
were Spanish.1 Having just a few surnames was fine when the country
was small but now it has a population of around 80 million people. That
most Filipinos today have one of a small group of surnames causes enor-
mous problems of mistaken identity when it comes to credit checks and
catching criminals.
Many law-abiding Filipinos unwittingly share their names with crimi-
nals and so carry certificates from the National Bureau of Investigation to
prove that they are not wanted for some criminal act. Others find it diffi-
cult to obtain a credit card because someone else by the same name is a
bad debtor.
The use of nicknames is prevalent in the Philippines too and these
essentially supplant individuals’ real names. Nicknames ought to help
identify people from one another except that they are not official and the
same nicknames are used over and over. Many seem odd in contexts
outside the Philippines. “Baby,” for example, is a common nickname for
many Filipino women. But it can be difficult for outsiders to get used to
calling a 50-year-old woman Baby. A senior member of the Philippines
Senate is Senator Joker Arroyo. It’s difficult to imagine anyone succeeding
in politics anywhere else with a name like that. (There once was a candi-
date for an Australian federal election by the name of John Crook. “Put
another crook into Parliament” was his campaign slogan. Memorable but
not successful; he didn’t win.)
Biblical first names are popular among ethnic Filipinos who are largely
Catholic. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary are common personal names, or even
Jejomar, a contraction of all three.2 And among Filipinos of Chinese
descent, Chinese surnames often are included as part of their Filipinoized
surnames. The Chinese surname for the Gokongwei family which controls
the Universal Robina Group, for example, is “Go.”
Korea also has too few family names. Koreans have been required to
have surnames for only about the last 100 years. The world’s 75 million
ethnic Koreans share just 270 surnames, but most Koreans opted for
10 Inside Knowledge
names that were associated with the aristocracy. And so most Koreans
today have one of about half a dozen common surnames. Around a
quarter have the surname of Kim. Another quarter have either Lee, Park,
Choi, or Chung.3
Before 1943, no person in Laos had a family name. Laotians were iden-
tified by a given name only. Then in 1943 a law was passed whereby every
person was required to have a family name. And so today, Laotians follow
Western practice and use their family name last.
Many people still don’t have surnames in Mongolia. Most did use a clan
name as a surname prior to the Communist takeover in the early 1920s.
But too few clan names meant that it was difficult to distinguish Mongo-
lians from each other. So to improve national tax collection, the Commu-
nists banned the use of clan names and from that point on, Mongolians
used only their more diverse given names. But the pressures of globaliza-
tion have come even to Mongolia. The country is now in the process of
adopting family names so that Mongolians and Mongolia can better fit into
world markets. A law was passed in 1997 that required the adoption of
surnames but it went largely ignored until 2004 when the introduction of a
national identity card forced Mongolians at last to comply with the law.
Some Mongolians chose family names that derive from their father’s
given name, their village or their clan. Others chose surnames that reflect
their hobbies, occupations, or personalities. Defence Minister Gurragchaa,
for example, chose the surname Cosmos: he is the only Mongolian to have
gone into space. Some chose names to fool evil spirits such as “Bujir,”
which means filthy. Others preferred names that would bring luck such
as “Yesuntai” which means nine, a number deemed auspicious. Family
members do not always choose the same surnames and so it’s not
uncommon now for siblings to have different surnames. This is less of a
problem, however, than the fact that many have chosen the surname of
“Borjigin,” the clan name of Genghis Khan, the twelfth-century conqueror
from whom many Mongolians are descended. So many have chosen this
name that it will likely cause the sort of confusion that saw the Communists
outlaw surnames in the first place.
Many Javanese, the dominant ethnic group in Indonesia, use only one
name: they do not have family names, which is ironic, given the centrality
of the family in Indonesian society and the degree to which individuals are
judged by society according to the family from which they come. Soeharto,
former president of Indonesia, has no name other than that. (And for the
record it is spelt “Soeharto” which is how he signs it with his own hand and
not “Suharto” as preferred by the Western media. The “oe” derives from the
Dutch colonial period. To complicate matters, his predecessor Sukarno
 You’re Who? Names in Asia 11

used the more modern rendering that uses a “u” rather than an “oe”. But to
further complicate matters the correct spelling of Jakarta’s international
airport is “SoeKarno-Hatta Airport”.) Often these single names are short-
ened and used with an honorific. Soeharto was known as Pak Harto for
example. Pak is a title of respect that means a combination of Mr, uncle,
and father, and is itself shortened from bapak.
More unusually, some Javanese have several names, none of which
serves definitively as a family name. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono who was
elected the country’s president in 2004 is a case in point. The president’s
children use Yudhoyono but neither of his parents does.4 Close friends call
him Bambang. The Indonesian media call him either Mr Yudhoyono or Mr
Susilo, and, more commonly, simply SBY. As he became more prominent,
the international media seemed to adopt the rendering of Mr Yudhoyono.
But it’s not clear that Yudhoyono is necessarily the name that the president
himself would choose as a family name.

Name Changing
In Thailand, names are associated with luck. And that means that when
someone has a run of bad luck, they might decide that it is because their
name is unlucky either in part or in full.
Apichet Kittikorncharoen, lead singer of Thai boy band D2B had his
name changed for him. A car accident in August 2003 left him in a coma
and so the Supreme Patriarch blessed the singer with a new name,
Panrawat, which means “to remain alive according to the desires of loved
ones.”5 The strategy was only half successful. The singer went on to
contract a fungal brain disease, spent more than a year in intensive care
and is yet to fully recover.
Criminals who get caught sometimes change their names so that they
have better luck next time. And top businessmen who have had financial
troubles sometimes shed their names along with their debts.
Suseree Tavedikul, Thailand’s former ambassador to The Hague, changed
his name after being dismissed from the civil service. He sold his country’s
embassy to a local developer in 1999 without authorization from Bangkok.
He claimed that he was duped into it, but that didn’t explain why his signa-
ture appeared on the contract of sale and his initials on each of its 15 pages.
The name change presumably was to put an end to this run of “bad luck.”
In recent years, the Thai government in conjunction with the Red Cross
of Thailand has offered thousands of new names that are made available
via a public ballot. Successful applicants can select from the new names
available. Those with early numbers in the ballot have the most choice.
12 Inside Knowledge
People queue sometimes for days in the hope of getting a new, “luckier”
name. In February 2002, for example, 2545 new names became available.
They were created by monks at nine different temples. Married women are
not allowed to reserve new family names. Their names change by virtue of
their husbands changing theirs.
A newspaper report of the ballot for these names asked several people
why they wished to change their names.6 One man, a Thai of Chinese
descent, said that his surname was too Chinese sounding and that his
children would have a better future with names that sounded more Thai. In
any event, part of his surname was made up of “Chu” which in Chinese
means “diamond” but in Thai means a “type of breed of dog.” One lady
said that her name clearly was unlucky because “every man I married was
a drunk.” Another man simply felt that it would be better to have a name
that had been blessed by the Supreme Patriarch.
On another occasion, Somboon Krobteerawong, country manager for
Visa International for Thailand and Indochina changed the “wong” ending
of his surname to “non” so that his surname became Krobteeranon. He felt
the new rendering was more auspicious.7
Name changing to bring a change in fortune is not unique to Thailand.
Malay parents in Malaysia sometimes will change a child’s name if the
child is sickly or appears to have bad luck. Chinese sometimes do this too
in respect of their children. But Chinese adults also sometimes change their
names, often on the advice of a feng shui master who will choose a “better”
name for the individual, usually in respect of their career aspirations.
Rarely, though, do they change their family names. And often, they will try
to obtain a new name that sounds like the old name but which has more
auspicious or “appropriate” Chinese characters. Hong Kong actor Jackie
Chan’s name is pronounced as Cheng Loong. His Chinese name was
changed from one that was relatively lacklustre to this name which means
“Become Dragon.” (Lee Kuan Yew named his son Hsien Loong, Singa-
pore’s prime minister, the Chinese equivalent of “Show Dragon.”)
Name changing does not help with procedures such as credit checks and
verifying employment histories. But being aware of these nuances can
help to improve the veracity of such checks.
Long, complex Javanese names suggest that the individuals so named
are members of the aristocracy, the priyayi, or nobles. Sometimes, such
individuals attach a prefix to their names such as Raden or Raden Mas
sometimes shorted to R.M. Similarly, in Thailand, individuals with an aris-
tocratic ancestry often have the pronoun “na” in their names, as in Chirayu
na Ayudhya, the head of Thailand’s Crown Property Bureau, the powerful
personal investment vehicle for the Thai king.
 You’re Who? Names in Asia 13

Aristocratic ancestry, however, no longer holds much cachet in much of

Southeast Asia, if only because the widespread practice of polygamy has
rendered families so large and decedents so numerous that probably liter-
ally millions of Southeast Asians can now claim at least some aristocratic
ancestry. Wealth has become diluted and opportunities are no more exten-
sive than those available to anyone else. I have met extended members of
the Perak royal family, for example, who live in low-cost housing on the
outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.
The Burmese have long names of several components, all of which are
used in conversation and are rarely shortened even among close friends.
So Daw Ang San Suu Kyi is the correct form of the name of Myanmar’s
most famous citizen, even for those on close personal terms with her.
Usually it will not be shortened even during conversation with her. Daw is
the equivalent of Mrs.

China and Chinese

There are perhaps 6000 possible Chinese surnames, but many have died
out. Today, there are around 3100 surnames in active use in China, but
almost a third of the population, or 350 million people, share one of just five
surnames: pronounced in Mandarin as Zhang, Wang, Li, Zhao, and Chen.
Each is pronounced differently in other dialects. Zhang, for example, is
pronounced as Chong in Hakka, Chang in Hokkien, Cheung in Cantonese
and Teo in Teochew. Wong, the most popular surname in Hong Kong, is
pronounced as Wang in Mandarin, Heng in Teochew, and Ong in Hokkien.8
Increasingly, mainland Chinese use two character names instead of the
more traditional three, which remains more common among Chinese
outside China. In part, this trend has been driven by email protocols that
have difficulty dealing with names in three parts. China’s President Hu
Jintao has a name of three characters, but two of the three vice-premiers,
Huang Ju and Wu Yi, use names comprising only two characters.
More complications come not only from how to translate Chinese
names into Roman letters but how to translate them back. The wife of one
friend holds an Australian passport in her Chinese name but not in Chinese
characters. Banks in China have had difficulty accepting her passport as
proof of her identity because they are unsure if the Australianized Chinese
version of her name properly matches what she says are the Chinese char-
acters for her name. Ultimately, she was allowed to open a bank account in
China using her Chinese name rendered in Roman letters but not in
Chinese characters, an odd result for someone who is ethnically Chinese.
14 Inside Knowledge
Other mainland Chinese adopt more Western-sounding names based on
their Chinese names. An Na, for example, might choose to westernize her
name as Anna An, and Pan Yi might become Penny Pan. Others simply do
a straight translation of their given names from Chinese to English, which
is fine, except that in some cases, names that are unremarkable in Chinese
seem odd in English. For example, Li Haijun might westernize his name
as Navy Li because Haijun means navy in Chinese. Zuo You in English is
rendered as Left Right. Others have names that reflect the Communist era.
Chen Da Hong is one example. Chen is a common family name. But Da
Hong means “Big Red” or “Really Red.”
Sometimes, mainland Chinese adopt Western-sounding names according
to their work environment. It’s not uncommon to find local Chinese staff in
the Beijing office of an American multinational who call themselves John,
Paul, or Sandra. Go to the office of a French multinational and you’ll likely
find yourself dealing with local Chinese who’ve adopted names such as
Marcel, Francois, and Michele.
The Chinese outside China usually use the same middle name for all
siblings of the same sex. For example, two brothers might be Yau Yat Chi
and Yau Yat Ming. Often Koreans follow suit in respect of sons. It’s one
way of telling if two or more directors of a company are brothers or simply
share the same surname, and thus the extent to which a publicly listed
company might actually be under family control.
Chinese communities outside China have their own name dynamics
often on account of chain migration or local political sensitivities. There
might be 6000 possible Chinese surnames but only 500 are in common use
in Singapore. And a fifth of all Singaporean Chinese share one of three
surnames: Tan (9.9%), Lim (6.9%), and Lee (4.6%). Each of these is the
Hokkien rendering, reflecting the dominance of Singapore’s Hokkien
community. The Chinese character for Tan is said as Chen in Mandarin,
Chan in Cantonese and Ting in Fuzhou.9
The transliterations themselves from Chinese, Thai, Tamil, or Hindi
characters can introduce further complications. In Hong Kong, it is not
unusual for members of one Chinese family to have different surnames
when rendered in English. Often it depended on which government official
registered the births and their preferred way to translate Chinese names.
And so a Mr Tsang might have a brother who is a Mr Chang, Tsao might
also be spelt as Chao, and so on.
Most Chinese in Indonesia have adopted Indonesian names but among
family many still use their Chinese names. Chinese in Singapore or Hong
Kong whose forebears spent time in Indonesia often have Dutch render-
ings of their Chinese family names. The surname that commonly is written
 You’re Who? Names in Asia 15

as Wee, for example, is often spelt Oei among Chinese with Indonesian
backgrounds as in prominent Singapore entrepreneur Oei Hong Leong
who was born in Indonesia, Cho is written as Tjoe, and Lim as Liem.
Other Indonesian Chinese have embedded their Chinese names in their
Indonesianized names. Former billionaire entrepreneur Liem Sioe Liong,
for example, adopted the family name Salim. Others followed Javanese
practice and took just one Indonesian name. Jakarta property developer
Tjie Tjing Hwa took the single Indonesian name Ciputra. The well-known
Jakarta-based historian Ong Hok Ham simply joined the three parts of his
name to make the single name Onghokham.
Ethnic Thais usually have relatively short last names, and Thais with
longer surnames are usually ethnic Chinese. Many such names comprise
their original Chinese surnames combined with Thai words considered
lucky. The founding family of Bangkok Bank is Sophonpanich, which
means “good business” in Thai; the word “panich” (pronounced “panit”)
suggests “wealth”. Chiarapurk is the Thai name of the Thai-Chinese
family that controlled Singapore and Malaysia’s MPH bookstore chain.
Their Chinese family name is Chia.
Many Chinese in Southeast Asia choose Western-sounding first names
in addition to their Chinese names. Certain names are popular in certain
countries but they seem old-fashioned compared with trends in Western
countries: names like Mavis, Lawrence, Linus, Edmond, and Edgar. Often
these names, which mostly are chosen by the individuals themselves in
adult life, come to supplant their actual Chinese given names. This leads to
identification problems because while the names effectively become the
individual’s “real” name, usually they have no legal standing. Malaysian
or Hong Kong Chinese often experience problems proving their residential
addresses and their identity when they wish to open a UK bank account if
their residence is in the name of, say, Edmund Wee but their passport is in
the name of Wee Chee Yee.
Some choose cute-sounding first names. I once sat next to an Indonesian
Chinese woman at a conference called Happy. She was. I’ve come across
women in Singapore named Sunshine, Sunflower, and Morning. And I
know of one Malaysian Chinese man who called himself Toto after
Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz. Memorably, I was once checked into
Bangkok’s Dusit Thani Hotel by a guest relations officer called Superporn,
an unfortunate rendering of the Thai into English.
Finally, some Chinese choose names for their children that represent a
plea in respect of subsequent children. One common name among tradi-
tional Chinese women is pronounced as “Di.” It comprises one character
made up of two parts: that for woman and then that for younger brother.
16 Inside Knowledge
Essentially, the name means “now that we have another daughter let her be
followed by a younger brother.” Similarly, if a family has had a run of
daughters, another name for the next daughter might be the equivalent of
“bring brother” or “no more sisters.” And this will be the name that the
daughter will carry for the rest of her life.

Man or Woman?

Identifying the sex of someone by his or her name can be problematic.

Normally this means getting used to, say, male Chinese personal names
compared with female Chinese names. Chin Chuen Wei, for example, is an
obviously male Chinese name for those in the know. Chin Mei Yuen is an
obviously female name. The Chin in both cases is the family name. But
sometimes the sex of an individual is not clear even to other Chinese. They
might need to see the actual Chinese characters to be sure of the person’s
sex, assuming that they can read Chinese, which many Chinese raised
outside China cannot.
But in Vietnam, some given names are popular for both men and
women so “sex indicators” are incorporated into a person’s whole name.
The indicator for a male is Van. For a female it’s Thi. An example of each
is Tran Van Hien Sinh (a male) and Ngo Thi Thanh Minh (a female). The
first part of each name is the family name. The second part is the sex indi-
cator. The final two parts are the first and second given names. In India
too, some names are popular for both males and females.
The Hindi/Hindu names Kumud and Kusum, for example, are
common to both men and women, but unlike in Vietnam there are no sex
indicators to indicate the individual’s sex. This puts Hindi names on the
same footing as an emerging trend in some Western countries where
personal names such as Ashley, Morgan, and Hillary are used for both
males and females.
All male Sikhs have the surname Singh (in Malaysia, Sikhs are actually
referred to as Singhs.) And all female Sikhs have the surname Kaur. But in
India particularly, many also adopt a third name after Singh/Kaur that
typically relates either to their caste, their home village or a family name
the family has decided to adopt. The leader of the Communist Party in
India is Harkishen Singh Surjeet, for example, Surjeet being his third
name so that he can more easily be identified from other Sikhs. The prime
minister of India, also a Sikh, is Manmohan Singh. But it’s not clear even
if he has a third name. The generic Sikh surname of Singh is all that he is
known by. To further complicate matters, some Sikh women brought up in
 You’re Who? Names in Asia 17

the West follow Western naming practice and adopt their father’s surname
as their own and so are known by the male Sikh surname of Singh instead
of Kaur.
These are just some of the complications of names in Asia – interesting
from a cultural point of view but critically important from a business
viewpoint. Confusion over names, their lack of standardization, and the
relative ease by which some in Asia can change their names all pose addit-
ional uncertainty, risk, and cost to business. But then structure is one
complication; pronunciation quite another. To provide just one example:
the king of Thailand is King Bhumipol. But it’s pronounced “poomy-pon.”
Almost no Thai names are actually said how they read. And that is often
the case throughout Asia, to varying degrees. But that is another story.
This page intentionally left blank
Part I

Places

19
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter
3 China
Triumphant

China’s leaders once made pronouncements about the workers’ struggle

and the need for the bourgeoisie to be smashed. Now all they ever seem to
hold forth on is whether the Chinese economy will have a hard or soft
landing, whether the yuan will be revalued, and foreign resource deals.
The leadership now is pragmatic and increasingly economically literate.
And their party, the Chinese Communist Party, ought to be renamed the
Chinese Party, for it’s nationalism now that is the force that binds China
together. No longer is it Communism and class struggle. Nationalism,
pragmatism, and preserving their own power at all costs: these are the
three characteristics that can be used to explain the behavior of China’s
leadership today and predict what it will do in future. Little else matters.
China’s share of world trade is now around 7%, almost triple what it
was a decade ago. Already its economy is far more reliant on international
trade than any other big country. By 2004, the sum of exports and imports
of goods and services was around 75% of the value of its GDP. The equiv-
alent figures for the US, Japan, India, and Brazil were all under 30%. And
at its peak the figure for Japan never went beyond 32%.1
And of course China’s domestic market is huge. It has 33 cities with
populations of a million or more. Five provinces have more than 50
million people: each could be a large country in its own right population-
wise. And when all those people act together, particularly if they
consume together, the effect can be breathtaking. Consider the Chinese
New Year period of 2003. In those few days, more than six billion text
messages were sent in China. One reason for all those texts is that so
many Chinese no longer live and work where they were born. China has

21
22 Inside Knowledge
114 million internal migrant workers, representing the largest migration
in human history.
Tax revenues, long a weak spot, are improving too. The tax take in 2004
rose by 25.7% over the previous year to a record US$311.4 billion.2 The
booming economy helped as did improvements in collection and
preventing tax evasion.
Shanghai is mind boggling. (The Asian Insider includes a chapter on the
city.) It has more than 3000 buildings that are eighteen or more storeys
high. And its port overtook Rotterdam in 2004 as the world’s busiest. But
what’s more mind boggling, disturbing even, is the speed with which this
has happened. Most of the development has occurred since 1990.
China became the world’s biggest recipient of foreign direct investment
(FDI) in 2003, receiving US$53 billion. The US received US$40 billion. It
is the world’s second biggest importer of rubber products, second largest
importer and consumer of oil, and the international price setter for copper,
iron ore, aluminum, and platinum. It is the world’s biggest producer of
cement. And it produces 200 million tonnes more steel per annum than the
US and Japan combined.
But right now for most people outside China, the most apparent conse-
quence of China’s rush to industrialize and commercialize is its production
and exportation of consumer goods. Seemingly there is nothing that China
will not or cannot produce.
The Chinese government attempts to block pornography on the internet
to protect the morals of its citizens. And yet China manufactures 90% of
all the sex toys that are exported around the world.
It is the world’s largest, officially atheist country. And yet it is the
source of most of the world’s plastic Christmas decorations, and home to
the world’s largest manufacturer of artificial Christmas trees.
Most children’s toys and most footwear now are made in China. Stand by
too for China the significant, emerging wine producer. Some of its chardon-
nays and sauvignon blancs are surprisingly drinkable. China has no shortage
of land with warm days and cool nights, perfect for wine growing. Around
340 wineries are spread across the country. Some have employed oenolo-
gists from Australia and France to introduce new wine-making techniques.
Chinese-made products turn up everywhere. Most “Venetian” glass sold
in Venice now is not Venetian at all, it’s made in China. Go to any Wedg-
wood store in London and a great deal of what’s on offer comes from
China. Almost all souvenir stuffed koalas and kangaroos and even wooden
boomerangs sold to tourists in Australia come from China, their labels
proclaiming that fact by law but with a plea that at least the design work
was done in Australia.
 China Triumphant 23

At least a third of all television sets produced in the world are made in
China. So too are a quarter of all washing machines, half of all telephones
and almost half of all computer monitors. It also produces 70% of the
world’s silk, 60% of the world’s penicillin, and 80% of the world’s tractors
and shipping containers.3 This list is illustrative; it’s far from exhaustive.
Certain cities in China have developed astonishingly narrow but effec-
tive specializations. In the Chinese city of Wenzhou, 70% of the world’s
cigarette lighters are made by 3000 small firms that have clubbed together.
In the city of Datang, 8000 factories have joined together to produce
around 8 billion pairs of socks each year, about a third of world demand.
Elsewhere, single firms dominate. The Chinese company Galanz makes
one in three microwave ovens sold worldwide. Pearl River Piano has
become the world’s second biggest piano manufacturer.4 And Huizhou-
based TLC is the world’s leading television maker.
Many famous name retailers in the West now are little more than shop
fronts for China. US retailer Wal-Mart buys US$14 billion annually in
goods directly from China and another US$26 billion from US, Japanese,
and South Korean companies that use China as an export base.5 It’s little
wonder that in 2003 the US recorded a record trade deficit with China of
US$124 billion. Hamley’s, billed as London’s biggest toyshop, with its flag-
ship store on Regent Street, barely stocks anything that isn’t made in China.
Having almost cornered the world market in footwear, particularly
sports shoes, China has made huge inroads into the internationally traded
clothing and apparel market. Another boost came on January 1, 2005 with
the end of the 30-year textile quota system that had governed the internat-
ional trade in textiles. Until then, the rich European and US markets were
restricted in how much fabric and how many garments they could buy in
any one year from any given country. This meant that major brands such
as Ralph Lauren and Gap had to source their popular lines from a range of
countries. That is why it has been possible to buy identical Ralph Lauren
polo shirts, for example, that have been made in China, Thailand, or the
Philippines. It is likely now that textiles and garment manufacturing will
center on no more than five countries, rather than spread across more than
fifty under the quota system. China will be the biggest beneficiary. Prior to
the quota system lapsing, China already made about 20% of all clothing
and textiles sold in the US. China is expected to capture as much as 70%
of the market post 2005.6

Trawling the World for Resources

Exports beget imports, particularly for a country as poor in natural resources
24 Inside Knowledge
as China. In fact, China is not a producer of anything much so much as it is
a processor; a processor economy rather than a producer economy. China
does have some mineral reserves. It has 54% of the world’s manganese
reserves, 23% of the lead reserves, 22% of the silver reserves, 12% of the
coal reserves, 11% of the vanadium reserves, and 6% of the copper reserves.
But most of this is no longer sufficient. China’s demand for copper, for
example, is only 18% met by domestic supplies.7 Twenty-five years ago
China imported virtually nothing. But compare that with now.
By the start of 2004 China imported around 150 million tonnes of iron
ore (up from 14 million in 1990), almost 1.3 million tonnes of copper (up
from 20,000 tonnes), 1.6 million ounces of platinum (up from 20,000
ounces), and almost 62,000 tonnes of nickel (up from almost zero). Its
demand for copper accounted for 20.6% of total world demand,
for aluminum it was 21.6%, 15.4% for lead, 20.3% for zinc, and 10.9%
for nickel.8
China’s demand for steel was so great by the end of 2004 that Nissan’s
steel suppliers Nippon Steel and JFE Holdings were unable to meet all the
demand they faced. The car manufacturer had to halt car production for
five days at three of its four assembly plants in Japan.9 In Bangladesh,
record prices were being paid for ships to be scrapped and turned into
recycled steel. The problem was twofold: fewer ships were being
scrapped, on account of high shipping rates thanks in large part to China’s
rapid ascendancy in world trade, and China’s demand for steel was
pushing the price of steel up.10 And in Beijing, municipal authorities had
to introduce non-steel manhole covers as more than a third of all the city’s
manhole and street drain covers were stolen in 2004 alone to be sold to
scrap metal dealers.
Its demand generally for minerals and other resources has ignited a
resources boom in Australia just as Japanese economic growth did in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. The state of Western Australia, Australia’s
largest state but with a relatively small population and comprising mostly
desert, has been the main beneficiary. Two Australian-based companies,
Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, the world’s second and third largest iron ore
producers respectively, embarked on billion-dollar expansions of their
Western Australian iron ore mines, railways, and ports, simply to keep up
with Chinese demand.11
In 2002, China signed a US$18 billion deal with Australia’s North West
Shelf field (off Western Australia) to supply China’s Guangdong province
with up to 75 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) over 25 years.
Woodside Petroleum, Australia’s largest oil and gas company and the lead
operator of the field, asked Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard to go
 China Triumphant 25

to Beijing and personally lobby for the deal. This Howard did and
Australia outmaneuvered bids from Qatar and Indonesia to win the deal.12
It was the biggest export deal ever signed by Australia, but the record
didn’t last long.
A year later, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC)
signed a US$20 billion deal in respect of Australia’s Gorgon gas project to
supply up to 100 million tonnes of LNG over 25 years – a new record for
Australia and one of the largest LNG deals ever signed.13
Woodside Petroleum itself is developing other remote gas fields and by
2004 was routinely sending executives to China to market its gas. It made
more than a billion Australian dollars in 2004, its highest ever profit,
largely underwritten by China. BHP Billiton similarly made a huge record
profit in 2004 of US$3.5 billion, once more driven by demand from China.
Virtually every one of BHP’s divisions had achieved production records.
The mining and oil company was making so much money that it decided
to return US$2 billion to shareholders via share buy-backs and special
dividends, despite plans to spend US$8.6 billion developing 23 new
projects over the next three years.14
By 2004, Australia and China had become close trading partners. But,
essentially, China’s economic ascendancy dashed Australia’s hopes of
being much more than a quarry, growing rich by digging bits of itself up to
sell abroad. Nonetheless, the government and its people were triumphant.
They’d done it again: raking in billions from a sector that employs very
few people but a great deal of machinery in parts of the country that most
Australians never visit, and all the while marveling at the apparent clever-
ness of it all. The real cleverness, though, was in how the Australian
government had so successfully courted the Chinese.
China is particularly desperate for long-term oil and gas supply
contracts. Other than the Australian deals, smaller ones have been signed
in a wide variety of countries including Sudan and Venezuela. Saudi
Arabia is an important supplier and getting more important. China raised
its crude oil imports from Saudi Arabia for 2005 by 25% over the previous
year, to 400,000 barrels per day.15 A pipeline is being built to link China
with Kazakhstan’s oil fields too. More on the emerging China–Central
Asia nexus appears in Chapter 5.
By 2004, China imported 700 million barrels (100 million tonnes) of oil
or around 40% of its consumption. Around 80% of China’s oil imports pass
through the Malacca Strait, the narrow shipping lane between Sumatra and
the Malaysian peninsular. China does not have a blue-water navy to protect
its shipping or the Strait, which is susceptible to blockading. It is also
annoyed that Singapore provides port facilities to the US which it feels
26 Inside Knowledge

heightens the risk that its oil supplies might one day be interrupted.16
Accordingly, China has looked at other routes to transport its oil supplies.
One is to build a pipeline from the Myanmar port of Sittwe in the Bay of
Bengal, through Myanmar and on to China’s Yunnan province. Another is to
build a canal through southern Thailand, across a thin strip of land called the
Isthmus of Kra. Both will involve huge expense and mean that Singapore,
where most of the oil tankers that ship oil to China call in, would be cut out
of the equation, leading to a considerable loss to Singapore’s economy.
The enormous cost of the Isthmus of Kra canal (put at up to US$28
billion) probably rules it out.17 In any event the sudden emergence of
Islamic unrest in southern Thailand also helped to kill off speculation that
China might be actively considering the canal. Conspiracy theorists who
note Singapore’s interest in the canal not being built also point to
a sudden increase in apparent wealth in southern Thailand, evidenced
by a surge in new motorcycle registrations in the southern provinces around
the beginning of 2004. This apparent and unexplained rise in disposable
income was soon followed by a sudden outbreak of religious and ethnic
unrest in southern Thailand that helped to make the canal idea untenable.
China’s demand for resources is such that its leadership makes visits
around the world in search of minerals supply deals as much as for diplo-
macy. President Hu Jintao visited Poland in June 2004 during which time
China Minmetals signed a contract with a Polish copper group to buy
300,000 tonnes of refined copper for delivery between 2005 and 2010.18
Other trips that year took him to Africa (Egypt, Gabon, and Algeria) where
similar deals were announced. China’s prime minister and vice-premier
had visited Africa the previous year.
But China doesn’t want to rely just on the spot market for commodities.
It wants long-term contracts or, even better, it wants to own the mines and
oil and gas wells overseas to ensure continuity of supply. Finding and
developing its own resources, even offshore, is cheaper than buying from
world markets.
Accordingly, China has become a keen buyer of resource assets around
the world. But it’s a new trend. China is still not an overseas investor of
any great significance, particularly given the size of its economy. Cumula-
tive overseas investment stood at US$33 billion by 2004 but the figure is
growing. In late 2004, the Chinese government, through the State Devel-
opment and Reform Commission and China’s Export Import Bank,
announced an increase in lending to Chinese firms for the purpose of
buying overseas mining assets.19 It was a green light and showed a definite
shift in government policy from isolated purchases to more systematic
wholesale acquisitions.
 China Triumphant 27

Right away, China’s state-controlled China Minmetals Corp entered into

talks to buy Canada’s Noranda Inc, the world’s ninth largest copper
producer and third largest zinc producer. It also owns 60% of Falconbridge
Ltd, the world’s third biggest producer of nickel. The deal was expected to
be worth around US$5 billion.20 And talks also commenced in late 2004
for the Chinese government to acquire Canadian oil and gas giant Husky
Energy Inc.21 Husky was controlled by Hong Kong entrepreneur Li Ka-
shing at the time. These are potentially major deals.
But it’s not just about securing resources. China has found that it is able
to leverage its new commercial power to achieve foreign policy objectives.
China’s President Hu Jintao told a joint sitting of the Australia Parlia-
ment in Canberra the day the US$20 billion Gorgon deal was signed:22

The greatest threat to peace in the Taiwan Straits is from the splitist activities by
Taiwan independence forces. We are firmly opposed to Taiwan independence.
The Chinese government and people look to Australia for a constructive role in
China’s peaceful reunification.

Smaller states are bribed outright. China promised US$122 million over
five years to tiny Dominica if it switched its recognition of Taiwan to
China. This Dominica did in 2004. Macedonia, Nauru, Libya, St Lucia,
and the Bahamas similarly dropped their recognition of Taiwan in favor of
Beijing in recent years too after the promise of aid and contracts.23 Taiwan
answers back with promises of cash and contracts of its own. But it’s now
China that has the deeper pocket.

China:The Third World’s Investor of Choice

China has become the FDI partner of choice among many developing
countries. Why? One reason is that it does not have enforced Foreign
Corrupt Practices Act-type legislation to stop its enterprises from paying
bribes when they invest abroad. As a result, there is little potential for
embarrassment in US or EU courts for developing country dictators or
bureaucrats that can come if it is US and other Western firms that are pros-
ecuted at home for their corrupt activities abroad. A case in point was the
trial that began in 2004 in the US of an American consultant accused of
paying bribes to the Kazakhstan president and prime minister (see Chapter
6.) And so Chinese involvement in a venture compared with, say, Amer-
ican involvement is unlikely to involve the same level of scrutiny.
Chinese companies also have plenty of experience in operating in
corrupt environments and dealing with corrupt government officials.
28 Inside Knowledge
They’ve been doing it at home for years. So one can imagine that when it
comes to settling big deals in Africa, South America, or Central Asia there
are no mismatches of expectations on either side, few embarrassing
silences and shifting of the feet.
So where in the developing world has China been investing? In 1998
and 1999 alone, the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) spent
more than US$8 billion buying into oil and gas concessions in Sudan,
Venezuela, Iraq, and Kazakhstan.24 In July 2003, it paid US$350 million
for several oil refineries in Algeria.25
In Ecuador, many US and European companies, tired of the persistent
corruption at the state oil company Petroecuador, had left the country. So
enter China. By the end of 2004, its state oil companies had spent around
US$100 million on oil drilling and exploration in the country, apparently
untroubled by the working environment.
In Pakistan, China has built a port in the coastal city of Gwadar that
ultimately will be used to ship Central Asian oil and gas to China. China
contributed US$198 million via loans and grants. At least those were the
formal sums. Pakistan contributed just US$50 million. Five hundred
Chinese labourers worked on site at the peak of the construction in 2002.26
The first three berths opened in 2005.
In Myanmar, CNOOC lead a consortium that signed a production-
sharing contract for oil and gas exploration with the state-owned Myanmar
Oil and Gas Enterprise in 2004. The consortium planned to explore for oil
in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state.27 Despite the fact that Myanmar is
believed to have gas reserves of 87 trillion cubic feet and recoverable oil
reserves of 3.2 billion barrels, most Western companies are unable to do
business in Myanmar on account of investment and trade sanctions, and
some find it relatively corrupt, although an executive from the French oil
company Total, who had operated in both China and Myanmar, told me
that in his view Myanmar was not nearly as corrupt as China.
In Indonesia, China has invested heavily in the oil sector. It is now
Indonesia’s largest foreign producer of oil, a sector traditionally dominated
by American firms. CNOOC paid US$585 million for oil producer Repsol
Indonesia in 2002. It paid another US$275 million for 12.5% of BP’s
Tangguh project in Irian Jaya in 2003. And Petro China, a subsidiary of
CNPC, acquired Devon Energy in Indonesia for US$262 million also in
2003. CNOOC and Petro China now account for 12% of Indonesia’s daily
output.28 As US investors have pulled out, frequently citing the Indonesian
government’s lack of resolve in fighting corruption, China has gone in.
Africa has emerged quickly as a place where China can do business. At
least forty African countries have made trade agreements with China. A
 China Triumphant 29

wide variety of projects have been started, such as a railway project in

Nigeria, a hotel in Algeria, and a mobile telephone network in Tunisia.
The China–Africa Business Council was formed in Beijing in
November 2004. It claims that two-way trade between China and Africa
amounted to US$18 billion in 2003, an amount the Chinese government
expected to double within two years.
China will soon be one of the top five investors in Africa, despite not
having the colonial ties to the continent that many traditional foreign
investors have. Oil is the big draw and China has no qualms about doing
deals with oil-rich African dictators, the sort of regimes that foreign corrupt
practices-type acts constrain much of the West from doing business with.29
China has become a significant business partner of Sudan, geographically
Africa’s largest country. Sudan’s government is a perennial abuser of
human rights and stands accused by the world community of ethnic
cleansing. But China only sees oil. Prior to China’s arrival, Sudan was a net
oil importer. China helped in building wells, refineries, and a 1600 kilo-
meter oil pipeline and so now, Sudan exports oil, mostly to China.
Angola is similarly avoided by much of the West. But in March 2004,
China gave it a soft loan of US$2 billion in exchange for 10,000 barrels of
oil per day.30 China has courted Zimbabwe too, the government of which
is now an international pariah. China reportedly did a deal worth US$200
million to supply Zimbabwe with fighter jets and other military equip-
ment. Much of Zimbabwe’s tobacco crop is now sold to China.31
Elsewhere in Africa, China’s Huawei Technologies constructed mobile
telephone facilities in eastern Algeria in 2003 and in 2004 announced
contracts worth US$400 million to service mobile telephone networks in
Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.32 And in Zambia, Chinese contractors
were helping to build a US$600 million hydroelectric plant in 2004.33
Other Chinese firms spent around US$100 million investing in Zambia’s
copper industry in 2002 and 2003.34
And then in late 2004 China lent Russia US$6 billion so that its state-
owned oil company Rosneft could finance the purchase of the largest
production unit of the Yukos oil company. The borrowing was backed by
Rosneft agreeing to supply oil to China in coming years.
So Zambia, Algeria, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Myanmar,
Sudan, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Indonesia: these are the countries
in which China has invested. And these are the countries ranked by Trans-
parency International as perceived to be the most corrupt in the world. And
among them are countries that many others refuse to do business with,
largely on account of sanctions and gross human rights abuses. But China
is not so fussy. It just wants a bargain.
30 Inside Knowledge

China to become a foreign military power

China’s outward-looking economy also means that it is one of the most

exposed to international unrest. Economist David Hale asks: Will China
develop a blue-water navy to protect the ships and shipping lanes used to
bring critical supplies of oil, gas, iron ore, and copper to China from coun-
tries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Australia, and Brazil? 35 The US has long
sought foreign military bases in those countries that are important to it
commercially. Might China also, for example, ultimately demand bases in
Western Australia to protect its resource supplies there? The US has a base
in the north of Western Australia. Shouldn’t China have a matching base?
Or in Africa? Might China be asked to intervene in domestic political strug-
gles in countries where it has commercial interests such as the Congo or
Papua New Guinea, asks Hale?
Increasingly, Chinese nationals work for Chinese companies abroad. Dozens
of mainland Chinese were working temporarily in Australia by 2004 to fill
worker shortages there. In Afghanistan, the Chinese construction and engi-
neering group China Railway Shisiju Group had around a hundred Chinese
nationals employed in 2004 building three World Bank-funded highways in
projects valued at US$21 million.36 Chinese companies were awarded roles
in the reconstruction of Iraq too after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow in
2003. Might China feel obliged to send troops abroad to protect its citizens
in the more difficult foreign working environments?
China has already deployed 4000 troops in Sudan to protect its investment in
the oil pipeline which it co-developed with Petronas of Malaysia.37 Sudan has
been in perpetual internal conflict between its Christian south and Muslim
north. Malaysia too as been involved in training Sudanese troops, presumably
for much the same reason.
As mentioned in Chapter 5, China has sent troops to Kyrgyzstan to partic-
ipate in military maneuvers, the first time that Chinese troops have partici-
pated in joint military exercises overseas. This coincides with China’s
growing investment in Central Asia.
The last few decades have seen the rise of China as an international trader
and investor and not without political ramifications. China’s role as an inter-
national military player is only just beginning to emerge.
 Chapter
4 China in Crisis

The previous chapter looked at the good news about China. This chapter
does the opposite. It looks at many of the negatives and there are plenty.
China strategy in many foreign companies often becomes captured by
China enthusiasts. Many have staked their careers and their reputations on
going into China. Millions are at stake and truth is often the first casualty.
They look at the yin and forget the yang.
China holds a lot of promise. China might be the world’s biggest
economy and only Japan and the US among the current G6 countries
might be among the six largest economies by 2050, according to a report
by Goldman Sachs.1 Another estimate is that if real incomes grow by 8% a
year and current income distribution remains the same, then by 2020,
China will have 100 million households with an average income equiva-
lent to the current average of Western Europe.2 That would represent a
huge, new market. It is an exciting prospect. But how real is the assump-
tion of almost two decades of continued high real growth in a country
where many citizens find that the only way to approach a policeman and
many other government officials is with an open wallet? The answer is
that it’s not so much unlikely as impossible.
Investors in China need to prepare for the possibility, inevitability even,
that China is heading for a nasty crash. At the very least a damage limita-
tion strategy is needed. Some might do well to have an exit strategy as well.
Why should investors build in a crash scenario? Look at Indonesia in the
lead-up to the 1997 economic crisis: a currency tied to the US dollar; diver-
sified conglomerates with poor corporate governance; a stock market that
was little more than a dumping ground for companies their founders no

31
32 Inside Knowledge
longer wanted; a banking system full of loans that were granted with scant
regard for prudence and risk analysis; an autocratic government kept in
power by the military; a suppressed media that spewed out propaganda;
excess capacity in industry and real estate; an economy highly dependent
on the external sector and high inflows of capital; no legal system worth
speaking of; widespread corruption; a largely rural population; and a bevy
of foreign investors and outsiders prepared to overlook all these cracks so
that they could invest, not on the basis of expected returns but because they
felt they “just had to be there” and the promise of a huge, rising middle
class. This is a description of Indonesia in 1996. And it is a description of
China today. China’s population is six times bigger, and its export base is
far more diversified, but many other fundamentals are the same.
Except for one thing. China might be a huge exporter but it tends to be
forgotten that it is also a huge importer. China retains only a tiny fraction of
the value of all that it exports: most exports comprise transformed imports.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, China is best thought of as a
processor economy, not a producer economy. And yet China managed to
build large foreign reserves from capital inflows. But when these stop, and
there is the possibility that they could overnight, China and those with a
stake in it will find themselves in big trouble.
There are those who think that a major contraction is unlikely for China
just as the World Bank thought about Indonesia. Only two months before
the Indonesian economy went into rapid collapse in 1997, the World Bank
described it as “performing very well” and likely to maintain a 7% growth
rate in the coming year. But what did happen? The rupiah fell by 85% and
the economy contracted by 15%.3
Sustained growth cannot be built on a framework of corruption and
poor governance. But speculative bubbles are. And without a system of
enforced law, foreign investment can take on the hue of a donation:
foreign aid under another guise. That is why the government of China is so
eager for foreign investment. Foreign investors might themselves leave but
they will leave behind their power plants, their highways, and their other
infrastructure. So of course China welcomes investment. Why wouldn’t it?
What it doesn’t welcome is that investment earning a return that can then
be repatriated.
Many foreign investors have been defrauded by local partners or
obstructed by bureaucratic wrangling. Others find that as soon as they do
show profits, copycat local manufacturers spring up and undercut them.
Essentially, China is going to give nothing away to outsiders unless it
absolutely has to. “Don’t treat foreigners fair but as fair game,” might be
the motto in China.
 China in Crisis 33

Some foreign companies, however, are profitable now in China. But a

lot aren’t. And among those that are, it’s suspected that a significant
proportion shift costs back to head office or otherwise underestimate them.
The only foreigners to have made sustained profits in China to date are
those that have used it as a cheap production base for products that are
then exported. Few if any have made consistent profits by selling into the
local market. After many years of false starts and millions of dollars, the
car industry finally looked like it might generate big profits for foreigners
around 2003. But then by early 2005 Michelin of France had actually
suspended production at its US$200 million Shanghai joint venture plant
after a dramatic slowdown in the Chinese car market.4 And in March 2005,
joint ventures operated by Ford, Honda, and Audi announced price cuts to
help shift large stocks of unsold cars.
And yet the world is desperate for China to succeed. So desperate that
problems are frequently glossed over and steps in the right direction are
greeted with excessive praise. The first Chinese Formula One Grand Prix
was held in Shanghai in 2004. It was a great success and all agreed that
the track was particularly advanced. The world media was celebratory.
Of course, Malaysia had been running a Formula One Grand Prix for
some years but whereas this was a mere detail, China’s Grand Prix was
written up as little short of a miracle. Reputations, egos, and careers have
all been staked on China. Many have a vested interest now in “selling”
China. And so the truth becomes even more distorted. Who has an
interest in the truth? Clearly not the Chinese government. Executives
who’ve sunk millions of their shareholders’ funds into a market that’s
largely devoid of legal protection? Newspapers around the world that
belong to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation with its billions invested
in Star Television and other China-focused media investments? Many
commodities are scarce in China. Quality information is perhaps scarcest
of all.
In a conversation with a Beijing-based Western consultant in early
2005, he told me:

So many foreigners are being ripped off and are screwing things up here. There
are so many anecdotes that I could put in a book of my own. But then I pull back
as I imagine being turned into a pariah of the foreign business community if I ever
committed the things I know to print. It’s a dilemma.

Foreign companies will become far more choosy once they realize that
they should invest in China on the basis of returns rather than because it is
a “must have” economy. China will have its 1997. The question then is
34 Inside Knowledge
how resilient will China’s economy be for a rebound? How long will the
malaise last? And what political unrest will it bring that will further
damage the economy? These are questions that all investors in China
would do well to consider.
The rush into China for the sake of simply being there was best exem-
plified by the world’s brewers. “A billion beer drinkers” they collectively
thought. They acted as if China didn’t already have its own beer
producers. They lined up to invest, sinking billions into greenfield plants
and ossified ones in need of modernization to tap China’s huge beer
market. But beer is not a sophisticated product. Quality control was poor
among local brewers but really what could foreign brewers add to China’s
beer market? Beer is a product for which any brand is a close substitute to
any other, for which start-up costs are relatively low and production tech-
niques barely more sophisticated than adding water to barley and letting it
ferment. On top of that margins are thin and getting thinner, to the point
that, by 2004, it was estimated that China’s 400 brewers operated with a
net profit margin of just 0.5%.5 Why did the world’s brewers fall over
themselves to try to get a piece of that? Ultimately, many if not most with-
drew with nothing but red ink, red faces, and out-of-pocket stockholders.
But the threat of foreign competition had at least encouraged local
producers to lift their quality and so the foreign investors had performed a
great service to China if not to themselves.

Don’t Bank on Bankruptcy

It’s almost boring to write (and no doubt read) again about how bad
China’s banks are. The problem is that China’s banks really are appalling
and do represent a huge drain on public sector finances.
The banking system is dominated by the “Big Four” state banks: the
Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the Bank of China, the China
Construction Bank, and the Agricultural Bank of China. They control 67% of
China’s financial assets. Each has an average of US$400 billion in assets,
employs 415,000 people and maintains from 15,000 to 58,000 retail branches
across the country. Agile and dynamic they are not. The China Banking
Regulatory Commission admitted in early 2003 that 24.1% of the loans at the
Big Four are non-performing. But analysts thought the true figure to be at
least 40%. And that is after the government bailed the Big Four out in 1998
with a capital infusion of US$33 billion. Bad loans worth US$169 billion
were excised from the Big Four and shunted off to asset management
companies the following year.6 In return, the banks were issued with US$141
 China in Crisis 35

billion in bonds and another US$28 billion in cash. And then in early 2004,
the central government raided its foreign reserves to tip another US$45
billion into the Bank of China and the China Construction Bank.7 This latest
payment still covered less than half the problem loans at the two banks.
But this is not reform. This is no panacea. Pouring billions into China’s
banks has not and will not solve the crisis. It merely delays it. Bad loans
are the consequence of the problems facing China’s banks, rather than the
problem itself. And fixing consequences does not fix the problem.
Loans are still given in China for reasons that are unrelated to a
company’s ability to repay them. Often they are given at the direction of
the local Communist party boss or to stave off a company’s collapse so
that its workers can keep their jobs. Risk analysis may not be done and
even if there is a desire to undertake it, very often company accounts are
poor or fictitious.
Perhaps the most useful tool that bank managers could have to chase
delinquent debtors is a bankruptcy law backed up by a well-funded bank-
ruptcy court and then the means by which the court’s rulings are enforced.
So what is China doing in these three areas? A new draft bankruptcy law
was presented to the National People’s Congress in 2004. Many analysts
felt that it was inadequate, although to be fair, most bankruptcy laws
around the world have their inadequacies. The new draft law exempted
around 2000 loss-making, state-owned enterprises (SOEs), mostly in the
military and mining sectors, from its provisions but for the first time
brought all other enterprises in China, state and private, into the same
bankruptcy system. And so most SOEs could not be forced into bank-
ruptcy and wound up like any other company. It also allows for the
appointment of an administrator who is elected by the creditors themselves
rather than appointed by government officials. But then a lot of discretion
will also remain with the bankruptcy court itself, more than is usual prac-
tice elsewhere, to allow social (and no doubt political) considerations to be
taken into account.
Overall, the draft law draws on sound foreign bankruptcy laws and
takes China further ahead compared with existing provisions. That at least
is the case on paper. But, in reality, how does a creditor force the liquida-
tion of an SOE with good local Communist Party connections? By and
large, it would still be the case that an enterprise will only be forced into
bankruptcy if local officials allow it and so in many respects, creditors
would be no better off even with the new law.
Bankruptcy courts must also contend with vague property rights and
confusion over who owns what. How can an SOE be forced into bank-
ruptcy when the extent of its assets is unclear? It might be insolvent, or it
36 Inside Knowledge
might not. And who wants to buy assets for which the title is unclear even
if the court’s orders are enforced?
So how does China maintain confidence in a banking system that so
clearly isn’t worth it? It bans local journalists and media organizations
from reporting on the full extent of its problems. The only reason why
depositors don’t panic is because they’re barely aware that they should.
This brings us to yet another problem: the lack of quality information. It
starts with the government. Disclosure and transparency are not part of the
Chinese government’s mindset. In China, journalists who obtain and
disseminate information that anywhere else would land them a journalism
award often land up in jail for revealing “state secrets.” China Central
Television, the central government-owned network, has more than 90
channels under its umbrella including news and business channels but it
has an informal policy of not interviewing foreigners live on Chinese tele-
vision because they are unpredictable and less willing to self-censor. They
might say something that’s critical of the government and which cannot be
edited out. They might even say things that are true. The internet is heavily
policed and despite conventional wisdom that information on the internet
is unstoppable, the Chinese government leads the world in blocking news
and other sites that it does not want its people to see.
Most SOEs in China don’t even have boards of directors, although
several bigger SOEs established such boards in 2004 on a trial basis.8
Corporate governance remains a mess even among China’s best
performing, publicly listed companies. CNOOC, for example, breached
Hong Kong corporate governance laws in 2004 when it transferred US$798
million to an unlisted company controlled by CNOOC’s parent company
without obtaining the appropriate minority stockholder approvals.9 China
Aviation Oil, a locally listed, state-owned Chinese company based in
Singapore, collapsed at the end of 2004 with US$550 million in speculative
trading losses. Its chief executive responded by returning to China to “visit
his sick mother” but was encouraged to return to Singapore to assist regula-
tors there with their inquiries. It wasn’t immediately clear which entity was
responsible for the losses and who would cover them.10
From the start, China’s two domestic stock markets in Shenzhen and
Shanghai have been treated as dumping grounds for the rubbish that
China wouldn’t dare list in Hong Kong. Almost 1300 companies have
been hived off onto the two domestic exchanges not because they’re good
and need funds to expand but because they’re so bad they need funds to
patch up holes. Most are state-controlled and their IPOs were not
approved by independent underwriters but by political committees. The
markets had boomed but only because local investors, starved of legal
 China in Crisis 37

casinos, used the local bourses as the outlet for their cultural predisposi-
tion towards gambling. Both markets fell by around 30% in the three
years to June 2004 as the punters grew to realize how heavily the house
had loaded the dice against them. Fortunately, China’s stock markets are
small relative to the size of the overall economy and so their mismanage-
ment is unlikely to destabilize the wider economy. But the legitimacy of
stock markets in general has been undermined among domestic savers
and investors.
China’s larger companies, both state-owned and private, have shown
disturbing tendencies to use spare funds to diversify way beyond their
core areas of expertise. Many larger groups are beginning to resemble
Korea’s chaebols or Indonesia’s conglomerates prior to the Asian
economic crisis. Reckless diversification is never good. Stockholders in
water company Vivendi of France that also morphed into a music
recording company found that out. But how many mini-Vivendis are
there in China? The number grows each month. A case in point is the
D’Long Group, a private corporation that grew to a US$12 billion
conglomerate making products from tomato paste to auto parts and with
30,000 employees. It grew too big, too fast and by mid-2004 had to be
bailed out by the central government.11 Other companies that started out
in computers have diversified into real estate and banking. State-owned
tourism companies have diversified into highways and water plants. And
once more, most of these companies don’t even have boards of directors,
they are inadequately audited, and typically they are granted bank loans
not on the basis of prudence but their proximity to local Communist
Party officials.

Laws? What Laws?

China’s own Ministry of Commerce estimated in 2004 that around 4000

corrupt Chinese officials had fled abroad in the previous two decades,
taking more than US$500 million with them.12 Of course most don’t flee.
There’s no need. And besides, why leave the source of one’s income?
A lot of money has been made legitimately in China and a great deal
more illegitimately. One estimate puts the number of millionaires in China
at 300,000. In November 2004, China’s most expensive private residence
went on sale. The luxury mansion in the eastern part of Shanghai was
listed for US$15.7 million, not bad for a country that remains ostensibly
Communist.13 The mansions around the reservoirs north of Beijing are
another manifestation of all this new wealth. When I asked who they
38 Inside Knowledge
belonged to, I was not told businessmen, factory owners, and the like. I
was told officials. Laws in developed economies allow for order because
they are enforced. In countries such as China where enforcement is a
problem, they produce bribery and corruption.
Prior to 1978, China had no formal legal system. It has come a long way
since. New laws have flooded out of Beijing and now most things are
covered by one law or another. If only China had put a similar effort into
law enforcement. The practical effect is that China remains largely
lawless. Order is maintained by power. Contracts are enforced via connec-
tions backed by those with access to power once mutual advantage has
evaporated.
China has far too few trained lawyers and most judges lack adequate
legal training; they’re likely to be from the local Communist Party hier-
archy or retirees from the military. Many of the laws promulgated by
China’s National People’s Congress are contradictory, poorly drafted,
vaguely worded, and often not even known to members of the legal
profession or fully understood by the officials who are responsible for
their enforcement. The opportunities for discretion on the part of officials
who are invariably poorly paid are many and the consequences obvious.
Bribery renders the rule of law patchy and inconsistently applied in many
parts of China. Indeed, the more laws there are, the greater the bribe-
taking opportunities. (A corollary of this in the West is that sometimes it’s
not that criminality has increased but rather that the number of laws that
can be broken have. And so one way to reduce crime statistics is simply to
reduce the number of laws.)
The law is not applied equally when it is applied. The 60 million party
officials, the judiciary, and the police all feel themselves to be above the
law. Largely they are. It is true that some are charged with corruption.
But when so many are corrupt, usually such charges are a veil for some-
thing else. Do ordinary people go to the police when they need help?
That is a good test of a civil society and a decent state. In China
they tend not to. After all, in China, the state is not there to serve
the people so much as the people are there to serve the state. Self-
serving cultural explanations such as Confucianism simply provide legit-
imacy to a regime that primarily is concerned with the preservation of its
own power.
The lack of laws at the practical level means that the probability that
foreign investors will be stolen from is extremely high. “People leave their
heads at home when they come here,” James Bryant, the head of Beijing
operations for Subway, a US sandwich franchise company has been quoted
to say. “They forget all about due diligence. They meet a guy on the street,
 China in Crisis 39

give him a ton of money to run something and six months later he
absconds with it.” Bryant spoke from experience. His local partner
defrauded Subway out of US$200,000. A relatively small sum but then
after nine years in China Subway had opened just 30 restaurants. It had
gone into China with plans to open 2000.14
China has plenty of laws to protect intellectual property but once again
does comparatively little to enforce them. The World Trade Organization
(WTO) insisted that China pass intellectual property laws before China
could join the WTO but bizarrely it did not also insist on making member-
ship contingent upon the enforcement of those laws. The laws were
insisted upon by Western officials who seemed to assume that a law passed
is a law enforced.
The counterfeiting problem in China is so severe even after China’s
entry into the WTO that in 2004, the US Patent and Trademark Office
appointed an intellectual property attaché to the US Embassy in Beijing,
the first such official assigned to any specific country.15 Production of
pirated goods has become more fractured, with assembly of the final good
happening quickly in one location and without stockpiling so that
infringements are difficult to detect and prosecute. Components for a
patented CD player, for example, might be produced at various plants in a
variety of locations. The components are brought together at the last
minute, assembled, and then distributed. Another problem is that central
government officials might attempt to close down a plant that produces
pirated goods in a given location but the local government will physically
block access to the factory, citing concerns over unemployment should
the factory be closed down. And that brings us to another complication of
doing business in China.

Who’s in Charge?

Government in China is fractured. There is a central government, provin-

cial governments, and municipal governments. Then there are statutory
and regulatory authorities. And spread across this lot is the Communist
Party. Demarcations between them are often unclear, even on paper. And
in practice the division of power is even more confused.
British American Tobacco (BAT) provided the world with a lesson about
doing business in China in 2004. At last, it trumpeted, it had broken through
to be awarded the right to be first foreign cigarette manufacturer to make
cigarettes in China. It was quite a coup: China is the world’s largest tobacco
market, with annual sales of 1.9 trillion cigarettes in 2004. Its 350 million
40 Inside Knowledge
smokers consume a third of all the cigarettes that are produced in the world.
China holds an additional attraction for cigarette companies in that its legal
system is so bad, there’s little danger anytime soon that cigarette companies
will face the law suits from dying customers that they do most particularly
in the US. But was it the coup that BAT had thought?
BAT had signed a deal with local China Eastern Investments to build
an £800 million (US$1.5 billion) plant to make up to 100 billion ciga-
rettes a year, a deal reached after expensive and lengthy negotiations
with the central government using local intermediaries and “advisers.”
But BAT had crossed its t’s but not dotted its i’s: it did not reach a deal
with the sector’s regulator, the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration
(STMA) and it is this body and its officials that profit most directly
from China’s tobacco monopoly. As far as the STMA was concerned,
there was no deal.16 By the end of 2004, BAT didn’t know whether it
had approval or not, six months after issuing triumphant press releases
announcing that it had. The reality was that BAT had approval to build
a factory from the central government, but that is not the same as
having approval to build a factory. That’s the trouble with China: the
higher up the hierarchy you go for your approvals, the further you are
from those who will implement them. What matters most usually is the
regulator or government body that’s closest to the target industry. As for
the central government, well, everyone has heard the maxim: “The
mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” Everyone that is but
BAT. But that was not the end of it. In early 2005, the STMA banned for
the time being the construction of any new cigarette factories in
China.17 Its power was clear, notwithstanding the fact that two years
earlier the National Audit Bureau had uncovered 88 secret accounts that
held US$12 million at the STMA, plus evidence of widespread corrup-
tion and fraud. 18 BAT was left to lick its wounds – and take a £50
million (US$94 million) write-down in March 2005 on the money it had
spent trying to get agreement to build a factory in China. The biggest
winners were the locally engaged consultants. they got paid but BAT
still had no factory.
French hypermarket chain Carrefour is one company that did play it by
local rules. Quickly it built up China’s second largest chain of stores by
ignoring the central government’s requirement that it approve retail joint
ventures.19 Instead it signed deals with local governments, rightly
assuming that once the stores were open and hundreds of locals were
employed, the central government would not shut them down. It didn’t.
Carrefour has revolutionized wholesaling in China, achieved wide name
 China in Crisis 41

recognition, and good consumer and supplier acceptance, all without

central government approval.
In some respects China is a conglomeration of vaguely defined and
overlapping fiefdoms run by chiefs who are very conscious of their posi-
tions relative to all the other chiefs, positions that rarely are defined in
absolute terms. Connections are important in China but less so today to
open doors and more to help outsiders pick their way through this morass
of delicate egos, bureaucracy, and real as opposed to de jure power.

Japan and China

China surpassed the United States in 2004 as Japan’s top trading partner
for the first time. So Japan and China – Asia’s two largest economies - are
enjoying closer relations? Nothing could be further from the truth.
Japan has shifted a lot of production to China in recent years. But a lot of
this production is not for the Chinese market. It is exported, often to the
United States.
Meanwhile there is a lot of resistance to Japanese brands in China itself.The
reason? Japan’s appalling Word War II crimes in China. They might have
been forgotten in Japan but not in China. Memories hamper the relation-
ship between Asia’s two giant economies, and Japanese investment in China
has suffered because of it.
The Japanese bombed and murdered their way through Shanghai in
1937. And that December in Nanjing (Nanking), they embarked on an
appalling massacre generally and a mass rape of Chinese women. Pris-
oners were used for bayonet practice. And many injured were buried in
mass graves.20
How many died? The author Iris Chang (1997) in her well known book The
Rape of Nanking, estimated that the number of Chinese killed in the Nanjing
massacre to be as many as 300,000. This was an upper estimate, with little
supporting empirical evidence. Nonetheless, that figure has come to be
popularly accepted as the actual number of deaths. But it is almost certainly
an exaggeration. Unfortunately, Chang’s death from suicide in late 2004 robs
us of the opportunity to further investigate her methodology.
42 Inside Knowledge

If the definition of Nanjing is widened so that it takes in hundreds of square

kilometres (including Suzhou, almost 200 kilometres away), the period
taken into account is lengthened from six weeks to several months and
soldiers killed “legally” (that is, in battle or executed legally) are included,
then a death toll of perhaps 150,000–200,000 can be justified.
But if Nanjing is defined as the city and its surrounding suburbs, and only
the deaths after the Japanese entered the city are counted, and the deaths
of Chinese soldiers who fell in battle are excluded (as is reasonable) then a
figure of 40,000–50,000 probably is more realistic.
Still, the actions of the Japanese amounted to one of the great crimes of
the twentieth century. Many Chinese regard the actions of the Japanese in
Nanjing as on a par with the worst of the Nazis’ war crimes in Europe. But
there’s a difference. Germany was contrite afterwards and that contrition
today remains with many Germans who feel a deep sense of personal
embarrassment about their country’s recent history. The Japanese attitude
simply bewilders many Chinese.
I have asked several Japanese how they can account for the animalistic
barbarism that went on in Nanjing not in a flash but over many days. They
cannot. Assuming they even know what I’m talking about.
Japan’s Mori Corporation has long planned to build the 95-storey Shanghai
World Financial Center in Shanghai’s Pudong district. It will either be the
world’s tallest, or among the tallest buildings, if and when it is completed. It
will have a giant, open circle built into its apex giving it the appearance of a
giant bottle opener. The circle is supposed to represent the sky, and the
tower, the earth. But as one Chinese said to me,“Many Chinese feel that this
building will be a disgrace to all Chinese.The circle represents the Rising Sun.
How can we allow this symbol of Japan to rise over all Shanghai?”
The open dislike for Japan among many ordinary Chinese was apparent at
the Asian Cup football final that was staged in Beijing in August 2004.21
Mobs simmered in the streets following China’s defeat against Japan. Local
spectators booed the Japanese team and the Japanese national anthem in
the stadium, while outside thousands of Chinese fans clashed with police
as they chanted anti-Japanese slogans. A busload of Japanese fans required
police protection as did the Japanese team which left China a day early.
 China in Crisis 43

The episode was fuelled by journalists in the state-controlled media who,

prior to the match, supplied plenty of incendiary commentary that would
see them being fined or jailed under anti-racial vilification laws in most
Western countries. And then in April 2005, anti-Japanese demonstrations
broke out in many cities across China.
But why should anti-Japanese sentiment still be so strong among young
Chinese? Anti-Japanese feeling that arose from the war has coalesced into a
general prejudice against all Japanese. They are not to be trusted and have
“twisted” morals is a common sentiment held by many young Chinese.

The Chinese Government itself helps to foster anti-Japanese feeling by

continuing to have made television dramas set in the war period that show
Japanese maiming and torturing peasant Chinese men, women, and
children. These are shown regularly on state-run television. Schools too
have a heavy component on Chinese history that focuses on Japanese war
atrocities against the Chinese, and anti-Japanese sentiment is even actively
encouraged by some teachers.

One Japanese involved in his country’s foreign aid program recently told
me of Japan’s frustration at not being given adequate credit for the billions
in aid that it gives the rest of Asia because the aid is usually seen only as
“reparations” and so not as aid at all.

A consequence of the hostility to Japan among ordinary Chinese is that

Japanese firms have a more difficult time in China than do other investors.
When they get into trouble, typically they must pay a higher price. When
Mitsubishi Pajero had a problem with its braking systems in China in 2001,
the Chinese government slapped a two-year import ban on them. And yet
the problem was not Mitsubishi’s doing. It was caused by the cars being
smuggled into China and improperly re-assembled by Chinese car factories,
a fact that was well known at the time.

Memories of Japan’s wartime atrocities fuel such aggression. But Japan’s

continued failure to face up to those atrocities and to fully admit to them
exacerbates the sentiment. It represents baggage that other foreign
investors do not have.
44 Inside Knowledge
Excess Capacity

China has historically high savings rates. This and high foreign capital
inflows allow it to have very high levels of investment. China’s investment
share of GDP was almost 45% by 2004, the highest in the world. During
the investment boom in Asia prior to the Asian economic crisis, some
emerging markets in Asia managed a rate as high as 42%. The more usual
level for developing countries is 20–30%.22
And as mentioned, China overtook the US as the world’s single largest
recipient of FDI in 2003. It attracted US$52 billion in FDI compared to the
US$40 billion attracted by the US.
With all this investment, there is enormous potential for China to develop
a huge excess capacity in manufacturing. This will serve to further keep
manufacturing costs down and allow China’s exports to remain competi-
tively priced. In essence, China is becoming one giant cobweb: everyone is
investing on the basis of today’s unmet demand without adequately taking
into account the similar investment decisions of others.
Germany’s chemicals giant BASF and a local partner built China’s most
modern integrated petrochemical plant near Nanjing, which opened in
2005. At a cost of US$3.7 billion and requiring more than 150,000 tonnes
of steel, it was one of the world’s biggest industrial construction projects.23
That’s the good news. The bad news is that at the time five more were
planned for China. China is full of potential oversupply problems, not just
in real estate but in plant and equipment. The speed at which China is
industrializing has ensured this: market signals suggest need and too many
step in at once to satisfy it.

Anti-dumping

What will all that excess capacity mean? A contraction in new investment
and a consequent economic slowdown will be one consequence. Another
will be a big increase in anti-dumping measures taken abroad against
Chinese goods.
China has been the target for dozens of anti-dumping actions since its
entry into the WTO in 2001. The EU reaffirmed in 2004 that it was not yet
prepared to recognize China as a market economy. The EU’s Brussels-
based administration found that China’s economy still suffered from
excessive state interference, weak rule of law, and poor corporate gover-
nance. The finding was important because once China is accepted as a
“market economy” under WTO rules, it will be far more difficult for other
 China in Crisis 45

countries to impose anti-dumping measures against its products.24 As

things stand, it’s far easier to demonstrate and certainly to assume that
production in China is not occurring on a fully costed market basis and
therefore has the potential to be anti-competitive.
Most anti-dumping actions launched in the US and the EU are against
Chinese companies. But China too is learning to play the game. In May
2004, for example, the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing decided to keep
in place anti-dumping tariffs on cold-rolled steel imports from South
Korea, Russia, and Taiwan. It also issued a preliminary ruling against
Corning of the US and nine other makers of fiberoptic cable.25 But in the
future, as excess capacity is built into the system, there will be many more
anti-dumping actions against China. Trade lawyers who can speak and
more particularly read Chinese will have a field day.

China: No Threat Anytime Soon to US Economic Dominance

Analysts tend to anticipate that China’s economy will overtake the US

economy some time in the 2040s and become the world’s biggest economy
in dollar value. On a PPP (purchasing power parity) basis, the catching up
might occur earlier. But the trouble with these sorts of projections is that
they tend to look at China’s growth rate now and project it forward along
with that for the US. The point at which the two lines cross is then taken to
be the point at which China’s economy will overtake the US economy. But
an awful lot is going to have to happen to the Chinese economy before it
gets anywhere close to rivaling that of the US. No country is rich because
its citizens work in factories making plastic toys and cigarette lighters.
China will only ever become a country with developed country levels of
incomes when the bulk of its citizens have stopped making these things;
because they have moved higher up the skills ladder and are employed in
services. That is the paradox of many “industrialized” countries: no longer
do they have significant industries.
In late 2004, IBM sold a majority stake in its PC division to China’s
Lenovo Group for US$1.25 billion. The acquisition made Lenovo, already
China’s largest PC manufacturer with a 27% domestic market share, the
third biggest PC manufacturer in the world. Under the terms of the deal,
Lenovo was able to keep using the IBM brand name freely for five years.26
A triumph then for a Chinese company buying into a world-renowned
name? Not really. IBM sold the division because it didn’t want it. Margins
had been competed down to a minimum in the PC business and IBM was
looking for an exit. Essentially the sale meant that the manufacture of
46 Inside Knowledge
another high-volume, low-margin, commoditized product was being
shifted to China. Neither China nor Lenovo was moving up the skills
ladder with the sale – IBM was. The market seemed to recognize this.
When it looked like the acquisition might not go ahead due to US security
concerns, shares in Lenovo rose 7.4%, their biggest gain in four months.27
Just a fortnight later, China’s TPV Technology paid US$358 million for
the PC monitor business of Dutch electronics giant Philips. The acquisi-
tion turned TPV into the world’s biggest monitor maker.28 But again the
move signaled less the arrival of another mainland Chinese company and
more the exit of Philips from a business it no longer found to be suffic-
iently profitable.
Haier, China’s number one white goods producer, is held up so often as
the first attempt by a Chinese company to build a global brand that it has
become something of a cliché. Partly owned by the northern city of
Qingdao, Haier claims a third of the market for small fridges in the US
and a billion dollars in overseas sales, but the truth is that it ranks high on
the list of world producers only because most of its sales are for the
Chinese domestic market. It has a long way to go before it will ever
compete with the true world market leaders, the sophisticated likes of
Whirlpool and Bosch-Siemens, with their streamlined production facili-
ties and huge investments in design and innovation. One problem for
Haier is that it costs a lot to ship white goods from China to the big
markets of the West. Most white goods are box-like and full of air. The
problem of cost has grown worse because China’s massive expansion into
world trade (imports as well as exports) over 2003–5 massively forced up
shipping rates. And so Haier resorted to opening production facilities in
the US. But the whole point of Haier’s competitive advantage is that it is
a low-cost producer and yet workers at its US plant are paid ten times the
hourly rate that its China-based workers receive.29 What can Haier as a
non-China producer offer that, say, Bosch-Siemens cannot? Certainly not
design and product quality, two things on which it trails the market. Para-
doxically, Haier, the one Chinese company that is routinely held up as the
branding success story, might be better off if it simply focused on China’s
domestic market.
Right now China is doing well from convergence whereby it doesn’t
need to incur the expense of R&D because it can beg, borrow, and steal it
from other economies that already have it, and by shifting workers out of
low productivity employment in rural areas to higher productivity employ-
ment in factories. But the problem with growth that derives from conver-
gence is that each extra unit of growth carries with it lower prospects for
continuing growth at current levels.
 China in Crisis 47

The story of China’s economy so far is the story of numbers. A great

part of the story comprises millions of underemployed rural workers
having removed themselves from the fields and gone to work in factories.
That simple act has seen a dramatic shift in China’s economic output.
If China is going to be as rich by the 2040s as analysts say, it is going to
have to be a very different place compared with what it is now. China’s
private sector has been important for introducing flexibility and driving
exports, but virtually all China’s heavy industries remain in state hands.
Half of all bank loans still go to SOEs and most of the loans granted by
China’s big banks will never be repaid. China remains one of the most
corrupt countries in the world, and the Chinese Communist Party, the
world’s biggest, most corrupt organization. All of this will need to change.
It will need to need to invest heavily in education, more so than it does
now. It will need a comprehensive legal system that is enforced. Property
rights will need to be better recognized. And it will need to have a political
revolution so that the market for ideas is robust and unconstrained. This
will mean greater plurality in the political arena and the media. Is that
likely? It all depends on what China’s political leadership really cares
about. Does it care more about economic development? Or preserving its
own power? Clearly, it is the latter. Converting China from a paddy field to
a factory does not threaten the leadership’s political power, indeed, it
preserves it. But the next stage of economic development, the develop-
ment of an ideas-based, creative, services-oriented economy, will present a
direct threat to the leadership. And so it is unlikely to happen any time
soon. China will hit a great wall. So too will its economy.
 Chapter Asia’s Big New
Frontier: The

5 Stans of
Central Asia

Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan
Capital: Astana Capital: Bishkek
Population: 15.1 million Population: 5.1 million
Religious mix: Muslim 47%, Russian Religious mix: Muslim 75%, Russian
Orthodox 44% Orthodox 20%
GDP per capita (PPP basis): US$6300 GDP per capita (PPP basis): US$1600
Corruption: equal 122 (out of Corruption: equal 122 (out of
145 countries)1 145 countries)

Turkmenistan Tajikistan
Capital: Ashkabad Capital: Dushanbe
Population: 4.9 million Population: 7.0 million
Religious mix: Muslim 89%, Eastern Religious mix: Muslim 90%
Orthodox 9% GDP per capita (PPP basis): US$1000
GDP per capita (PPP basis): US$5800 Corruption: equal 133 (out of 145
Corruption: equal 133 (out of 145 countries)
countries)

Uzbekistan
Capital: Tashkent
Population: 26.4 million
Religious mix: Muslim 88%, Eastern
Orthodox 9%
GDP per capita (PPP basis): US$1700
Corruption: equal 114 (out of 145
countries)

48
 Asia’s Big New Frontier: The Stans of Central Asia 49

Once more the former Soviet republics of Central Asia matter – this time
for commercial reasons. In the past, it was for reasons of geopolitical
factors and imperial aggrandizement that anyone bothered with them. But
now, not only are the economies of the republics becoming important in
their own right but they are increasingly important to the rest of Asia,
particularly China and its fast-developing economy.
Britain and Russia signed a treaty in 1907 after years of posturing, in
which they set out their imperial interests in Central Asia. Russia agreed
that Afghanistan lay within the realm of British influence. And Britain
agreed to accept Russia’s rule over the rest of Central Asia, namely Kaza-
khstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Emirs and
khans ruled over these five as vassals of Russia. Russian peasants moved
into Kazakhstan but otherwise life went on much as before. But by the
1920s, most of the traditional Islamic rulers had been overthrown and new
localized rulers established autonomous people’s republics. The five
republics were formally incorporated into the Soviet Union over the next
decade, sometimes violently. Rebellions were put down. One in Turk-
menistan in the 1930s saw thousands executed including the president and
premier of Turkmenistan. Thousands more died from 1925 to 1933 either
from famine or reprisals from Stalin’s policies of collectivization, particu-
larly in Kazakhstan, where the region’s nomads were forced to settle and
operate state-controlled farms.2 Thereafter the five were largely subjugated
politically and tended to underperform economically. Their economies
were based on agriculture, largely cotton, which was traded with the rest
of the Soviet Union.
The five gained formal independence in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s
collapse. The first years were a struggle. Their economies collapsed with
the removal of Soviet state subsidies and the loss of Soviet export markets.
But they did open their borders to China and the rest of the world. The
region was known to have oil and gas reserves but the extent of these
reserves was unknown. Until now.
Politically, the five are more diverse than suggested by their common
Soviet pedigree. The government of Turkmenistan has evolved into one of
the world’s most repressive and ridiculous dictatorships. Uzbekistan is not
far behind. Tajikistan at least has a façade of tolerance but the opposition
is emasculated. Kazakhstan is more liberal but it’s unlikely that its presi-
dent will readily give up power. Kyrgyzstan has the most democratic,
liberal regime, but it’s not without its cracks. The one thing all five share is
corruption. Each is grotesquely corrupt and each ranks among the most
corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International.
Culturally and commercially, the region formed an important stop on
50 Inside Knowledge
the fabled Silk Road but also operated as one market rather than a series of
discrete and isolated entities. Into the nineteenth century, Uzbeks
controlled many Central Asian cities with the support of Turkmen merce-
naries and Tajik farmers.3
The five sit together between the Caspian Sea and China and form a
block that in shape looks like a bigger version of India. Kazakhstan is the
biggest by far. With 2.7 million square kilometers, it is bigger than the
other four combined, slightly smaller than India, 25% bigger then
Indonesia and more than five times the size of Thailand.
To the west, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan border the Caspian Sea as
do Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia, but Kazakhstan has the longest Caspian
shoreline. And to the east, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan directly
border China. Other than their Caspian Sea frontage, the countries are
landlocked. None have access to the open sea and thus to the world’s
commercial shipping lanes. So why do the Central Asian republics
suddenly matter?
Near and beneath the Caspian Sea lie the world’s greatest untapped oil
and gas resources. It has been known for centuries that the resources were
there. It’s their extent that has only just become known. It’s likely that only
Saudi Arabia has more oil reserves than what lies beneath the Caspian and
its vicinity. The Kashagan oil field off the Kazakhstan coast was only
discovered in 2000. It is now among the world’s five largest known fields.
The discoverers of the Kashagan field had drilled to 4300 meters and
struck oil. It then didn’t matter where they drilled they still kept turning up
gushes of brown crude. They drilled 40 kilometers away and again, more
oil. Chemical analysis from all the samples showed them to have come
from the one oil bubble. An estimated 38 billion barrels of oil had been
found, the second largest field in the world and at least twice the size of all
the North Sea oil fields combined.4 The oil field is projected to have 13
billion barrels of recoverable oil, given existing technology, and will come
on stream in 2008. A consortium that includes Italy’s ENI, Shell, Total of
France, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Inpex reached an accord in
early 2003 with the Kazakh Government on how to develop the field. It
agreed to spend around US$29 billion to bring it into production.5
Big though it is, the oil field is an expensive one to develop. It lies
beneath sea that is frozen for much of the winter. Additionally, the Caspian
is shallow in many parts, making it difficult for icebreakers to operate
effectively. The depth changes quickly too. In recent years, it has risen
several meters, dramatically changing the coastline and submerging facili-
ties built along what was once shoreline.
The problem for all the Central Asian republics is how to get their oil, gas,
 Asia’s Big New Frontier: The Stans of Central Asia 51

and other mineral wealth out to the outside world. The region is landlocked
and a long way from any of the principal markets for its resources. Insofar as
oil and gas are concerned, the more obvious solution is pipelines. But
whichever way the pipelines go, there are political instability issues. The
most cost-effective route would be from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf but that
would mean crossing Iran, which Central Asian oil states are happy with, but
to which the US with its embargoes on Iran objects. Another route is through
Russia, but the republics are loath to expose themselves to such reliance on
Russia, having won their independence from the USSR such a short time
ago. Another route is into China, but that serves China only, making the
republics dependent on one large customer. Besides, whilst China is close,
its industrialized and energy-hungry provinces are not. Pakistan is desperate
for energy and would like to see a pipeline from the Caspian region that
passes through its territory. India too needs more energy as it develops.
More progress has been made in respect of nearby Azerbaijan’s Caspian
oil and gas. British Petroleum heads an international consortium that is
building a US$2.9 billion pipeline from Baku through Georgia and then
Turkey to Ceyhan where a marine terminal is being built.6
Territorial issues are another problem. The Caspian Sea is not big, is
bordered by five countries, and beneath it lies enormous mineral wealth.
This is not a recipe for regional political stability. The five have yet to
definitively work out how to divide between them the sea and its bed.
Should the Caspian be defined as a sea or a lake? If a lake, each bordering
country is allocated several kilometers reaching into the lake from its
shores. The rest is defined as international waters to be used communally
and the bordering countries must then negotiate how to tap the resources
and divide the proceeds. If a sea, the entire sea – bed and water – must be
divided among the neighboring nations like a pie and each is free to
exploit its part how it chooses.
Most experts view the Caspian Sea as a sea. But Iran does not. Nor did
the Soviet Union. Between them they signed treaties on how to exploit
what they had legally defined as a lake. But Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turk-
menistan no longer feel that they need adhere to Soviet-era treaties and so
the division of the Caspian remains unresolved, although agreements are
under negotiation.
So in Central Asia, the world has found an unexpectedly huge supply of
oil and gas that both helps to extend the world’s supply of cheap fossil fuel
and diversifies supply. Importantly, the Central Asian countries do not
belong to the Arab-dominated oil cartel OPEC. With their production and
assuming that a US-favoring regime in Iraq takes Iraq out of OPEC, a
significant amount of the world’s supply of oil no longer will come from
52 Inside Knowledge
OPEC countries and OPEC’s price-setting power will be destroyed. There
is now the possibility of decades of cheaper energy, thanks in large part to
Central Asia.

China and Central Asia

China is desperate for reliable energy sources. Until the 1990s it supplied
all its oil needs from domestic fields. But demand has boomed with the
economy. And so by 2004, China imported around 700 million barrels to
supplement domestic production.
But from where should China’s oil come? Central Asia is an important
emerging source.
All of China is covered by just one time zone: Beijing time. It means
that government offices in far western China close mid-afternoon and
open absurdly early in the morning. Merely to cross the border from Tajik-
istan and Kyrgyzstan into China means having to adjust watches and
clocks by three hours. (The difference at the border with Kazakhstan is not
always so extreme because Kazakhstan operates across time zones.)
There are six transit points along the border now between China and
Kazakhstan, including a railway, which until oil pipelines are completed, is
how Kazakh oil reaches China. China is also a big buyer of scrap metal from
the Central Asian republics. The metal comes from Soviet era factories that
have been closed and dismantled. It’s taken by truck across the border into
Xinjiang province and to the rest of China where it is melted down for reuse.
China has signed a raft of oil supply deals around the world, but the
biggest supplier potentially could be central Asia. In 1997, the government
in Beijing directed the Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC) to
buy 60% of Kazakhstan’s third largest field, the Aktubinsk field. CNPC
paid way above what was considered the market price for the stake. A 35%
stake in the smaller North Buzachi field was acquired next from a Saudi
Arabian company. And China’s Sinopec bought 50% of three blocks near
the Tengiz field.
In March 2003, China’s state-owned offshore oil company CNOOC
announced that it would pay US$615 million for almost 10% of the
Kashagan field, buying the stake from British Gas. But the other foreign
consortium partners blocked the sale, asserting their right of first refusal.
The long-planned construction of an oil pipeline to link China with
Kazakhstan finally began in September 2004, an extension of the 400 kilo-
meter Kenyak-Atyrau pipeline within Kazakhstan that was completed in
2002. The new pipeline ends at Alashankou, just inside the Chinese border
 Asia’s Big New Frontier: The Stans of Central Asia 53

and will have an annual capacity of 70 million barrels. A gas pipeline is

likely to follow. China plans to spend billions on new pipelines to then
convey the Kazakh oil from Alashankou to its industrialized eastern coast.
China imported 8.3 million barrels of Kazakh oil in 2003, just a small frac-
tion of the total imports of 637 million barrels. But with the new pipelines,
Kazakhstan’s contribution will rise.
To date, China’s commitment to Kazakhstan and its oil and gas is worth
around US$10 billion. Kazakhstan’s overtures to China have been helped
by the fact that its foreign minister and the president’s chief assistant are
fluent in Chinese as well as Russian and English.7 The two countries have
something else in common: a desire to contain internal Islamic sentiment.

Military Bases and Islamic Insurgents

Foreign countries have been quick to establish bases in the region since
the demise of the Soviet Union, reflecting both its new-found mineral
wealth and its role in the international war against terror.
US troops arrived in Uzbekistan in October 2001 to establish a base at
Chanabad from where humanitarian missions would fly into Afghanistan
as the war against the Taliban proceeded. These were the first US troops to
be deployed on territory of the old Soviet Union. It has become the largest
US base in Central Asia. Uzbekistan and the US signed a Strategic Part-
nership Framework in 2002. Uzbekistan was rewarded with US$220
million in cash.8
A few months later, after US troops arrived at Chanabad, more arrived in
Manas, near Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to establish a US base there. The base
would be an important position from which the US armed forces would
commence their attack on Afghanistan and its Taliban government. The US
government pays an annual rent to the Kyrgyzstan government for the base.
The amount has not been disclosed but it reportedly pays an extraordinary
US$7,000 for each US plane that lands as a landing fee.9 By 2005, there
were 1000 US troops based in Kyrgyzstan and 800 NATO troops.
Initially, the US bases at Manas and Chanabad were to be temporary.
But they are likely to be ongoing. Turkmenistan was the only Central
Asian republic to reject all US requests for assistance in the war against
the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan, although it did allow
humanitarian aid missions to cross into Afghanistan from its territory.
But it’s not only the Americans who have set up bases in ex-Soviet
Central Asia. Russia established an airbase in Kyrgyzstan in early 2003
after a visit to the country the previous December by Russia’s President
54 Inside Knowledge
Putin. The Russian planes and soldiers were to be joined by troops from
Kazakhstan and Tajikistan to make a joint rapid reaction force. The move
appeared to be an attempt to re-establish the influence and presence in the
region that Russia once enjoyed. The airfield, at Kant, is just 56 kilometers
from the US base at Manas. Kyrgyzstan agreed in February 2005 to double
to 1000 the number of Russian troops based within its borders. It would
appear that the Kyrgyz government is attempting to play Russia and the
US off against each other to extract financial and strategic benefits.
Russia also opened a permanent base in Tajikistan in November 2004. It
serves as an outpost for Russia’s 5000 strong 201st Motorised Rifle Divi-
sion. A key military space observation centre was also handed over to
Russia. For its trouble, Tajikistan was rewarded with the cancellation of
most of its US$300 million debt to Russia and pledges of some US$2
billion in investment over the next five years.10
Tajikistan has also become the venue for India’s first-ever military
outpost on foreign soil, located at Farkhor, about 10 kilometers outside
Dushanbe. Construction was underway in 2004 and it was likely that two
Indian air force squadrons would be stationed there.11
China too is becoming more interested in military involvement and
cooperation in the region. It held joint military exercises in Kyrgyzstan in
October 2002. Around a thousand troops were involved from China,
Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan. It was the first time that
Chinese soldiers had participated in military exercises abroad.
As mentioned, China, like the Central Asian republics, has a problem
with growing Islamic sentiment. Nine million Uigher people live in
Xinjiang province. The Muslim Uighers are close relatives of the Turkic
peoples of Central Asia. There is a Uigher independence movement that is
largely suppressed. The more militant wing of the movement is respon-
sible for various terrorist attacks and bomb blasts in the province from the
1990s onwards. Separatists Uigher rebels did declare a short-lived Eastern
Turkistan Islamic Republic in Kashgar in 1933 and governed some other
areas of the province as semi-autonomous areas under the Kuomintang,
but that was all lost when Mao and his Communists seized power in 1949.
A final Uigher uprising was put down in Hotan in 1954.12 Hundreds,
possibly thousands, of Uigher sons were sent to Koranic schools in
Pakistan in the 1980s and 90s where it’s now known that they came into
contact with radical Wahhabi preachers who preach the extremist version
of Islam as it’s practiced in Saudi Arabia. Many mosques and Islamic
schools that had operated in Xinjiang have been closed since the separatist
movement regained impetus. All Imams are now state-approved and
closely monitored.
 Asia’s Big New Frontier: The Stans of Central Asia 55

Xinjiang is remote and sparsely populated but it is important to China.

The province comprises around a sixth of China overall, and accounts for
as much as three-quarters of the country’s mineral wealth. Big reserves of
oil and gas lie beneath the province, including the massive Tarim Basin in
the north.13 A 3800 kilometer pipeline that is expected to be completed in
2008 is being built to take gas from the field to Shanghai. Shell Corpor-
ation is leading an international consortium that is paying half the US$5.2
billion cost of the project.
The Uighers are not China’s only Muslim minority. The Hui Chinese are
another Muslim group who are as numerous as the Uighers, except they are
spread across central China. They too have been the subject of sporadic
ethnic unrest. Ethnic clashes that involved the Hui in the central Chinese
province of Henan left seven dead in October 2004, for example.14
In June 2001, Russia and China formed with all the Central Asian states,
except Turkmenistan, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. This has
become the most important multilateral organization in the region. Osten-
sibly created to combat Islamic terrorism in the region, it is a means by
which China and Russia can express their strategic aims in the region and
counter the West.
But what are each of the five republics like? How do they differ and
what are their prospects? The following chapter looks at them in more
detail, providing an overview of a part of Asia that will only grow in
strategic and commercial importance.

Caviar and the mafia

Prior to all the excitement over oil and gas, the Caspian region was best
known to the outside world for its caviar. But what has happened to that
industry is symptomatic to the region’s wider problems.

Sturgeon, the fish that produces the finest caviar, are found in many waters
particularly in the northern hemisphere, including the seas near Japan,
North America and Europe. But the best caviar comes from the sturgeon
that are caught in the Caspian Sea. The principal sturgeon species in the
Caspian are the Beluga, Oscietre and Sevruga. Caviar from the Beluga stur-
geon typically attracts the highest price but only because it is the rarest; it
may not be the best. Sevruga caviar probably takes that honour.
56 Inside Knowledge

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union there has been a significant break-
down in the quota system that governed sturgeon fishing in the Caspian
Sea. Overfishing resulted and immature fish were caught. Controls to stop
over-fishing were put in place but it’s thought that for every fish caught
legally, 12 more are poached. Mafia groups from Russia, Kazakhstan, and
Turkmenistan have moved in on the trade and now perhaps 80% of all
Caspian caviar, particularly if sourced from these three countries, comes via
these illegal channels.

Good caviar is very good. Eat bad or cheap caviar and you’ll wonder what
all the fuss is about. The best caviar that I’ve had was in St Petersburg at a
restaurant that specializes in Russian food.To underscore the perilous state
crime has reached in Russia, before I was taken to the table, I was frisked
for weapons by an attendant who then insisted on taking my jacket before
I was permitted to go to my table on account of “security.”

The stakes in the caviar trade have been sufficiently high to lead to murder.
In 1996, 30 people were killed when an apartment block was bombed, a
direct result of Russian mafia infighting over control of the illegal caviar
trade.15 A lot of the illegal caviar is of dubious quality. Documentation is
non-existent or unreliable, refrigeration patchy, and poor handling may lead
to contamination. Much of it is tinned and labeled in the same manner as
legally sourced caviar and so the region’s caviar producers face the same
problem worldwide, with brand infringement and counterfeiting, as do, say,
producers of cigarettes and Scotch whiskey.
 Chapter
6 The Stans in
Detail

Kazakhstan: Asia’s Newest Star

Fifteen years ago, Kazakhstan barely mattered. But then it was discovered
just how much oil the country has. It hasn’t looked back. Few people
know much about it; however, Chinese government strategists in Beijing
are not among them.
The 15 million strong population is potentially fractious, for it
comprises over a hundred ethnic groups and 38 dialects. It’s also the only
former Soviet republic in Central Asia that has an Orthodox population
almost as large as the Muslim one. The others are overwhelmingly Islamic.
Kazakhstan is the richest and most developed of all the stans – and it
has the brightest prospects. Income per capita is rising fast, and now is
almost on a par with Thailand’s, on a PPP basis, despite the fact that at
independence at the end of 1991, Kazakhstan was essentially bankrupt.
Almaty is the commercial capital. It was the administrative capital until
1998. It has a population of around a million people and is lush with
poplars and hedges. Astana, the new administrative capital, is thirteen
hours from Almaty by train or almost two hours by plane. Day-to-day life
in the country’s cities and towns is open and relaxed. There are busy
internet cafes and vibrant shopping.
Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbaev is a former steel mill blast
furnace operator and long-time head of the Communist Party in Kaza-
khstan. He became the country’s president at independence in 1991. He
has ruled Kazakhstan with a mixture of benevolence and totalitarianism.
One of his first acts was to hand back to Russia all the nuclear warheads on

57
58 Inside Knowledge
Kazakh soil. He has generally been pro-market and pro-business; the regu-
latory moves of his government have generally had a beneficial effect on
the economy.
Elections were held in 2004. The three main parties were Nazarbaev’s
Otan (Fatherland) Party, the Asar (All Together) Party headed by his
daughter Dariga, and the leading opposition party Democratic Choice of
Kazakhstan, which was finally allowed to register as a party on May 5,
2004, after a three-year struggle with the authorities. The elections were
held in September 2004. Otan won an overwhelming victory amid stren-
uous claims of vote rigging.1 Asar had hoped to get at least 50% of the
votes but achieved only second place with 11%. Perhaps even the presi-
dent’s daughter fell foul of voting irregularities. “This election really
discredits Kazakhstan’s bid to be known as the democracy of Central
Asia,” a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch was quoted as saying.2
In any event the parliament is largely toothless; real power radiates from
the office of the president. Political killings are unknown in Kazakhstan.
The country’s only political prisoner was let out of jail prior to the election
so that he could resume running Democratic Choice.
Nazarbaev, like all the other leaders in the region, has sought to control
militant Islamic sentiment. Such sentiment is monitored carefully and
channeled via a national Muslim body that is headed by a state-appointed
mufti. In September 2001, the Foreign Ministry ordered all Kazakh men
pursuing Islamic studies abroad to return immediately to Kazakhstan. So it
seems that the events of September 11, 2001, were not only a wake-up call
for the US, although political parties based on religion had been banned
since 1998.

Onwards and Upwards

Chevron of the US was the first foreign oil company to be awarded a

drilling concession in Kazakhstan after the country’s independence,
gaining the right in 1993. It formed a joint venture Tengizchevroil with
Kazakhstanmunaigaz, the Kazakh state-owned oil company, and invested
more than US$4 billion in developing the Tengiz oil field, sixty kilometers
inland from the Caspian Sea. The field contains up to 25 billion barrels,
making it the world’s sixth largest oil bubble. Seven years later the
massive Kashagan field was discovered out to sea, as described in the
previous chapter.
Currently Kazakhstan produces about a million barrels of oil a day. By
2015, production will be more than three million barrels. A US$2.2 billion
 The Stans in Detail 59

pipeline has been completed across the northern Caucasus to the Russian
port of Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea, to shift 700,000 barrels per day by
2010. Other pipelines are under discussion or have been agreed, such as
those that will link Kazakhstan with China.
But Kazakhstan not only produces oil. It is the world’s fourth biggest
producer of uranium and supplies about 8% of world demand, and is a
large agricultural producer. The industrial sector is based on the extrac-
tion and processing of its natural resources, and manufacturing the asso-
ciated extraction and processing equipment. Kazakhstan’s oil has a high
sulfur content. The Tengiz field alone produces 4080 tonnes of sulfur,
part of which Tengizchevroil processes into fertilizer that is sold in
Europe.3 The Kazakh government is attempting to diversify the economy
away from oil and gas, and provides incentives for greater investment in
light industry.
Wealth has come quickly, as illustrated by Nazarbaev’s own circum-
stances as president. Back in the early 1990s, when Nazarbaev wanted to
fly anywhere on a state visit, he had to borrow cash for the visit from local
businessmen and ask for jet fuel from the countries he visited. He now
travels abroad on a US$80 million Boeing 767 presidential jet.
But it hasn’t been a question of simply extracting oil and selling it.
Economic management has been relatively prudent. The country’s debt
was awarded an investment grade rating by Moody’s Investor Services in
April 2003, two notches higher than Russia’s and better than some US
cities. Moody’s commended the Kazakh government for its “tight fiscal
and monetary policy and improved banking system regulation and super-
vision.” In 1996, Kazakhstan became the first CIS (Commonwealth of
Independent States) state to adopt international accounting standards, to
which most enterprises in the country now adhere. Securities market regu-
lation has also been significantly tightened. And in 1999, a new Budget
System Law was enacted which shifted many hidden, off-budget expendi-
tures onto the budget, thereby significantly enhancing the transparency of
the government’s finances. Various IMF (International Monetary Fund)
loans have been repaid ahead of schedule. There is a functioning stock
exchange and laws have been passed that require all trading in listed
companies be done via the exchange. The banking system has been tidied
up too and is now relatively solvent and transparent.
The US is Kazakhstan’s biggest foreign investor, responsible for around
a third of all foreign investment since 1991. But the Kazakh government
has grown increasingly unhappy by the level of foreign involvement in its
energy sector. Some officials feel that contracts negotiated early on
favored foreigners too much. The government has tightened restrictions on
60 Inside Knowledge
foreign investment so that foreign companies can now only invest in
Kazakh-controlled joint ventures. Nonetheless, renationalization of oil and
gas assets, at least in part, is now a risk.
Mittal Steel, controlled by London-based but Indian born Lakshmi
Mittal, is perhaps the single largest non-oil sector foreign investor. It
employs 50,000 workers at its steel works in Kazakhstan. Much of its
output is exported to China.
The Kazakh government has won praise for establishing a national oil
fund, the Future Generations Fund. It manages more than US$3 billion and
is modeled on Norway’s oil fund. But the way in which the fund has been
managed has attracted criticism. Funds that go into it do not come directly
from the oil sector but are skimmed off the national budget. Others claim
that it is not independently managed; the managers are too close to
Nazarbaev. The fund is run by the National Bank of Kazakhstan but the
board of directors includes government members and members of the
president’s own staff. Critics also argue that there are insufficient guide-
lines about how the funds should be invested.4
With greater wealth come more concerted efforts to protect it. In 2003,
Kazakhstan decided that it would create a fully fledged navy, although it
is landlocked other than for the inland Caspian Sea. But then it’s beneath
the Caspian that much of Kazakhstan’s mineral wealth lies. Defence
contracts are being awarded and purchases made. In November 2004, for
example, Singapore’s weapon maker ST Engineering, 55% owned by
the Singapore government, announced a joint venture with Kazakhstan
Engineering, a company formed in 2003 by merging 19 former govern-
ment defence companies. The venture will provide IT, engineering, and
defence services to the Kazakh government.5 There is little doubt that,
with growing oil revenues and resources to protect, Kazakhstan and the
other Central Asian states will become lucrative customers for defence
contractors, just as the Saudi Arabian regime, for example, has become a
milch cow for British contractors.

Corruption and Nepotism

For all the good news, Kazakhstan is corrupt, very corrupt. Nepotism is
also a big problem. Political and business appointments typically proceed
along clan lines. In Kazakhstan, as in many places in Asia, nepotism is not
seen as necessarily bad but almost an obligation; one is expected to help
one’s own clan and family. This is similar to how many Indonesians
viewed the corruption and nepotism of their country’s former President
 The Stans in Detail 61

Soeharto. The fact that he used his position to benefit his children and
friends was not seen as wrong per se. It was only when the nepotism and
patronage became excessive that Indonesians objected.
Corruption is a systematic problem, particularly for small and medium-
sized businesses (SMEs) and investors who lack the political clout and
connections to protect them from rapacious government officials. The
government adopted anti-corruption laws in 1998, but if other laws are
subverted by corruption, why will anti-corruption laws be any different?
The biggest corruption scandal to date involves no less than the presi-
dent himself, in what locally has become known as Kazakhgate. One large
American oil company in particular and its agent are implicated in ques-
tionable multi-million-dollar payments that were banked in overseas
accounts in the name of the president and another senior Kazakh political
figure. An American businessman was charged in 2004 in the US under the
US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in relation to US$78 million in ques-
tionable payments.
Nazarbaev ignored the controversy, preferring to do energy deals with
China. China does not have adequate legislation against corrupting foreign
officials that is actually enforced, nor (at the time of writing) has it ratified
the UN Convention against Corruption, nor does it have a well-resourced
and inquisitive media. Thus it is unlikely that the Kazakh president will
suffer any significant embarrassment over deals done with Chinese firms.
Meanwhile, the president’s family have enjoyed access to government
positions and business opportunities. Dariga Nazarbaev, the president’s
daughter, controls Khabar Television, the main local television station. She
also chairs the Congress of Kazakhstan Journalists. Nazarbaev named her
husband, Rahat Aliyev, to senior positions first in the tax police and then
the security agency KNB, the local successor to the KGB.
Another daughter, Dinara, is a director of the National Education Fund.
Her husband Timur Kulibayev was put in charge of oil and gas transporta-
tion and was then made deputy chief of an agency that oversees most of
the oil industry.6
Aliyev and Kulibayev both developed large private business interests as
well. Aliyev grew rich through sugar trading and other enterprises.
Members of his family bought control of Khabar and two other television
stations, a bank called Nurbank, a regional carrier called Atyrau Airlines,
and the country’s largest circulation newspaper, Karavan. And Kulibayev
gained control of another bank and a caviar-trading monopoly. He also
gained an interest in the Alibekmola oil field. A government company that
he headed then raised US$150 million in bond financing to help build an
export pipeline from the Alibekmola oil field.
62 Inside Knowledge
But it was Aliyev who made himself the most unpopular. His role in the
economy grew so large that the creation of the opposition Democratic
Choice Party was felt to be a response to it.7 As head of the tax police he
used what many said was excessive tactics to hound businesses. The tax
police appeared to have become a personal fiefdom. Critics claimed in
parliament that he demanded “tribute” from local businessmen and they
questioned his loyalty to the president.
Rumors circulated that Aliyev was planning a coup against his father-in-
law. Whatever the case, Aliyev was now a considerable political liability,
and so Nazarbaev effectively exiled him from the country by appointing
him ambassador to Austria and the Organisation for Security and Cooper-
ation in Europe (OSCE).
Nazarbaev had another daughter Aliya marry Aydar the son of the then
Kyrgyzstan president Askar Akayev. It appeared to be an attempt to forge
a diplomatic alliance in the manner of Europe’s royal families throughout
the ages. But the marriage ended in divorce and Aliya has remarried. It did
however serve to underscore the split personality of emerging Kazakhstan:
an economy with bright prospects overlaid on what in many respects
remains a traditional, clan-based society.

Turkmenistan and its Sun King

Turkmenistan, like Kazakhstan, is rich in oil and gas. Probably not as rich,
but rich nonetheless. But its people are relatively poor, particularly at the
level of actual household disposable income. The reason: it is ruled by one
of the world’s most ridiculous and self-aggrandizing dictators, who rules
by a mixture of repression and subsidy.
Proven gas reserves amount to at least 2.8 trillion cubic meters and
possibly 7.4 trillion, putting the country’s reserves in the top ten in the
world. Untapped oil fields lie in the Caspian Sea off the country’s coast,
the size of which are yet to be quantified.
As enormous as the country’s resources are likely to be, there’s almost
no foreign investment in the country. The government does little to
encourage it. And so the country is far poorer than it needs to be. The rule
of law is embryonic and much that happens in the country is at the whim
of the president. Vague property rights and unclear laws mean that there is
little protection for foreign investors, either from each other or corrupt
officials. Transparency International’s 2004 survey of perceived corruption
found that of 145 countries examined, only seven were perceived as more
corrupt than Turkmenistan.
 The Stans in Detail 63

Soviet President Gorbachev’s perestroika or openness policy of the late

1980s completely missed Turkmenistan by and it remained one of the last
remaining orthodox Communist outposts in the Soviet empire, holding
onto the tenets of a centrally planned economy that Russia quickly
ditched. The country’s President Saparmurat Nyazov rose to power and
proceeded to build a Stalin-like personality cult around himself, long after
the rest of the leaders in the CIS had ceased to contemplate any such thing.
And so the economy remains in a moribund state. The country is
covered largely by the Kara Kum desert, the hottest in the world. Agricul-
ture exists only with the aid of intensive irrigation; around half the irri-
gated land is planted with cotton. Much of the economy is still in the
hands of the state and little attempt has been made to privatize state assets.
Little is known about the economy with any great precision: basic
economic statistics are either deemed state secrets or they are blatant lies.
Gas, oil, and cotton are the main exports. Electricity has emerged as a
new export. The Turkmenistan–Iran–Turkey energy bridge was completed
in late 2003 and electricity exports to Turkey have since doubled to 300
million kW, earning US$21 million annually, with US$3.8 million paid to
Iran in transit fees.8 But this is paltry compared with what Turkmenistan
could earn if it proceeded with the robust development of its oil and gas
sector. But that would mean significant foreign investment and would
subvert the president’s preference for total control.

Diary of a Madman

So who is the man who effectively holds the five million Turkmens hostage?
A plump, thick-necked man, President Saparmurat Nyazov is the former
head of the Communist Party in Turkmenistan. He has turned his country
into Central Asia’s own North Korea. He models himself on Kemal Atatürk,
the founder of modern Turkey, and sees himself as the founder of modern
Turkmenistan. To a degree that is true. He is certainly giving the citizenry an
identification they’ve not previously had. But it’s also true that he is a dictator
who has stamped out opposition and shut down all democratic channels.
Decades after his death, Turks still breathlessly exclaim how much Turkey
today owes Atatürk. The same will not be said of Nyazov after his death.
Nyazov rules by decree and micromanages as much as he can. A system
of KGB-type informers is used to spy on the population. Many citizens are
not permitted to travel abroad. Nor are visitors welcomed readily. The
price of a visa to Turkmenistan is prohibitive, if possible to get at all; visa
rules are restrictive and whimsical.
64 Inside Knowledge
All newspapers are state-owned and Nyazov personally names all
editors. Each reports directly to him. All foreign publications are banned,
including those from Russia. Satellite television is not banned, however,
but that’s probably because foreign satellite television almost never carries
news on or commentary about Turkmenistan. Access to the internet
is restricted.
Nyazov’s rule has grown more bizarre the longer he has stayed in
power. He adopted the name Turkmenbashi or Father of all the Turkmens
and has had his rubber-stamp parliament appoint him president for life.
Statues of the man grace Ashkabad everywhere as do banners that
proclaim the state slogan: Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi (One People, One
Fatherland, One Leader). Following a successful heart operation, he had
thousands of portraits of himself that showed him with white hair replaced
by ones that show him with dyed black hair.9 He seems keen to suggest
that he is immortal.
A 23-meter victory column at the centre of Ashkabad is topped by a 12-
meter gold statue of Nyazov, his coat billowing, his arms stretched out. It
rotates, doing a full turn every 24 hours, but rotates so that it always faces
the sun during daylight hours. Nyazov has styled himself into something of
a Sun King. Uniformed guards stand to attention beside most of the statues.
And then on the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence from
the Soviet Union, a 300-meter-square handmade carpet, the world’s largest,
was unveiled. “The 21st Century: The Epoch of the Great Saparmurat Turk-
menbashi” was the carpet’s title.
Nyazov’s face also adorns books, and food and alcohol packaging. A
gold profile of him revolves constantly in the upper right-hand corner of
the screen for each local television channel.
Both Ashkabad’s central road and the airport are named after Nyazov.
The Caspian port city of Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan’s second largest, was
renamed Turkmenbashi. Regions, plants, and even asteroids have been
named after him.
Nyazov has often complained about receiving excessive praise. “It’s a
bit difficult for me that I am praised so much that I cannot even leave my
home because of it”, he was reported as saying on Turkmen Television in
mid-2004. Several of the huge portraits of the president that adorned the
city centre were removed and one statue was taken down.10 But apparently
such complaining should not be taken at face value. In the past it signaled
dissatisfaction with underlings and an imminent purge. Nyazov wants all
the praise he can get. But he does not want to take responsibility for it.
That would seem egotistical.
But the adoration doesn’t stop with Nyazov. He has extended it to his
 The Stans in Detail 65

dead parents, an unremarkable pair who died before Nyazov reached his
teens. Statues of his mother have been erected around Ashkabad. She
perished along with other family members in an earthquake in 1948 that
devastated the city and killed more than 110,000. Nyazov was eight years
old at the time. The parliament declared 2003 to be the year of Gurban-
soltan, the president’s mother. The national women’s association, a factory,
a school, and other facilities are named after her. In August 2002, Nyazov
decreed that henceforth January would be known as Turkmenbashi and
April would be renamed after his mother.11
Nyazov’s father died several years before his mother in World War II,
killed in fighting in the northern Caucasus. He too has been given the hero
treatment. The parliament declared 2004 to be “The year of Atamyrat
Nyazov, Hero of Turkmenistan and Father of Saparmurat Turkmenbashi
the Great, Turkmenistan’s first and life President.” The country’s war
veteran’s organization is named after Nyazov’s father as is a town in the
country’s east formerly known as Kerki.
Nyazov’s desire for follies goes beyond statues. Enormous sums have
been spent on a large gold-domed presidential palace, and water gardens in
what is otherwise one of the world’s most arid countries. Nyazov built
what was the largest mosque in Central Asia in his home town of
Kypchatk. Ruins of a 2500-year-old city lie just outside Ashkabad and
Nyazov has built a 21-kilometer staircase that passes over sand dunes
alongside the site, the stairs being illuminated at night with thousands of
small lights. A massive reservoir, the Golden Era Lake is being built in the
desert east of Ashkabad. It will be 120 kilometers long and 60 kilometers
wide. The concern is that it will suck up scarce water from rivers that
provide water for crops and drinking. Nyazov himself has claimed that the
dam will cost US$7 billion.12 It seems an overestimate. The country
simply doesn’t have the money.
Nyazov has declared that neither the Koran nor the Bible provide suffic-
ient guidance for his people and so has published his own book of moral
teachings called Ruhnama or Book of the Soul. It has become part of the
mandatory curriculum in schools and universities, replacing more practical
texts to the point where a generation of Turkmens will likely have
impaired education. In August 2004, Nyazov decreed that all learner
drivers must pass a 16-hour course on the Ruhnama as part of the require-
ments to gain a driving license.13 He completed a second volume in mid-
2004. (The English translation can be accessed at www.ruhnama.com.
Souvenir Ruhnama T-shirts, carry bags and mugs are also available from
the site. Seriously.) Every work unit must organize weekly discussion
groups about the Ruhnama. “This book, written with the help of inspira-
66 Inside Knowledge
tion sent to my heart by the God who created this wonderful universe,” it
starts off. Indeed, Nyazov is said to have inquired of the religious authori-
ties whether he could declare himself a prophet. But then in 2004, he
didn’t have to. The country’s youth association declared that he should be
known as the Prophet of the Turkmen Nation. Well, why not? The month
of September had already been renamed “Ruhnama.”
Clearly, Nyazov is a megalomaniac. But it’s not all bad. The country is
the only one in the region to have abolished the death penalty (although
678 executions were performed in the eleven months before).14 Nyazov
refuses to have a chauffeur; he prefers to drive himself around the capital.
The monuments and public buildings around the capital might be
wasteful and excessive but Turkmens seem to be impressed by them, in
the same way that Malaysians are impressed by the Petronas Twin Towers
in Kuala Lumpur, a project that had little commercial justification but
probably had beneficial effects by way of nation building. And, Nyazov
has succeeded in creating a Turkmen identity out of what is otherwise a
series of desert tribes.
Largely on account of his tight control over everything, Nyazov’s rule
faced little obvious opposition but that changed in 2002, which saw an
assassination attempt and a growing number of officials leaving the
country and going into exile. An opposition is in exile too. And so Nyazov
promulgated a law requiring that candidates for president must have lived
in Turkmenistan for ten years prior to the ballot.
Pressure also comes from ethnic rivalry. The population comprises
seven main tribes and 24 smaller ones. Tribal affiliations remain strong.
Nyazov is from the most numerous Tekke tribe. Many and perhaps most of
his senior officials tend to be Tekke too. But the Yomad tribe, which is
centered around the Caspian port of Turkmenbashi, see themselves as
having to pay taxes to Ashkabad and thus the Tekke to build up Nyazov’s
grand capital with little obvious benefit to them.

Governance and Government

Nyazov dominates the government completely. The situation was formal-

ized in 2003 when a law was passed that made it a crime punishable by
life imprisonment to “sow doubts about presidential policy.” Little is
delegated and as a consequence the business of government either jolts
ahead if it involves a project that has caught the president’s eye, or it
grinds to a halt.
The president likes to approve all major decisions and many minor
 The Stans in Detail 67

ones. He is also quick to fire those who have made a wrong decision.
Consequently almost no one in the government is willing to make a
decision. Foreign investors find that meetings with ministers are pointless,
they are disempowered and their words meaningless.
Only meetings with and agreements made by Nyazov hold much value.
Corruption is rife. This is encouraged by the president’s habit of sacking
almost everyone after just short tenures in the job, so senior officials have
an incentive to take what bribe money they can, knowing that they will
probably only have a short window of opportunity. Influential or compe-
tent officials are removed too because they might pose a threat to the pres-
ident. And so the functioning of the state is undermined because no one
can make a decision, few among the political elite are permitted a stable
career, and those that are, are there by virtue of their incompetence.
The 50-seat parliament meets only occasionally and then to accept laws
already announced by the president. Elections for the parliament were held
in December 2004. But they were a farce. Only one political party, that of
the president, is registered, and all candidates were required to have
demonstrated loyalty to Nyazov. Voter turnout figures are not known but
were probably very low. Many citizens seemed unaware that an election
was being held.
Cabinet meetings are broadcast on television. “Nyazov sits, admon-
ishing government ministers, who stand trembling along the wall, taking
notes with their heads bowed, clearly in fear of his questions,” is the
description provided by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.15
Purges come with monotonous regularity. Ministers are fired regularly,
sometimes for corruption and nepotism, at other times for underdelivery,
or simply on a whim and probably often to ensure that rivals are kept at
bay. Sometimes, Nyazov even fires ministers live on television. Poran
Berdiyev, a former interior minister, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in
2004. His crime was not specified but he is known to have fallen out with
the president in September 2002 after cotton harvest targets were not met.
Probably the role of minister is not a job that attracts the best candidates in
any event.
Government budgeting lacks transparency and presumably is a mess.
The funds for Nyazov’s grandiose projects appear to come from the off-
budget Foreign Exchange Reserve Fund, of which he has exclusive
control. Details of the fund are kept secret and so the cost of all Nyazov’s
projects is not known. It is believed that most of Turkmenistan’s earnings
from oil and gas go into the fund and from there are spent on the presi-
dent’s monuments.
68 Inside Knowledge
The Turkmen Economy

The prospects for Turkmenistan and its economy are potentially very good. It
is hugely rich in fuel resources particularly compared with its relatively small
population. One day its people will enjoy per capita incomes as high as any
other oil and gas rich state. It is all contingent on the removal of Nyazov.
As things stand, only two pipelines export gas from Turkmenistan. Both
are small – one to Iran and one to the Ukraine. The Iranian pipeline earns
very little by way of export earnings. Nor does the Ukraine one and much
of what it does earn is paid by way of barter trade.
A new pipeline was considered across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan
and on to Turkey but the idea was dropped in 2000, partly because
Turkey was offered better alternatives by competing countries but also
because the foreign firms Bechtel and Shell charged with assessing the
feasibility of the project could no longer work with Nyazov and his ever-
changing demands.16
Malaysia’s national oil company Petronas is one of the few outside
investors. It has exploration rights over the Makhtumkuli field in the
Caspian Sea off the Turkmen coast. It announced in early 2005 that an oil
well in the field had begun to produce major oil flows of nearly 800 tonnes
and half a million cubic meters of natural gas each day. It also said that
commercially viable flows had begun at two other offshore fields where
Petronas has exploration rights.17
Nyazov announced in 2004 Turkmenistan should export 75% of all oil
products produced by 2020. A US$2 billion deal was concluded in April
2004 with Itochu and JCG of Japan for the modernization and expansion
of the country’s refineries. And plans were announced for two new
refineries to double oil processing capacity. The details are hazy however,
and the plans may not be sufficient even assuming they come to fruition.
Nyazov has signed various gas supply agreements with Russia and
other CIS states but there is doubt that Turkmenistan will be able to extract
enough gas to fulfil all the contracts. It’s not that the gas is not there but
that the facilities to extract and convey it are inadequate.
The election of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan in 2004 and the
promise of a more stable Afghanistan augers well for the longer term
prospects of the Turkmen economy. The Turkmenistan government has
long hoped to have a pipeline built through Afghanistan and out to
Pakistan from where its gas can then reach export markets. Political prob-
lems, instability, and sanctions had put paid to that while the Taliban was
in power but in March 2002, President Karzai, on a state visit to Turk-
menistan, discussed reviving the pipeline idea with Nyazov.18 The
 The Stans in Detail 69

following May, Karzai and Nyazov met in Pakistan with President Pervez
Musharraf to sign a treaty authorizing construction of a US$3.2 billion gas
pipeline from Turkmenistan to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan. The plan is
to build a parallel oil pipeline later on. Karzai himself has worked for the
American oil company Unocal and in 1997 had represented the company
in pipeline negotiations with the Taliban leadership.19 Pakistan is desperate
for energy resources and at the same time can profit from being a transit
country for a gas pipeline to India. How the pipeline will be brought to
fruition remains unclear. The situation in Afghanistan was improving, but
it was still the case in early 2005 that the country’s opium crop was enor-
mous, drug money accounted for as much as two-thirds of national income
and had corrupted the government from very senior levels down, and
much of the country outside Kabul was still controlled by regional
warlords and drug barons.
In terms of foreigners doing business in Turkmenistan, the central role
of Nyazov and the poor state of the rule of law mean that connections to
the president and his patronage are critical factors for success.
One foreigner who did well in Turkmenistan was Igor Makarov. He
grew up in Ashkabad but is now a powerful businessman in Moscow
where he is CEO of the Russian energy company Itera. He used a long-
standing friendship with Nyazov in 2002 to secure supplies of Turk-
menistan gas for Itera. Old Soviet-era pipes were used to convey the gas.
Bouygues Batiment International of France, the world’s third biggest
civil engineering company, has done well in Turkmenistan. Nyazov
routinely chooses it to build his various monuments and follies, including
construction of the US$95 million mosque in his birthplace and a presi-
dential palace.20 An August 2004 presidential decree announced that a
four-kilometer-long cable car complex would be built on the outskirts of
Ashkabat along with shopping and restaurant facilities, an observation
deck, fountains and an ice skating rink with capacity for a thousand
people. The estimated cost was US$43 million, and once more the
contracts were awarded to Bouygues.21
Wasteful projects, corruption, centralized control, and insufficient invest-
ment in export-earning sectors are not the only challenges for the Turkmen
economy. Another is the non-convertibility of the Turkmen currency, the
manat, which hampers foreign investors. Worker productivity is low too.
Almost 90% of the 2.3 million workforce are employed by the state.22
There are many public holidays to mark obscure events such as Melon Day
in autumn when melons are brought into Ashkabad by soldiers and the
people can eat as many melons as they like. January 2 is Health Day,
another public holiday. Farm yields are low due to an approach to the sector
70 Inside Knowledge
that borders on the collectivist, and the need to meet production quotas that
lead to inefficient and counterproductive farming practices.
The pricing system is in disarray. Subsidies for a broad range of goods
and services mean that resources are misallocated across the economy.
Basic foods such as flour and salt are heavily subsidized, as is housing.
Water, gas, and electricity are provided to citizens practically for free.
Gasoline subsidies mean that a full tank (fifty liters) is priced at around
US$1. Flights on Turkmenistan Airways are cheap to the point that market
gardeners find it profitable to fly with their produce 700 kilometers across
the country in the morning to sell in the street bazaars of Ashkabad and
then fly home before nightfall.23 Not surprisingly cross-border smuggling
with Uzbekistan is a big problem. Turkmens buy things at subsidized
prices at home to sell to Uzbekistan at a profit.
The broad system of subsidies is enormously difficult to roll back and is
part of the means by which Nyazov perpetuates his power. Any regime
change will need to reduce and then eliminate such subsidies if the
economy is to be put on a market-based footing but such moves will be
met with enormous resistance from ordinary Turkmen citizens.
What will the future hold for Turkmenistan? Nyazov must know that his
dictatorship is unsustainable. Turkmenistan is isolated and he is isolated
within it. Even his close family have either left or been pushed aside. His
only son lives in Austria; his daughter in Moscow with her mother.
Nyazov is said to have been deeply disturbed by images of statues of
Saddam Hussein being toppled in Iraq and reportedly sank into a bad
mood for at least a week.24
Like Myanmar, Turkmenistan has a lot of potential but is held back by
an obstinate and isolationist leadership. The extreme centralization of
power with the president significantly raises the political risks for
investors. What will happen when Nyazov leaves office or dies? Will there
be a fight for power? Will contracts be repudiated? These are pertinent
questions, given that Nyazov, although not old, is now several years
beyond the typical life expectancy for a Turkmen male and has had heart
surgery. Change will come sooner rather than later for Turkmenistan.
Foreign investors and businesspeople should prepare for emerging oppor-
tunities now, if only to determine what those opportunities might be.

Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan

Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are the three poor relations of

Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Each has a per capita income, PPP basis, of
 The Stans in Detail 71

well under US$2000. Uzbekistan is the leader in the region population-

wise, with a population of 26.4 million, and has aspirations of being the
regional power to match. What is the current state of play in each country
and what economic prospects does each have?

Uzbekistan: How Not to Run a Country

Uzbekistan is largely arid and is landlocked. But it is not devoid of

resources or prospects. Much use is made of irrigation. It is the world’s
second largest producer of cotton and fourth largest producer of gold. It is
also a significant exporter of oil and chemicals. It has a long history of
involvement with international trade too.
Historically, what is now Uzbekistan was connected to the rest of Asia
via the Silk Road. Bukhara, which was on the Silk Road, is in modern-day
Uzbekistan as is Samarkand, with its spectacular Islamic architecture.
Some of Southeast Asia’s prominent trading families have ancestral roots
in Uzbekistan. Leading Malaysian businessman Syed Mokhtar Albukhary,
for example, is partly descended from Bukhara traders. In short, Uzbek-
istan has a critical mass population, a not insignificant endowment of
natural resources, and a long history of commercial involvement with the
outside world. So what is going wrong?
The answer is its government. It is headed by President Islam Karimov
who was the head of the local Communist Party until 1991 when he had
himself made president of the newly independent republic. His rule is
dictatorial and among the worst in the world, both in terms of human
rights abuses and economic management. No opposition parties are
allowed to register and so the opposition is either overseas, in jail or
underground. The parliament rubber-stamps all laws, and the media is
utterly muzzled and intimidated. Dozens of journalists have been jailed.
The police are required to fill crime-solving quotas and in order to meet
the quotas many innocent people are reportedly framed and jailed by the
police.25 Torture is systematic in Uzbekistan jails.
Pious Muslims have been caught up in the hunt for terrorists, and
Muslim activists and extremists face particularly harsh conditions. Inde-
pendent Islamic schools and mosques are banned. And almost 7000 polit-
ical prisoners are kept in what a UN rapporteur has called “cruel, inhuman
and degrading” conditions.26
By and large, government officials are corrupt, the police appallingly so,
and violent toward citizens as well. Enforcement of rules is arbitrary and
theft of private property by police commonplace. Discontent is rife. Early
72 Inside Knowledge
2004 saw open fighting and bomb attacks in the streets of Tashkent itself
between government forces and militant extremist Islamic groups.
Accordingly, Karimov has built up an 80,000-strong army, the largest in
Central Asia, reflecting Uzbekistan’s desire to be the regional heavy-
weight, as well as to help in putting down dissent at home and entrenching
his rule.
Most sectors of the economy remain in state ownership. The govern-
ment’s role in the economy is intrusive and heavy-handed. Inefficiency,
waste, and corruption abound. Legitimate businesses from stall holders in
markets to companies are at the mercy of rapacious government officials
and the police who impose unofficial levies and constantly demand bribes.
There is little predictability in the business environment, and insufficient
reward for effort. Consequently little effort is made.
The Uzbekistan government’s tardiness on improving human rights and
reforming the economy has led to condemnation from abroad. The US
announced in 2004 that it would withhold millions of dollars in security
and economic assistance because of its “disappointment” over Uzbek-
istan’s continuing human rights abuses. The European Bank of Recon-
struction and Development similarly decided that it would suspend its
assistance to Uzbekistan on account of the lack of progress on economic
restructuring. It’s a case of not wanting to throw good money after bad as
much as anything else. The som, the Uzbek currency, was made convert-
ible in October 2003. Ordinarily, this is a step forward but in Uzbekistan’s
case banking and other restrictions mean that, in practical terms, convert-
ibility has done little to help would-be foreign investors.
Uzbekistan has moved militarily closer to the US, allowing a US base
on its territory. This is partly on financial grounds. But as the US and
Western Europe have grown increasingly disapproving of Karimov and his
regime, Uzbekistan has sought to re-engage Russia. In May 2004, deals
were signed with Russia’s Gazprom for gas extraction in the Ustyurt
fields, for example. In 2003, 2.5 billion cubic meters of gas were shipped
from Uzbekistan to Russia. The government targeted 7.7 billion cubic
meters for 2004.
One significant foreign investor is Indonesia’s Bakrie Group, headed
by Aburizal Bakrie. Bakrie was appointed coordinating minister for the
economy by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in
October 2004. In Uzbekistan, the group has a stake in a mobile telephone
operator, Bakrie Uzbek Telekom, and invested in a hotel that had been
built by India’s Tata Group but sold it on in 1999. The Bakrie family has
ancestral roots in the region, which seems to be part of the reason for
their investment.
 The Stans in Detail 73

A Hand in the Till?

Most families in Uzbekistan have remained poor since the country’s inde-
pendence. One family in particular has not: that of the president. A
glimpse of the family’s wealth was afforded by the divorce proceedings of
his daughter Gulnara Karimova in a New Jersey court in 2003. Documents
presented at the hearing suggested that in the US Gulnara had jewelry
worth US$4.5 million, at least US$11 million in bank and investment
holdings in Switzerland and Dubai, a house in Tashkent, a US$10 million
retail complex, a US$13 million resort, a US$4 million Moscow pent-
house, Tashkent nightclubs valued at US$4 million, a 20% stake in Uzdun-
robita, Uzbekistan’s main mobile telephone company valued at US$15
million, a television station, and a recording studio. Later, when inter-
viewed, Gulnara admitted only to the Uzdunrobita stake.27
A barely existent rule of law and corruption is a heavy roadblock on the
way to developing a stronger economy. One law that President Karimov did
have the parliament pass in 2003 was a law that ensures that ex-presidents
cannot be detained, interrogated, or searched. There are no ex-presidents to
date. Karimov will be the first, assuming he does not die in office. The fact
that he had such a law passed suggests that he does at some point intend
to step aside and in that there is a glimmer of hope for Uzbekistan and
its economy.

Kyrgyzstan: Marks for Trying

Kyrgyzstan is not a country on many people’s lips. One reason is because

few know how to pronounce it. (Try Kee-er-gistan.) It is poor and moun-
tainous. And yet it has been something of a regional leader on economic
and political reform since the end of the Soviet era. Certainly it provides a
lesson on reform and decency that so far has been lost on Uzbekistan’s
leadership. But such things are relative.
Its economy is largely agricultural; cotton, tobacco, wool, and meat are
the main agricultural products. Exports comprise tobacco, cotton, gold,
mercury, uranium, natural gas, and electricity. Poor as the country remains,
the government has been adept at privatizing government assets and intro-
ducing market-based measures. Its management of its finances has also
been relatively prudent. There has been an eagerness to reach the outside
world, even if that eagerness might not always be reciprocated:
Kyrgyzstan was the first CIS country to become a member of the World
Trade Organization for example.
74 Inside Knowledge
Leadership, as always, counts for a lot. Askar Akayev who served as
president from 1992 to early 2005 was the only former Soviet Central
Asian head of state who was not a senior communist. He is a former
physics professor and as president was generally liberal in his inclinations.
He won the presidency in 1992 in elections that were widely regarded as
democratic. Akayev successively wound back Kyrgyzstan’s democracy,
culminating in his being chased from office in March 2005 and fleeing the
country after parliamentary elections were staged that were regarded
widely as fraudulent. But on the whole, the country remains one of the
more liberal in the region.
Kyrgyzstan society is relatively plural. The local business elite gather in
the Bishkek Business Club for example. Political parties are allowed to
register relatively freely. Even towards the end of the Akayev regime there
were at least 44 of them. But by and large they are not so important. Many
are built around single personalities and tend to exist to serve an indiv-
idual’s political career rather than the other way around.
Akayev was not a popular politician, largely on account of his economic
reforms. Constitutionally he was permitted only two terms as president
and he said repeatedly that he did not intend to run for a third term.
Nonetheless, the two-stage March 2005 parliamentary elections were
rigged and Akayev supporters ultimately won 69 of the 75 seats, raising
concerns that he would have the parliament amend the constitution to pave
the way for him to run again. Widespread public protests and looting in
which four people were killed led to Akayev’s fleeing the country even
though he still maintained that he had no intention to run in presidential
elections to be held later in the year. But his son Aider was a successful
candidate in the parliamentary election, as was his daughter Bermet, and
this fuelled speculation that the family was attempting to establish a polit-
ical dynasty.
Kyrgyzstan remains one of the world’s most corrupt countries, ranking
at 122 out of a possible 145 according to Transparency International’s 2004
survey of perceptions of corruption. The practice of position buying is
systematic, with senior government positions practically up for auction.28
Winnable seats in the 2000 parliament were said to cost as much as
US$500,000 in payments to senior members of the government. Such
payments are reminiscent of the “simony” of the medieval Catholic Church
in Europe, whereby sons of the aristocracy “bid” to be appointed as cardi-
nals and bishops or even pope for all the bribe taking and commercial
opportunities that such positions entailed. Still, some small and medium-
sized business operators claim that the business environment is getting
better and less corrupt. Others are yet to discern a change.29
 The Stans in Detail 75

Kyrgyzstan is a significant producer of gold. Its Kumtor gold mine, one

of the largest in the world, holds as much as 70 metric tonnes of gold. The
mine had been a joint venture between the Kyrgyz Government and
Canada’s Cameco but was folded last year into a new company, Centerra
Gold Inc, along with majority stakes in Mongolia’s Boroo gold mine and a
stake in a mine in Nevada. The new entity was listed on the Toronto Stock
Exchange. The Kyrgyz Government was allocated around 27% of the
shares in Centerra in exchange for its two thirds share in Kumtor. It then
sold this down to about 16%.30 The terms of the deal dismayed some
Kyrgyz parliamentarians and there were hints of suspected corruption.
Akayev’s family did well commercially from his presidency. One
family member controlled fuel sales to the US base at Manas.31 And in
2004, the telecommunications company Areopag, which is linked to son
Aidar, bought a significant stake in Pyramida TV, the country’s most influ-
ential independent television company. Akayev’s son-in-law Adil
Toigonbaev (Bermet’s husband) owns several media outlets, including the
popular newspaper Vechernii Bishkek and the popular television station
KORT, and is involved in the local tobacco, alcohol, building materials,
and oil products businesses.32 Akayev’s legacy is not all bad. He intro-
duced many pro-market reforms to his country and allowed it greater free-
doms than enjoyed in several other Central Asian republics. But the
manner of his departure from office ensured that he was demonized, and
that he will be remembered as yet another despot even though his leader-
ship was not without benign tendencies.

Tajikistan: Back to Mama

Tajikistan is the loser in the pack among the ex-Soviet Central Asian
republics. What does it have to offer the world? Not much. It has the
lowest per capita GDP among all 15 former Soviet republics. It has almost
no arable land. Cotton is the most important crop among the few that can
be grown. It lacks the oil and gas resources of its Central Asian neighbors.
Other mineral resources are limited too. Industry comprises one large
aluminum plant, some hydropower facilities, and small inefficient facto-
ries left over from the Soviet era. These are involved in light industry and
food processing.
The government has privatized state assets, not that there was much to sell
off. Unemployment is widespread and the economy is burdened by high
external debt. Corruption is rampant. Transparency International’s 2004
survey on perceived corruption found that as with Turkmenistan, of 145
76 Inside Knowledge
countries examined, only seven were perceived as more corrupt. A civil war
between 1992 and 1997 gravely damaged an already weak economy.
Drug money is one of the most important influences on the Tajik
economy. The country has become a major transhipment route for heroin
and other drugs produced in Afghanistan, earning Tajikistan as much as
US$300–400 million a year.33 The drugs enter Russia and from there are
distributed to Western Europe.
Tajikistan’s political institutions are weak. President Imomali Rahmonov
has sequentially removed most of his erstwhile allies from positions of
authority to head off any rival sources of power. And in June 2003, a refer-
endum extended the time that a president may stay in office, and so
Rahmonov could now run for two more terms and stay in office until 2020.
Parliamentary elections were held in February 2005. They were widely crit-
icized by international observers. The ruling party kept its majority.
Rahmonov responded to international criticism by saying that it was
“dangerous to force democracy” on a fractious society like Tajikistan. 34
Russia’s influence is strongest in Tajikistan, among the Central Asian
republics. Russian troops were sent there as peacekeepers in 1997 after the
five-year civil war between the post-Communist government and Islamic
factions. Around 50,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict.
The Russian troops are yet to leave and in 2004, the situation was formal-
ized with the opening of a Russian base in Tajikistan. The need to protect
Russia’s southern flanks from drug smugglers from Afghanistan is one of
the reasons proffered. In return, Russia forgave most of the debt owed to it
by Tajikistan and promised billions of dollars in new investment, rewards
it seemed for coming home.
But in essence, Tajikistan, like its other Central Asian neighbors,
remains a largely unknown quantity. Few know much about it. Fewer still
have been there. And where there are knowledge gaps, the potential can be
enormous, as Kazakhstan has shown.
 Chapter Anwar Ibrahim:

7 Malaysia’s
Dark Cloud

A dark cloud hangs over Malaysia in the form of the former Finance and
Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar was fired from these posi-
tions in September 1998. He was then charged with sodomy and abuse of
power and jailed for nine and six years respectively. The sodomy charges
were overturned on appeal in 2004 and Anwar was released.
What is Anwar planning to do now that he has been released from jail?
Will he become a divisive opposition figure? How much trouble will he
cause? Planning for business needs to take these unknowns into account.
They will impact upon Malaysia’s future political stability.

What Anwar’s Release Really Means

The decision in 2004 by Malaysia’s Federal Court to overturn Anwar’s

conviction for sodomy might have got him out of jail but it did not get him
off the hook. Many commentators and journalists who reported on the
decision did not appear to have read the detail of the 36-page majority
judgment. The initial conviction rested on a confession by Anwar’s co-
accused, his adopted brother Sukma Darmawan, and statements by the
only witness, Anwar’s wife’s driver who claimed to have been sodomized
by both men. The charges against the two men related to acts of sodomy
between given dates, dates that famously had to be changed three times on
the charge sheet as Anwar came up with credible alibis.
The Federal Court majority judgment ruled Sukma’s confession as inad-
missible. The judges found that it had been obtained under duress. There is

77
78 Inside Knowledge
little doubt as to Sukma’s sexual orientation. But what the court had to prove
beyond reasonable doubt was that the incidents occurred within the dates
specified by the charges. The Federal Court judges found that the dates had
not been proven, and it was on this basis that they allowed Anwar’s appeal.

Guilty but Not as Charged

Critically, the majority judgment says, “we find evidence that the appel-
lants were involved in homosexual activities.” It is this point that many in
the media, particularly outside Malaysia, missed. What the judges couldn’t
find evidence for was the dates.
In one respect the majority judgment went further than earlier courts. It
found that the driver “was an accomplice” to the acts of sodomy. Earlier
courts had judged him to be a victim. To put it crudely, the judges paint a
picture of a happy threesome rather than of two aggressors.
Rumors of Anwar’s homosexual activities had circulated in Kuala
Lumpur for years. Hanif Omar, the well-regarded police chief from 1974
to 1993, has publicly stated that the police were concerned at least as early
as 1993 about Anwar’s alleged homosexual activities because of the risk
of blackmail. In that year he had informed then Prime Minister Mahathir
of the concerns. Mahathir at that stage found Hanif’s claims difficult to
believe and Anwar was not charged for another five years.1
Why does all this matter? Because in Malaysia, politics and business are
inextricably linked. Anwar himself had no shortage of “clients” in the
business sector when he served as finance minister. He awarded banking
licenses to conglomerates that previously had been unable to get them, and
his people were appointed to the helms of various government-linked
companies. Some of his backers in the business community were accused
of manipulating the stock market to raise funds for his campaigns within
the ruling party.
Many Malaysians were pleased to see Anwar released. But that might
have been more a consequence of a Malay preference to let bygones be
bygones rather than because of a view that the sodomy charges were fabri-
cated. When asked to express an opinion as to Anwar’s guilt, most
Malaysians seem to be of the view that they just don’t know.
Indeed, what was unusual about Anwar’s treatment was that it was so
devastating. The winner take all approach is alien to Malay culture. Had
the government, and more particularly Mahathir, orchestrated events in the
grand conspiracy that’s typically supposed, Anwar’s annihilation is
unlikely to have been so total. It’s more usual in Malaysia for the defeated
to be allowed to retire from the public sphere with a degree of dignity.
 Anwar Ibrahim: Malaysia’s Dark Cloud 79

In any event, politicians in Malaysia do not direct the outcomes of trials,

contrary to widespread belief. Ministers do not ring up judges and demand
convictions. There’s no need. Typically the judiciary does the govern-
ment’s bidding without being asked.
A very senior Malaysian government figure once described Malaysia’s
judiciary to me as a “bunch of bloody idiots.” Of course we want them to
favor us, he explained, but not to the point where it’s so embarrassing. It
must be said that improvements have been made since then.
Anwar’s prosecution pointed to a process that ran out of control such
that none of the participants were able to stop it. The police and the judi-
ciary overestimated what was expected of them, and the government, true
to its word, did not intervene. Instead it looked on with rising horror
and incredulity. Mahathir might have hoped for Anwar’s removal, not
his destruction. Probably no one was more shocked at the turn of events
than Mahathir.
But did the 2004 freeing of Anwar signal a more independent judiciary?
Probably not. Perhaps once more, the judiciary was simply second-
guessing the government’s wishes. New Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi
appeared to be quite comfortable with the court’s decision and among the
well-wishers at Anwar’s house soon after was Khairy Jamaluddin,
Abdullah’s son-in-law and close advisor.
Will Anwar rise once more? Electoral support for his cause appeared to
have waned at the federal elections held earlier in 2004 when the opposi-
tion party headed by his wife saw its representation in Malaysia’s federal
parliament fall from five seats to one.
Also, the fact that the Federal Court cleared Anwar of the conviction but
not the allegations will not go unnoticed by many in Malaysia. Nor will it
go unnoticed by Anwar’s many enemies who will have an interest in
reminding the electorate and the ruling party that in the view of all three
Federal Court judges Anwar is a sodomite. Of course in more liberal coun-
tries, the notion that sodomy is a criminal offence is an absurdity, but in a
morally conservative society such as Malaysia, it’s not a strong foundation
on which to rebuild a political career.
In any event, Anwar’s second appeal, against the abuse of power
charges, was rejected by the Federal Court shortly after it overturned the
sodomy convictions. The rejection was unanimous. The court decision
meant that Anwar remains a convicted criminal and is banned from
holding political office until 2008.2
Meanwhile, once out of jail and having returned from Germany where
he had back surgery, Anwar did attempt to initiate public contact with
Abdullah. Anwar appeared unannounced at a community hall in Penang
80 Inside Knowledge
state for a breakfast celebrating the end of Ramadan in November 2004,
knowing that the prime minister was there. Hearing that Anwar was
outside, Abdullah went to the door, welcomed Anwar and escorted him
inside. Some in the media interpreted this as Abdullah looking on Anwar
with some sympathy, with a view to a rapprochement but it was no such
thing. It was simply Abdullah as ever displaying traditional Malay hospi-
tality even to one’s adversaries. Foreign journalists are quick to report on
outcomes in Malaysia but rarely do they interpret correctly the rationales
and motives of the key players. Whatever else Anwar might have done he
is also a past deputy prime minister.

Binladen, the Ayatollah and the ABIM

In early 2003, after I’d just given a speech at the Bankers’ Club in Kuala
Lumpur, a Malay businessman approached me. I asked him what business he
was in. Construction, he said, specifically mosque construction. Had his
company bid for the construction of the Putra Mosque at Putrajaya, the new
billion-dollar capital city being built outside Kuala Lumpur, I asked? No, he
replied. Anwar Ibrahim, the finance minister at the time, had already decided
who the contract would go to. Anwar, my informant told me, was “very
keen” to have the Binladen Group involved in Malaysia. And it was to that
group that Anwar gave the contract. He did so, I was told, without a tender,
despite there being no shortage of local construction firms capable of building
a mosque and with plenty of experience. As my informant said to me: “Why
a foreign firm? Why one from Saudi Arabia? And why without a tender?”
The Binladen Group is of course owned and run by the estranged family
of international terrorist Osama bin Laden. On being awarded the contract to
build the US$71 million Putra Mosque, it set up a local subsidiary, Puturan
Mutiara (M) Sdn Bhd to undertake the project. The contract to build aprons
and taxiways at Kuala Lumpur International Airport also went its way.
Anwar had been an early leader of the Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia
(ABIM), the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia. As its newly elected
president in 1974, he was detained for 22 months under the Internal Secu-
rity Act for his part in some student demonstrations. The ABIM was active
among Malay students and graduates and sought to raise the level of
Islamic consciousness in the broader community. It rejected a separation
between politics and religion and was responsible for the revival and
growing Islamicization of Malaysian society. Anwar became powerful
with the ABIM as his platform. Recognizing this, Mahathir enticed him
into the ruling UMNO party with promises of ministerial posts. Many
 Anwar Ibrahim: Malaysia’s Dark Cloud 81

were surprised. They thought Anwar would have been more at home with
the opposition Islamic party PAS.
Anwar has many curious links to foreign Islamic organizations and
business groups. To what end? many in Malaysia wondered. Anwar, who
is from Penang, had learned Chinese calligraphy but many Malaysian
Chinese were not won over by this symbolism. They remained suspicious
of his motives. A student radical, an Islamic activist, and now apparently a
liberal. Who was the real Anwar? many wondered. Which Anwar would
emerge as Prime Minister? The Anwar of old who had forged close links
to Islamic movements in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia? The same
who traveled to Iran in the early 1980s to meet with the country’s newly
installed leader Ayatollah Khomeini?3 One notable aspect of Anwar’s
political demise was how few of his parliamentary colleagues rushed to his
support either publicly or even privately.

What Anwar did Wrong

Anwar had been one of Mahathir’s strongest supporters. During the 1987
political crisis in which Tunku Razaleigh challenged Mahathir for the
leadership of UMNO and thus for the position of prime minister, a chal-
lenge that Mahathir very nearly lost, the challengers had taken to referring
to Mahathir’s principal backers – Anwar and three other government
ministers Daim Zainuddin, Sanusi Junid and Rafidah Aziz – as the “AIDS”
group, after their initials.4 They were a cohesive group, united in their
support for Mahathir. How things changed.
As Mahathir’s premiership developed, it was clear that Anwar would
succeed him. All he had to do was wait. But, by most accounts, he couldn’t.
And when the 1997–98 Asia economic crisis struck, Mahathir and his
supporters were particularly vulnerable politically. Tensions over how best
to resolve the economic crisis boiled into the political and factional arena.
Anwar’s main error was to transparently move against Mahathir during
the economic crisis when he thought Mahathir was politically weak. He
and his supporters did so in a way that caused Mahathir to lose face. Retal-
iation was inevitable. By then the mistakes had been accruing. They had a
long genesis.

A Tale of Two Finance Ministers

Anwar replaced Daim Zainuddin as finance minister when the latter

82 Inside Knowledge
resigned in 1991. And Daim replaced Anwar when Anwar was sacked in
1998. They had been friends but this changed during Anwar’s tenure as
finance minister. Daim was a businessman in his own right and so now
was subject to approvals and licenses being granted by the man who
replaced him. And not all Anwar’s decisions pleased him.
An early major bone of contention between the pair was the sale of
Hock Hua Bank in Sabah. It only had eight branches, a small customer and
assets’ base. Nonetheless, Daim had to pay M$90 million (then around
US$30 million) for it. The transfer price of all banking licenses is set in
conjunction with the Ministry of Finance, and hence the finance minister.
In this case, it was Anwar.
Daim wanted a banking license, but they were hard to come by. He was
not particularly interested in Hock Hua’s Sabah operations but more in the
license. He considered M$90 million far too much to have to pay, but had
little choice. He complained to Anwar, but his response was simply that
Daim could afford it. Why Anwar had any interest in the amount being so
large is not clear. After all, the money did not go to the Treasury but to the
Sarawak-based Chinese owners of Hock Hua Bank. There is little doubt
that the price Daim had to pay was high, given the assets. I had a chance
meeting with John Ting, Hock Hua’s CEO, in Sibu a few weeks after the
sale went though in 1997. His delight with the price was obvious.
Daim had also cultivated certain businesspeople during his tenure as
finance minister but now Anwar sought to develop his own people in the
business sector by granting them licenses denied to them by Daim.
Malaysia’s banking regulations have tended to mean that its banks gener-
ally belong to owners whose main interest is in banking. The finance
minister is empowered to grant exemptions, and that is what Anwar did as
finance minister. He allowed the diversified Hong Leong Group to acquire
MUI Bank from Khoo Kay Peng. (It was then renamed Hong Leong
Bank.) Hong Leong is Malaysia’s largest conglomerate and had not been
permitted by Daim to buy a banking license when he was finance minister
in the 1980s. Daim was completely opposed to Hong Leong acquiring a
banking license. He felt that diversified conglomerates should not hold
banking licenses. Other businesspeople were granted concessions and
licenses who Daim regarded as being hostile.

A Roof Over One’s Head

Another sticking point related to a property transaction between the two

men. Anwar’s official residence in Kuala Lumpur actually happened to be
 Anwar Ibrahim: Malaysia’s Dark Cloud 83

owned by Daim. It is next to what was then the prime minister’s official
residence. Despite extensive renovations to the house paid for by Daim and
requested by Anwar, the rent that Anwar paid each month was just
M$6000, far below the likely market rate. Daim says that he asked Anwar
to pay more but Anwar refused, saying that Daim was rich and didn’t need
the money. To add insult to injury, Daim claims that Anwar had another
house in Kuala Lumpur that he privately owned but which Anwar rented
out for M$15,000 per month by virtue of his occupation of Daim’s house.
To Daim, Anwar was simply profiting at his expense.
Businessman Amin Shah, Daim’s close friend who has big shipping
interests, moved into the house in 2000 by which time Anwar was in jail.
By then the market value of the rent was thought to be around M$25,000
a month.5
Another matter of contention was Putrajaya, the administrative city
being built outside Kuala Lumpur. The decision to build Putrajaya was
taken when Anwar was finance minister. Mahathir very much drove the
plans for the new city but Anwar was responsible for approving the
details as they related to public expenditure. Putrajaya’s estimated cost
was M$20 billion (US$5.3 billion.) Building commenced in 1996 and is
scheduled for completion in 2012. When finished, it supposedly will have
a residential population of 300,000 people, including 76,000 civil
servants. The prime minister’s residence in the new center was one of the
first buildings to be completed. It is large and lavish and for that it
attracted enormous criticism. Mahathir was its first occupant. He
defended the residence, or at least his role in its erection, by saying that
he would only be a temporary resident. Future prime ministers would be
greater beneficiaries than he. When I asked Daim, Anwar’s replacement
as finance minister, about the cost of the residence, he commented: “I
don’t know how Anwar agreed to it.” But of course when he did, he fully
expected to be its next occupant. And his local mosque would be the one
constructed by his Saudi Arabian friends. Anwar was involved in the final
designs for the residence. The residence was built with six bedrooms in
addition to the master bedroom. Mahathir only had two of his children
still living with him. Anwar had six.

Anwar and the IMF

The economic crisis rolled through Asia in mid-1997. The IMF arrived
shortly after, the economic doctor with its one-size-fits-all, cure-all
remedy. Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea had little choice but to
84 Inside Knowledge
swallow the bitter pill on offer, but Malaysia had other ideas. In any event,
Malaysia simply did not need the IMF’s money.
If Malaysia didn’t need the IMF’s money, then perhaps it could take its
advice. Anwar was sympathetic to the IMF’s policy prescriptions. His
policy response to the economic crisis was higher interest rates and a
tougher stance on non-performing loans (NPLs). Higher interest rates were
to attract foreign money and thus restore the ringgit to higher levels. The
prime lending rate rose from about 9% in mid-1997 to a high of 12.27% in
June 1998. However, because funds were scarce and banks’ assessment of
the risks of lending rose dramatically, some borrowers suddenly faced
rates as high as 24%. Malaysia’s business leaders, hit hard by the
economic crisis, then had to face Anwar’s high interest remedy. They
complained vociferously to Mahathir.
Policy differences emerged within the government. There were dramat-
ically different ideas about which way the government should turn.
Mahathir opposed the IMF-style policy prescriptions, but was unsure what
other options should be considered. Communications between Anwar and
the prime minister started to break down.
Perhaps the most spectacular communication breakdown occurred in
relation to the fate of the large, state-owned Bank Bumiputera. Around late
1997, Anwar was on the verge of allowing it to fail. He then planned to
liquidate it. The bank had been bailed out several times before and was a
perpetual headache for the government. Liquidating it would get rid of the
problem once and for all. The problem is that Anwar had not told Mahathir
of his plans. Closing the bank was an enormous decision and it is
surprising that the prime minister had not been consulted. The bank’s
managers went to Daim to tell him of Anwar’s plans. Daim went to
Mahathir with the news. Mahathir was shocked and agreed that the
government should support a government bank. No doubt the incident
unnerved Mahathir. His deputy prime minister had not kept him informed
of a very major development and had unilaterally made a historic decision.
“We have a Brutus in the Party,” Mahathir is known to have remarked on
several occasions.

Restraining Mahathir

Few realize even now that Mahathir considered announcing a state of

emergency in response to the economic crisis. Most probably this would
have involved establishing a National Action Council along the lines of
the one established in the aftermath of the 1969 race riots in Kuala
 Anwar Ibrahim: Malaysia’s Dark Cloud 85

Lumpur. Daim was vehemently against imposing a state of emergency.

“One was imposed in 1969 and it was a mistake then too,” Daim told me.
A similar declaration in 1997 would have “more or less allowed Mahathir
to rule by decree.” Daim believed that it would have been a disaster for
Malaysia. All those foreigners who were convinced that Mahathir was a
totalitarian dictator would have been correct after such an imposition,
Daim thought, because the state of emergency would have given
Mahathir the dictatorial powers that many foreigners wrongly presumed
he already had.
Daim called a meeting of nine members of the UMNO Supreme
Council (UMNO’s key policy-making body) in late 1997 to attempt to
avert Mahathir’s plan. The nine were the chief ministers and menteri
besars of the UMNO-ruled states. Daim held no cabinet post at that stage,
but the nine chief ministers and menteri besars attended anyway. Daim
had the ear of the prime minister and that’s what counted.
Daim briefed them on the state of emergency option. It found little
favor. Instead, Daim proposed what became the National Economic Action
Plan, which was then taken to Mahathir, with the broad backing of the
UMNO Supreme Council. Daim’s plan to which Mahathir agreed included
establishing the National Economic Action Committee (NEAC) which he
would head. It came to rival Anwar’s Ministry of Finance. Effectively,
Anwar was sidelined.

Disaster for Malaysia

Daim was appointed finance minister after Mahathir fired Anwar from the
job on 2 September 1998, the day after capital controls were introduced
and the ringgit was tied to the value of the US dollar.
Politically, things were moving to a head. Anwar or at least his
supporters were moving on Mahathir. Publicly they complained of nepo-
tism and corruption, a thinly veiled attack on Mahathir. In response, allega-
tions of Anwar’s sexual impropriety resurfaced. Mahathir seized on them.
Prior to Mahathir’s decision to fire Anwar, Mahathir called a meeting of
the various UMNO chief ministers and briefed them on the sodomy alle-
gations. The consensus apparently was that Anwar should be fired and
charged. But Daim felt that this order of events was wrong. Anwar should
be charged and then fired, and he told Mahathir so. He argued that it would
be better if Anwar was arrested immediately. That would destroy Anwar’s
credibility. But Mahathir ignored the advice. Time was lost. The delay in
Anwar’s arrest was due partly to the police, who had decided that Anwar
86 Inside Knowledge
should not be arrested while the Commonwealth Games were still being
staged in Kuala Lumpur. To do so would have provoked serious civil
disobedience and security problems. When the police did detain Anwar,
they initially did so under the Internal Security Act (ISA). It was a
mistake, as that, alone, provoked howls of outrage. Mahathir later said that
the decision to use the ISA was the police chief’s and not his or the
government’s decision. Singapore’s then Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew
met up with Mahathir at Davos in Switzerland in early 1999 where he
asked him how Anwar could be arrested under the ISA as a national secu-
rity threat when he’d been deputy prime minister only a month before. He
was “flabbergasted” to learn that Mahathir did not know that Anwar was
going to be arrested under the Act.6 Once more the business of governing
Malaysia was shown not to be the neat conspiracy that the Western media
so often presumes but was in fact far messier and uncoordinated.
On hearing that Mahathir was about to move against him, Anwar
confronted Mahathir, who told him that he should resign. Anwar asked for
a week to think about it. Anwar decided that he would not resign and so
Mahathir fired him. The time between Anwar’s sacking and his eventual
arrest allowed Anwar to galvanize support, the very thing that Daim had
feared would happen. In Daim’s view, the whole affair of Anwar’s
dismissal was mishandled. The delay in arresting Anwar cost Mahathir, the
government and Malaysia dearly. It allowed Anwar to state his case before
the international media and organize his supporters.
But the biggest debacle was the black eye that Anwar received as part of
a vicious beating from the Inspector General of Police Abdul Rahmin
Noor, after his arrest and detention. Every member of the Malaysian
government was appalled when they saw images on their television
screens of what had happened to Anwar. “The PR was appalling and the
black eye was an unmitigated disaster,” the then defence minister and
now Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak told me. Daim was also
disgusted. The police chief had been under huge pressure, due to the threat
of rioting in Kuala Lumpur because of Anwar’s Reformasi campaign, and
he had been personally verbally attacked by Anwar but his actions were
inexcusable. He compounded the felony by taking so long to admit that he
was the perpetrator.
Lee Kuan Yew, on his first visit to Malaysia in ten years in August 2000,
during a media conference in Kuala Lumpur, echoed Najib’s views that the
Malaysian government had mishandled the Anwar episode. “It was an
unmitigated disaster, and I felt more sorry for Dr Mahathir than I felt for
Anwar,” Lee said.7
 Anwar Ibrahim: Malaysia’s Dark Cloud 87

The Trials

The first trial that Anwar underwent related to the abuse of power charges.
The presiding judge was Augustine Paul. He has since been demonized,
probably unfairly. The way in which the trial was conducted is open to
criticism. He allowed charges to be amended late in the trial. Initially the
trial dealt with Anwar’s alleged sodomy and with him using his position to
have witnesses withdraw statements against him. The amended charges
meant that in this trial at least only the second matter was addressed. And
so the truthfulness of the sodomy allegations was immaterial. What
mattered was whether Anwar had abused his position.
But rather than adjust to the new charges, regardless of their procedural
propriety, Anwar’s defence team carried on regardless. In fact, Anwar’s
defence team was unbelievably incompetent. Paul’s job was to adjudicate
over a matter of law. Had Anwar broken it or not? Anwar’s defence team
kept demanding adjudication over a political matter. Their main argument
was that Anwar was the victim of a political conspiracy. Paul reminded
them repeatedly that it was irrelevant. The issue was whether Anwar had
abused his position. The motives of the government in bringing the
charges were irrelevant. They were something for another arena. Ulti-
mately, the judge presented a lengthy, well-argued decision with plenty of
references and precedents. And Anwar’s defence team presented political
arguments that were inappropriate for a court of law.
And so had Anwar abused his position? Absolutely. There is no doubt
whatsoever that Anwar was guilty of these charges. Paul correctly found
Anwar guilty. Anwar had indeed asked the Special Branch of the
Malaysian police to “put a little fear” into two witnesses who had made
statements in relation to Anwar’s alleged sexual impropriety. Special
Branch officers were then assigned to get the two witnesses to retract their
statements. They threatened the witnesses with detention under the
Internal Security Act and, from the officers’ own testimony, subjected one
or both of the witnesses to night-long, non-stop interrogation “to create an
atmosphere in which physical threat is imminent.”8 Anwar was sentenced
to six years on each of the applicable four charges, to be served concur-
rently. The sentence was tough. But it was not the maximum.
The next trial related to the sodomy charges. Here the evidence was less
clear cut. In any event Anwar was found guilty. He was given nine years. It
too was a tough sentence. But it might have been worse. Section 377B of the
Malaysian Penal Code states that whoever voluntarily commits carnal inter-
course against the order of nature shall be punished with imprisonment of a
term which may extend to 20 years and shall also be liable to whipping.
88 Inside Knowledge
And From Here?

So where does all this leave us? What should be clear is that the whole
Anwar episode is a lot less black and white than was portrayed in the
foreign media particularly, much like Anwar himself. The case for Anwar
is not clear cut. And so politically no matter what the future brings, Anwar
is damaged goods. Will he resurface as a significant political force in
Malaysia? It seems unlikely. Not because of any grand government
conspiracy to stop him. But because of the man himself. But it won’t stop
him from trying. And what must not be forgotten is that sympathy from the
Malay community and indeed other Malay politicians for Anwar on
account of how he was treated should not be taken as a sign that they think
that he is innocent of all with which he was charged. He remains barred
from holding political office until 2008. The only way around this is if he
receives a royal pardon. But pardons do not exonerate. They merely
excuse. And once again that is not a good platform on which to resurrect a
political career.
 Chapter Guns for Hire:

8 Australian
Expatriates

Expatriates are one of the great commercial minorities of Asia. One of the
most prominent in this diaspora are the Australians. But what are they
good for? Australians are direct to the point of rudeness. They are insensi-
tive to hierarchy. They are disparaging and dismissive of authority. And as
employees, that makes them very valuable, especially in Asia.
Asian culture demands the opposite of these attributes. But modern
corporations need employees who are able to tell managers the truth, even if
the news is bad. They need employees who put productivity above loyalty;
they need management that is participative and not authoritative. And
nowhere more are these attributes needed than in Asian family firms.
So what do Australians have to offer the world, and more specifically
Asia? Australians themselves joke about Foster’s beer, the Hill’s Hoist,
and Vegemite. But these things really are not important. Perhaps their most
valuable attribute is their ability to detect bullshit and their unwillingness
to put up with it. Australians are deeply cynical and suspicious of
authority. Typically they are unafraid to question it.
Australians seem to be born with in-built bullshit detectors. And, in a
world that is increasingly full of it, that is a very valuable commodity.
But those in-built bullshit detectors do not often come with in-built
senses of discretion. And so Australians’ ability to not only detect bullshit
but also announce it as such is something that many companies around
the world find valuable. This is why Australians make such useful expa-
triates. They are bullshit detectors for hire. Of course they are more than
that, but it is an attribute that can provide a competitive edge. The
Australian ability to pipe up in a meeting and say quite unashamedly,

89
90 Inside Knowledge
“what a lot of nonsense,” particularly in the presence of more senior
managers is a skill much needed in corporate Asia.
This attribute makes many Australian professionals excellent trou-
bleshooters. Increasingly they work as lawyers, auditors, and management
consultants in Asia. But it can also make them short-term employees. The
crash or crash through mentality means that often Australians in Asian
workplaces can introduce reforms that others cannot but, having done that
and trodden on everyone’s toes they then find their positions untenable.
They can be blamed for the discord that all workplace change brings – be
forced out or be fired – and yet leave behind an organization more stream-
lined and efficient than when they arrived. They represent an all-inclusive
package for any Asian manager who needs change but doesn’t want to be
blamed for it.
They are cost-effective too. Australians have the reputation in business
services such as accounting and law as being highly skilled, flexible, and
well priced when it comes to remuneration. Anecdotally, Australians do
not require compensation packages as large as, say, comparable American
or European expatriates in Asia. No longer is spending time working in
Asia unusual for many Australians. Asia is not seen as being far from
home, exotic or unknowable, as it might appear to Americans or Euro-
peans. Working in Asia is now viewed in Australia as unremarkable.
Jakarta or Hong Kong might as well be an outlying suburb of Sydney as
far as many Australian business professionals are concerned now.

World Citizens

Australians are leaving Australia in record numbers, even though in the

late 1990s and early 2000s the Australian economy was one of the world’s
most resilient. But it’s a cultural thing. Educated Australians are inquisi-
tive, flexible, and adapt well to living in other countries. Many enjoy being
mobile and independent. These are sentiments that few in Asia understand
and for whom to leave family and friends permanently and by choice
is unthinkable.
About 120,000 Australians leave Australia permanently or for the long
term each year. Overwhelmingly they are young professionals: accoun-
tants, lawyers, and IT professionals. Altogether about 5% of Australians or
about a million live outside Australia.1 Many operate in the international
labour market and remain internationally mobile.
Only in 2002 did the Australian government pass legislation to allow all
Australian citizens to hold dual citizenship. Previously only overseas-born
 Guns for Hire:Australian Expatriates 91

Australians were able to hold two passports. According to the Australian

government, the change was to keep in step with social and economic real-
ities. But it was also because Australians overseas had lobbied the govern-
ment for the change.

Here Come the Australians

Australia is not an important country on the world stage. But Australians

are prominent as individuals around the world more than is suggested by
their numbers. Australians are phenomenally successful in show business.
Many of the biggest names in movies today are Australian. But many
heads of worldwide corporations are Australian too. One reason for this is
the size of the Australian economy. It is too small, given the number of
highly educated Australians, be they professionally trained actors or
managers. Domestic audiences are too small and there aren’t enough
management positions around. Challenges are also limited. The Australian
economy is relatively benign; those looking for big challenges must often
look elsewhere. The following are some areas of influence:

■ In acting there is Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Hugh Jackman,

Russell Crowe, Toni Collette, Naomi Watts, Eric Bana, Nicole Kidman,
Pamela Stephenson, Barry Humphries, Judy Davis, Paul Hogan, Mel
Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce and Noah Taylor, Bryan Brown,
Jonathan Lapaglia, Heath Ledger, and Paul Mecurio.
■ In movie directing there is Phillip Noyce, Baz Luhrmann, Bruce Beres-
ford, Peter Weir, George Miller, Gillian Armstrong, Richard Franklin,
Simon Wincer, and Fred Schepisi.
■ The list of world-renowned Australian musicians perhaps is bigger. Joan
Sutherland (opera), Nick Cave, Darren Hayes, Kylie Minogue, and
Natalie Imbruglia (pop) are among them.
■ Australians head some major names in world business. Jacques Nasser
was a recent CEO of Ford Motors worldwide; Charlie Bell was the CEO
of McDonald’s Corp until stepping down in late 2004 due to ill health
(he died from cancer in January 2005, aged 44); David Johnson served
as the chairman of Campbell Soup Co until 1997; and Douglas Daft
headed Coca Cola worldwide until the end of 2004.
■ And at the start of 2005, other Australians heading up big name non-
Australian corporations included Geoff Bible, CEO of Philip Morris;
Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical; Bob Bishop, CEO of Silicon
Graphics; Philip Bowman, CEO of Allied Domecq; Leigh Clifford,
92 Inside Knowledge
CEO of Rio Tinto; Rod Eddington, CEO of British Airways; Doug
Flynn, head of Aegis Group; Peter Hearl, president of Pizza Hut;
Stephen Millar, CEO and president of Constellation Wines, the world’s
biggest wine business; David Mackay, president of Kellogs; and John
Pizzey, chairman of the London Metals Exchange.2
■ Robert Thompson, the editor of The Times in London, is another
Australian. UK Trade Minister Patricia Hewitt is Australian by birth,
having been raised in Canberra. So too is James Wolfensohn, the head
of the World Bank. Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corporation, is
also Australian born but gave up his Australian citizenship for US
legal reasons.
■ Some Australian companies are making it big in the home of capitalism,
the United States: Australia’s Westfield Corporation is the second
biggest shopping center owner and manager; Lend Lease Corporation is
the biggest manager of tax-exempt real estate; and Boral is the biggest
brick and roof tile manufacturer.

Is Australia a Part of Asia?

Australian expatriates are commonplace throughout Asia but is Australia

a part of Asia? Australia is close to Asia or at least it is physically close.
But Australia’s population is concentrated in the bottom southeast corner
of Australia. So while Australia is physically close to Asia, most
Australians physically are not. They live nowhere near it; those parts of
Australia that are close to Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia remain
largely uninhabited.
Australian politicians talk about “the region” meaning Asia. But the reality
is that Beijing is closer to London than it is to Canberra. And yet the English
do not describe Beijing as “in their region.” Anything but, in fact. Asia is the
“Far East,” usually said with a great deal of emphasis on the word “Far.” (The
idea that Asia is on the “East” really only works if you consider the world to
be flat. Otherwise keep heading east and you’ll end up back in London.)
So what is “Far” to the English is “our” region to the Australians. And
as for Australia’s “near” neighbor Indonesia? Well, Tehran or Kabul are as
far from London as Jakarta is from Sydney, Canberra, or Melbourne.
Clearly, the British do not regard Iran and Afghanistan as near neighbors.
They’d spend even more on defence if they did.
And what of Australians themselves? What do people mean when they
talk of “Australians”? Typically they mean “white” Australians – Australians
of European descent. But old stereotypes are precisely that. Many
 Guns for Hire:Australian Expatriates 93

Table 8.1 Asian-born Australians – top ten countries of birth3

Country of birth Numbers % of Australian population
born overseas
Vietnam 174,400 3.9
China (excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan) 168,100 3.7
The Philippines 123,000 2.7
India 100,200 2.4
Malaysia and Brunei 97,600 2.2
Indonesia 67,600 1.5
Hong Kong and Macau 56,300 1.2
Sri Lanka 56,000 1.2
Korea 41,400 0.9
Singapore 30,700 0.7

All Asian regions 1,077,800 23.9

Australians are Asian. Indeed more than one million Australians were born
in Asia and almost 10% of the country’s population has its ethnic origins in
North and Southeast Asia or in the subcontinent (see Table 8.1).
In fact a quarter of all people who live in Australia were born overseas
and of these a quarter were born in Asia. The Asianization of the Australian
population’s ethnicity is accelerating. The number of Australians who were
born in Asia quadrupled between 1980 and 2000.4 Just over half were born
in Southeast Asia, a third were born in Northeast Asia and a fifth come
from the subcontinent. The three most common countries of birth for
Asian-born Australians are Vietnam, mainland China, and the Philippines.
Table 8.2 shows the top ten source countries in Asia.
As it is, proportionally Australia has the highest Asian-born population
in the world outside Asia (Table 8.2.) Australia is also said to have the
biggest concentration of Greeks outside Athens (in Melbourne), the second
biggest Maltese community outside Malta, and the largest number of
Holocaust survivors per capita outside Israel.

Table 8.2 Asian-born populations in selected countries5

Country Proportion of the population
born in Asia (%)
Australia 5.6
Canada 5.2
New Zealand 3.3
USA 2.0
Sweden 1.0
UK 0.8
France 0.4
Italy 0.4
94 Inside Knowledge
Food culture in Australia is among the most open and diverse in the
world. Most Australians are familiar with regional Chinese, Vietnamese,
and other Asian foods. Chinese restaurants are far more common in
Australia than McDonald’s. As many as 4000 Chinese restaurants have
opened in Australia and there are another 2000 other Asian-style restaurants.
There are at least 2500 Italian restaurants. But there are only around 700
McDonald’s. Counterintuitively, McDonald’s has made greater inroads into
Japan than it has into Australia. And Chinese restaurants have made greater
inroads into Australia than they have in Japan.

Australia and Asia

Australians are very preoccupied with Asia, particularly at the government

level. When he was prime minister, Paul Keating made a great play of culti-
vating some Asian leaders. It made him popular in Asia. He was closest to
Indonesia’s President Soeharto. But to what end? Ultimately, it did Australia
little good. For all the time and money spent cultivating that relationship,
about the best that could be said of it was that one of Australia’s former
prime ministers had a good relationship with Indonesia’s now disgraced and
very corrupt former president. The ties between the two countries had not
deepened beyond that.
Most of Australia’s largest embassies and high commissions are in Asia.
Australia appoints its best and most experienced ambassadors and high
commissioners to Asia. And Asia is the focus for a lot of Australia’s intel-
ligence gathering, much of which is done in cooperation with governments
in Asia, particularly the Singapore government. Australia “looks after”
Indonesia on behalf of the Western alliance. The US and the CIA almost
entirely relied on Australian intelligence when the matter of East Timor’s
sovereignty was being resolved.
The Americans also rely on Australia’s diplomats and senior ministers
as occasional emissaries to China. The US–China relationship is complex
and sometimes fraught, so the two governments convey and reinforce
messages to each other via mutually friendly third countries such as
Australia. The US has relied on visits to China by Australian ministers and
defence officials to emphasise, for example, that China should never
assume that the US is not prepared to defend Taiwan. In return, China has
passed messages back to the US via Australian officials that it considers
that the US fails to fully appreciate the degree to which China regards
Taiwan as properly within its territory.
But ultimately it is the linkages between private individuals that gives a
 Guns for Hire:Australian Expatriates 95

bilateral relationship depth and relevance. And these are thriving between
Asia and Australia. Australians are working in Asia in unprecedented
numbers, particularly since the 1997–98 economic crisis after which there
was great need for corporate restructuring expertise. Education is another
tie. Tens of thousands of Asian professionals have passed through
Australian universities.

Are Australians Racist?

There is a residual anxiety in Asia that Australians are racist. Of course

every country has its racists including Asian countries. But there is none of
the racial violence or racial vilification in Australia that appears to be
common in, say, the US. In any event there are strict laws against it.
Presumably if contemporary Australian culture is racist towards Asians,
then Asians would not choose to settle in Australia which, as explained
above, they are doing in ever-increasing numbers. Asians, it seems, are
voting with their feet.
The White Australia Policy is routinely brought up in Asia as evidence
that Australia is somehow a racist country. The policy, introduced by Labor
governments in the 1950s, encouraged immigration from Europe and of
Europeans to the exclusion of non-Europeans. But it is too simple to say
that it was motivated by race. Instead, it was more to do with protecting
existing unionized labour from immigrants from countries such as those in
Asia that were not unionized and where wage rates were comparatively
low. The Labor leader Arthur Calwell is famously said to have once
remarked in respect of immigration policy: “Two Wongs don’t make a
white.” I did once sit next to his daughter, a nun, on a flight. She said that
she was writing a biography of her father, and in conversation she was
adamant that he said no such thing and had been greatly misrepresented.
Liberal Party-dominated governments started dismantling the White
Australia Policy in the late 1950s when Harold Holt, future Liberal prime
minister, was immigration minister. The last vestiges of the policy were
removed in the early 1970s. There was no unrest, and barely even any
contention when this was done. Essentially, the White Australia Policy was
discarded far too easily for race-based nationalism to have been a deep
part of Australian identity.6
Perhaps the one area in which Australians truly are racist is in their
treatment of the country’s indigenous people. But the racism is not active.
It’s passive. After all, no single ethnic minority group in Australia receives
as much public funding as do the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
96 Inside Knowledge
The funding represents a big transfer of wealth from largely white
Australians to indigenous people. Institutionally, there is clearly no racism
at work here. But does the average Australian know much about the
culture of the Aborigines? The answer is no. Few realize that there are
hundreds of Aboriginal languages. Few know about the song lines, the
routes across the country that are “sung” by Aboriginal elders. The racism
that many indigenous people feel in Australia thus is one of disregard and
dismissal. Most Australians are far more curious about Italian or Chinese
culture than they are about Aboriginal culture.
But no one in Asia should take comfort from this as confirmation of
their own prejudices about what Australians are or are not, because racism
is alive and well in Asia. Malays in Singapore complain that the local
majority Chinese community, particularly in matters or employment and
promotion, disregards them. The numbers of incidences of abuse of
Indonesian maids by Singaporean employers is extraordinary. There
simply is no comparable phenomenon in Australia.
Penan and Iban people claim that they face racism in peninsular
Malaysia. So do Indonesians in Malaysia. Thousands of Indonesian
Chinese have been murdered, raped, and stolen from en masse on account
of their ethnicity as recently as 1997. I have Malaysian Chinese and other
Chinese friends who now refuse, on principle, to visit Indonesia. Local
Indians face discrimination in Myanmar. Hill tribe people are looked
down on in Thailand. Muslims in the Philippines say they face discrimin-
ation. Southeast Asian Chinese say that they find Hong Kong Chinese
rude and disparaging of their Cantonese language skills even if say they
are from Kuala Lumpur and speak Cantonese as a matter of course. And I
have been told by the staff at the Lok Yu Teahouse in central Hong Kong
that I’m not welcome to sit in the more preferred downstairs area because
I’m not Chinese.
So no one has a clean slate when it comes to matters of race. And in
comparison to the relatively tranquil cities and towns of Australia, where
thousands of affluent Asians wish to send their children for tertiary educa-
tion, it is Asia that more readily might be described as a hotbed of racism.
And then there are the Japanese. No society in the world is as xeno-
phobic and insular as Japan’s. There is little commonality between South-
east Asians and Japan. That was made abundantly clear during World War
II when Southeast Asia was seen as a source of raw materials and comfort
women. The culture that is closest to that of Japan’s is Korea’s but even
Koreans face enormous discrimination in Japan.
Ultimately, those who claim that Australians are “racist” are, of course,
committing the same error of which they accuse: they are indulging in
 Guns for Hire:Australian Expatriates 97

stereotyping. Many in Asia remember the ultra-conservative politician

Pauline Hanson and her questioning of Asian immigration. But they
should also remember that in national elections she and her party scarcely
scored more than 5% of the vote nationwide and that was when her “popu-
larity” was at its peak. Ultimately, she lost her parliamentary seat and in
2002 was charged with electoral funding fraud. She received a three-year
jail term in August 2003, although the conviction was later overturned on
appeal. She stood again for election in the 2004 Federal election and was
overwhelmingly defeated. Rarely has a politician, who is as unpopular at
the ballot box as Pauline Hanson, attracted so much attention, particularly
in the newspapers of Asia. She did not, by any means, speak for the
majority of Australians. If she did, they would have voted for her. Instead,
the typical Australian today is more interested in going to the beach with
their Malaysian-born neighbors, eating out at a Chinese restaurant and
holidaying in Thailand. Meanwhile, Australian accountants, lawyers, and
the like head to Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, and wherever else bluntness
and cynicism is required.
 Chapter Nepal: From

9 Democracy to
Dictatorship

Hindu cosmology has four ages. In which do we live? We live in the worst.
The gods Vishnu and Shiva are asleep and do not hear the prayers of their
devotees. It is an age when the natural order of things breaks down, an age
of corruption and violence. Two world wars, nuclear weapons, internat-
ional terrorism, even global warming are all products of this age. It is the
Age of Kali, the consort of Shiva. And so I visit the temple of Dakshinkali,
20 kilometers outside Kathmandu. It is the most important temple in this
overwhelmingly Hindu country. It is devoted to Kali. The temple stands at
the edge of a still, dark valley, surrounded by forested hills and at the
confluence of two rivers.
I stand in the temple’s forecourt, my bare feet mired in mud and blood,
for Kali requires sacrifices, specifically the blood of uncastrated male
animals. For more than an hour I watch various animals – three goats,
chickens and ducks – have their throats cut open. The butchers hold each
terrified, dying animal aloft and sway it to and fro, with one hand on the
body of the animal and the other beneath its chin so that the neck wound
gapes open. Sliced jugular veins spray steaming blood onto a row of stone
statues of Kali and other gods. Some release their contents with a
whimper. Others do so geyser-like, the dark red ejaculate splashing out in
a series of angry gushes, draining the kicking animal of life and spirit.
A sacrifice to Kali is designed to lessen whatever ills one might be
suffering, and so businesspeople, politicians, and even students hoping to
avoid bad exam results make the trek to the temple to pay for animals and
then pay again to have them killed. Want to have a safe plane journey
abroad? Then sacrifice a goat. Want to stave off the collapse of your bank?

98
 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 99

Then better sacrifice several buffaloes. The car park higher up the ravine
fills with buses of pilgrims from India and the Mercedes of Kathmandu
businessmen. I turn to leave, my feet freezing and bloodied. A mad woman
shrieks as she smashes a coconut over a stone lingam. That’s one thing that
seems to cross cultures: the hard end of religion attracts the mentally ill.
Nepal is sandwiched between India and China. The miracle is that
neither has managed to subsume it but then even roads do not service most
of the country. It’s too mountainous. Instead, tracks traversed by donkeys
are the main way that goods are distributed around much of the country.
The main threat to Nepal is internal. A bloody Maoist insurgency has
waged almost non-stop since 1996.
The country’s terrain has determined its politics. The Shah family has
ruled Nepal as its kings since 1769. For centuries, the Shahs had been the
rulers of Gorkha, a tiny hill state to the west of Kathmandu. At the time of
the Shah family’s ascendancy over what is now Nepal, no less than 60
independent hill states existed within its borders, each with its own raja,
army, and laws. Many had their own languages, often unintelligible to
those of adjacent principalities. Ranges of mountains cut across much of
the country. And so each kingdom roughly corresponded with a valley. But
all that changed in 1769 when Prithvi Narayan Shah united all the princi-
palities to become Nepal’s first king.

The Economy: Corruption and Donkeys

The terrain also determines Nepal’s economy. Nepal is poor. It is a country

of more than 26 million people and yet annual government revenues are
just US$700 million. Almost half the people are defined by the World
Bank as living beneath the poverty line. The international community
funds more than 60% of Nepal’s development budget and more than 28%
of its total budgetary expenditure.
GDP per capita on a PPP basis is less than half that of Indonesia’s and
little more than half of India’s. And yet the typical Nepalese has a keen
sense of humour, and does not share the pathos that you see in India or the
lack of self-confidence that breeds envy and suspicion on Java. Their
music is raucous and their dancing energetic.
And yet everywhere, people can be seen doing things that human beings
should no longer have to do. V. S. Naipaul, in respect of poor Indian
workers, writes of the “nullity” of tasks in India, “where there are so many
hands and so few tools, where a single task can be split into minute
portions and labour can turn to an absurdity.”1 The same is true of Nepal.
100 Inside Knowledge
The road to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in southwest Nepal,
is lined with large mature mango trees and occasional mud brick houses
with thatch roofs. And by the side of this road I saw people squatting in the
dirt, hammering at rocks to splinter them into smaller stones and the gravel
to be used in road construction. Dozens were employed this way, using up
their lives in fields of rocks that could be turned into gravel in an afternoon
by a single mechanized rock crusher.
Even in Kathmandu the poor are treated like animals, or worse than
animals. Teams of men, dressed in rags, can be seen walking quickly
through the streets carrying the most appalling loads on their backs that
are balanced by cloth harnesses that reach around their foreheads. It is the
work of donkeys except that the time of these men is worth even less than
the price to rent donkeys. Otherwise, donkeys would do it.
Nepal’s population is ethnically very diverse. This too is a consequence
of the terrain. People living side by side but separated by mountains have
developed along separate cultural tangents. And so today there are
Thakalis, Tamangs, Sherpas, Rais, Limbus, Newars, Gurungs, Magars,
Brahmins (known locally as the Bahuns), Chhetris, and Tharus as well as
Tibetans from the north. No single group forms a majority. But the Thakalis
and Sherpas are seen as being “good” at business and the Newars have long
dominated higher end crafts. Kashmiri businessmen have settled in Kath-
mandu to sell carpets and embroidered textiles that they can no longer sell
to tourists in Kashmir on account of the armed strife there. Another inter-
esting commercial diaspora in Kathmandu are Muslim Tibetan families
who sell Tibetan artifacts. (At the time of the Dalai Lama’s departure from
Tibet in 1959, there were 300–500 Tibetan Muslim families in Lhasa.
Almost all fled soon after, mostly to Kathmandu and Kashmir.)
The economy remains largely feudal. Zamindars (landlords) lorded over
millions of Nepalese until 2000 when bonded labour was outlawed. Many
bonded labourers were freed but, as with many laws in Nepal, enforcement
is a problem. And for those who are now free, their lives scarcely have
improved as they remain landless. The feudal nature of the rural economy
carries over to the non-farming sector. It is dominated by a handful of
family-owned groups of companies with diverse involvements.
The caste system was abolished in 1963 but many vestiges of it remain.
Members of the Brahmin and Chhetri castes, the two highest castes,
continue to dominate government, business, and higher education. Three
groups (the Brahmins, the Newars, and the Chhetris) account for around
70% of all graduates in Nepal but less than 40% of the population gener-
ally,2 and 80% of all senior positions in the judiciary, the civil service, and
the legislature.3 They also dominate the media and own most of the land.
 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 101

Corruption and administrative incompetence are enormous problems in

Nepal. The civil service is underfunded and undertrained. The conse-
quences are entirely predictable. The police, for one, have become a by-
word for corruption and generally are despised. One evening in
Kathmandu, I was at the Nagarkot restaurant and nightclub that’s popular
with locals. We ate chilli buffalo, danced to energetic Nepalese traditional
music performed by a live band and were out-talked by some twenty
raucous Sherpas at the adjacent table. The bonhomie ended prematurely
with a police raid. Nonetheless, everyone was ordered out while the police
collected bribes from the club’s owners.
The all-pervasive corruption and incompetence are best suggested by
the state of Nepal’s national flag carrier. The Himalayas are one of the
world’s major tourist destinations. And the only practical way for most
visitors to reach them is to fly into Nepal. So it might be imagined that
Royal Nepal Airlines is a relatively strong airline. But it isn’t. It is a good
year when it is not teetering on bankruptcy. It has just two Boeing 757 jets
to service its international routes. And in November 2003, when one jet
was grounded in Kathmandu for technical problems and the other was
grounded in Shanghai for similar reasons, it meant that the airline’s entire
international operations were grounded. The airline’s former chairman was
fined US$300,000 and jailed in Kathmandu for two years for corruption in
early 2005.4 Incompetence has meant that Nepal has been unable to capi-
talize even on the unique advantages that it has.
Nepal’s banks are beset with problem loans, not from poor people
unable to repay debts, say, for a motorcycle or a small house, but from big
people with political influence. They use their influence to get big loans
and then use it again to ensure that they don’t have to repay them.
Infrastructure in Nepal is abysmal. A four-wheel drive vehicle is desirable
even in some parts of central Kathmandu, simply to navigate the potholes and
rain-worn ruts. Outside the city, the roads are much worse, if they exist at all.
Drugs are one mainstay of the Nepalese economy, partly because mari-
juana is native to the Himalayas and so is cheap and plentiful. It is not
uncommon while trekking to see fields of the plant growing wild. Accord-
ingly, marijuana and hashish are readily available on the streets of Kath-
mandu. (Hashish is produced simply by rolling green marijuana leaves
with vegetable oil until the lot congeals into a pitch-like mass that can then
be cut with a knife.) The trade is illegal but you wouldn’t know it. Many if
not most young Nepalese are regular users of the drug. And most rickshaw
drivers in the tourist areas appear to moonlight as drug dealers, enticing
would-be buyers into their rickshaws so that negotiations can be carried
out as the driver pedals along.
102 Inside Knowledge
From Democracy to Dictatorship

A multi-party system was introduced by King Birendra in April 1990. The

political parties subsequently proved to be fractious, barely able to nego-
tiate, wracked by perpetual, internal feuding and mostly headed by
corrupt, nepotistic, petty leaders who cared only about their own prestige
and bank accounts. And so, after more than ten years of democracy, there
was no resolution to a murderous Maoist insurgency, the cities were
wracked by regular blanket strikes, the economy was in tatters, and
corruption was rife at every level of government. In short, democracy
delivered few obvious benefits to ordinary Nepalis.
And so in February 2005, Birendra’s successor Gyanendra sacked the
government. The move was met with international condemnation and calls
from everyone for a return to democracy. Everyone that is but ordinary
Nepalese. They simply got on with business, probably with a sense of
relief. In any event, democracy did not end in Nepal in early 2005. It ended
in mid-2003 when Gyanendra suspended parliament, pressured the prime
minister to resign and appointed his own prime minister. The dismissed
government cried crocodile tears in early 2005 but it had no more legiti-
macy than the new arrangements. While in office, almost all its moves had
been approved if not orchestrated by the king who maintained a thin, but
fictitious veneer of estrangement from day-to-day political processes. The
events of early 2005 merely formalized the situation. And so calls for a
return to democracy were two years too late; their timing based on igno-
rance more than anything. Many leading politicians were placed under
house arrest although, as one Nepali said to me from Kathmandu via email,
that represented one final luxury: “You should see their houses.”
Nepal’s serious Maoist insurgency sparked Gyanendra’s actions. His
view was that peace needed to be achieved before multi-party democracy
could be reinstituted. But in practice, the parties, fractious and incompe-
tent though they are, would be needed if the peace process was to have
legitimacy and broad-based acceptance.

The Maoist Insurgency

Nepal’s economy faces many problems. The biggest comes from the viru-
lent and effective Maoist uprising. There had been a Maoist uprising in
northern Bengal in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Known as the Naxalites
after Naxalbari, the area where their movement began, the Maoists were
good at killing and destroying public property but bad at actually fleshing
 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 103

out their demands beyond vague notions of land reform. The Communist
Party of Nepal (Maoist) has followed in the footsteps of the Naxalites.
It decided to resort to violence in the wake of the 1995 elections in
which it won nine seats in a 205-seat assembly. The insurgency started the
following year and by 2005, at least 10,000 people had lost their lives. The
insurgents are thought to have 8000 regular troops and maybe 40,000
irregular fighters. Their ideology is confused and there is no evidence that
they receive any support from China despite their Maoist pretensions.
The list of the insurgents’ demands seems moderate enough and includes
things like minimum wages, better rights for women, a secular state, free
education and healthcare, and an end to government corruption – the kinds
of things that are standard in any Western democracy.
The damage wrought by the insurgency has been enormous. More than
a third of 4000 village development committee buildings have been
destroyed. Post offices, bridges, telecommunications, and power stations
have been bombed, including the US$20 million Jhimruk hydroelectric
plant. Telephone repeater stations have been destroyed in most hill
districts. Schools have also been targeted, the Maoists seeing these as
instruments of the state. The National Planning Commission puts the cost
of the damage to public infrastructure to date at US$400 million.5
A seven-month cease-fire in 2003 achieved little other than to allow the
Maoists to regroup and improve their position, strategically and finan-
cially. Negotiations held during the cease-fire were hampered by a lack of
expertise and professionalism on the part of the negotiators, a reluctance to
involve truly independent and skilled mediators, and the absence of an
effective secretariat.6
Both sides have perpetrated extraordinary human rights abuses. The
Maoists have maimed and tortured school teachers and others with educa-
tion and have beheaded those they claim are informers, often in front of
their families. And the military has conducted numerous extrajudicial
killings, including the summary execution of 19 suspected Maoists during
the cease-fire.
Public buses have been targeted by the Maoists, one of which I’d seen
on the day that I traveled from Pokhara in the north to Lumbini near the
Indian border in the south. It had been abandoned and was burnt out.
Maoists had forced it to stop earlier that day, ordered everyone off it and
torched it. The point of such destruction is not clear. Most of the harm
accrues to poor rural people, the very people whom the Maoists claim to
want to help.
The Maoists’ leadership has sought to appeal to the lower caste Dalits,
members of the occupational castes such as the Kami (blacksmiths), the
104 Inside Knowledge
Damai (tailors) and the Sarki (shoemakers), and those ethnic groups that
had been marginalized. The leadership itself though comprises mostly
well-educated, upper-caste Brahmins and Chhetris. Baburam Bhattarai, for
example, the Maoists’ lead ideologue, second-in-command and chief
negotiator, is an upper-caste intellectual who holds a PhD on Nepalese
regional development issues.
Attacks on the offices of multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Lever, and
Colgate-Palmolive and the US Embassy in Kathmandu have undermined
international investor confidence. Bomb threats and occasional blasts are
mixed with demands for protection money. The Maoists sent letters of
demand to various multinationals demanding amounts of up to US$70,000
in 2003, for example.
The Maoists also raise cash from bank robberies and the worldwide
diaspora of Nepalese migrants and guest workers. Partly this is achieved
by threatening relatives who remain in Nepal to ensure that the Nepalese
abroad pay up.
The insurgency is distorting the Nepalese government’s spending
priorities. Expenditure on the armed forces and weapons procurement
has had to increase greatly at the cost of other areas such as education
and health. For the price of a single M-16 gun, it has been estimated that
a typical Nepalese village dispensary could be provided with medicines
for a year.7

Face to Face with the Maoist Rebels

The mountains that once divided Nepal into 60 separate kingdoms mean
that defeating the Maoist insurgency completely will prove impossible
militarily. Nepal’s terrain guarantees that the government has little choice
other than to negotiate with the insurgents. But what are the insurgents
like? How sophisticated are the ordinary cadre politically? Or are their
skills largely restricted to bomb making and property destruction?
I did meet several insurgents while trekking in the mountains above the
northern town of Pokhara. Four young Nepalese men were seated and
eating when I walked into the dining hall of a lodge where I was to spend
the night. They ate with enthusiasm and in a way that suggested that they
did not expect to pay for their meals. One finished and turned to me. Where
was I from? he asked. It is a standard question. The Maoists demand
passage money from all trekkers. They had heard that I was here and so had
turned up to collect the money. The fee is set at 1000 rupees (about US$13)
unless you’re American, in which case it’s double on account of the US
 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 105

Government having provided military assistance and weapons to the

Nepalese army.
I was asked by one Maoist what I thought of Nepal. I said that the
scenery is beautiful and the people are very likable. He agreed and then
launched into a litany of problems: the government is corrupt, the king is
a murderer (a “criminal king”), America is no good, the American presi-
dent is corrupt, India is no good, China is no better, but Osama bin Laden
is good.
He asked, not unreasonably:

Millions of dollars in aid comes into this country from the World Bank and
others, but where is it? The people’s health is bad, the schools are terrible, the
roads terrible, where is all the money?

But what do the insurgents really stand for? It’s what everyone is
wondering. So I asked him. They themselves seem confused. He let fly
with a series of contradictory positions in a pre-programmed monologue
that invited no dissent:

We are Maoists. We hate Communism. We don’t like the system of government

in China. George W. Bush is no good. Bin Laden is good. We want a multi-party
democracy.The last king was a good man. We want a republic.

The spiel ended with the request for 1000 rupees. I’d been advised to hand
it over. An Israeli tourist had recently been almost killed for refusing to do
so. I did so and was handed a receipt, a proper, printed receipt that was then
stamped with a hammer and sickle. The cadre then insisted on writing two
web addresses on its reverse (www.cpnm.org and www.insof.org) so that I
could “find out more”. “Insof” stands for something called the Internation-
alist Nepalese Solidarity Forum. “CPNM” stands for the Communist Party
of Nepal (Maoist). Later I looked at the website. It opens with a quote from
Mao Zedong: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
The receipt was to be shown to other insurgents along the way so that
no further demands for money would be made of me. And the next
evening, a group of them did appear, holding rifles, and from behind a
stone wall. We were about to enter the village of Ghandruk. I showed the
receipt and we were allowed to pass. High up in the Himalayas, Ghandruk
was Maoist territory. I could see the occasional Maoist dart along a path or
into a house as I stood in the front garden of the guest house where I was
to spend the night. But it was not to stay Maoist for long. I could see
several government soldiers standing in the front garden the next morning.
106 Inside Knowledge
Each held a submachine gun. At least fifty soldiers were distributed around
the village. Some stood in groups around. Others scurried in single file
along the paths, their machine guns at the ready. Overnight, Ghandruk had
changed hands.

The Royal Family

The most extravagant confirmation for the Nepalese of the arrival of the Age
of Kali came on the evening of June 1, 2001 when King Birendra and Queen
Aishwarya plus eight other members of the royal family were gunned down
by their son, Crown Prince Dipendra. Others were wounded, including
Dipendra’s aunt, the woman who is now queen. The family had gathered for
a regular get-together. Dipendra had been drinking and smoking marijuana
and was emotionally fraught at having been prohibited by the queen from
marrying the woman he loved. He also had a big collection of firearms.
One can imagine the confused looks on the surgeons’ faces as they
arrived that night to the emergency room of the Chhauni Military Hospital
to see the bloodied bodies and bits of bodies of the king, the queen and
many other members of the royal family laid out on beds and slumped
against walls. The hospital simply did not have the facilities to cope with so
many emergency cases at once. Staff had the difficult task of choosing who
to treat first. Protocol was confused with health issues and much effort was
expended at first on the king even though he was clearly dead.8 Meanwhile
the other wounded royals lay bleeding to death. The queen was also clearly
dead. Most of her skull had been shot away. Dipendra shot himself but did
not die for several days, during which time convention demanded that he be
declared king. He was, but he never regained consciousness. (Official
montages in Nepal of past kings now include a photograph of Dipendra.)
The bodies of the royal family were taken in procession to the Pashu-
patinath temple complex on the banks of the Bagmati River where they
were burned on the cremation ghats. Most of the residents of Kathmandu
will find their way here eventually, to be cremated, their ashes being
pushed into the Bagmati that eventually flows into the Ganges. I sat at the
cremation ghats once for four hours and watched a cremation ceremony
from beginning to end. There were prayers, chanting, even professional
wailers. The body was taken from a verandah to the ghat before it, laid
out on a platform of wood, and covered with straw. Coins had been
strewn about to send the soul on its way but no sooner was this done than
about a dozen beggar children appeared to scavenge them while several
mourners attempted to chase them away with sticks. The children appear
 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 107

to live on the cremation ghats for this purpose. I stayed for as long as it
took for the smoke to change colour from white to bluish-black; the point
at which the flames had reached the body and its fat began to burn.
The killings left Prince Gyanendra, a younger brother of Birendra, as
Nepal’s new king. Ordinarily, Gyanendra might have been an acceptable
choice. But official obfuscation about what really happened on that June
evening meant that the new king’s legitimacy was eroded. Many and
perhaps most Nepalese simply believe that the new king somehow orches-
trated the bloodbath.
This view was compounded by the persona of the new crown prince,
Gyanendra’s oldest son Paras. Already deeply unpopular, Paras is thought
to have supplied Prince Dipendra with the hashish that he smoked on the
evening of his bloody rampage. Paras is also blamed for causing two
deaths in hit-and-run accidents, the second of which led to the death of
Praveen Gurung, a popular Nepalese recording artist. No action was taken
against Paras.9 With his shree panch status, Paras suffered no legal conse-
quences. Still, Paras is hardly the first Nepalese royal in recent times to
have had a less than decorous lifestyle. In the 1960s, Prince Basundhara,
the brother of the then king and Paras’s great uncle, was famous for having
taken the American Barbara Adams as a mistress. Marian Lindt of the
Lindt chocolate family was a previous mistress.
King Gyanendra’s political intrusions have done little to endear him.
King Birendra had turned Nepal into a democracy. This did not lead to an
appreciable increase in the quality of government in Nepal. Gyanendra
dissolved parliament in 2002 and appointed his own government, osten-
sibly to allow the Maoist insurgency to be better dealt with.
In response, the opposition parties regularly called widespread strikes
called bandhs. I experienced one of these while in Kathmandu. The effect
is almost total. Most shops close and stay closed for the day of the bandh.
Taxis and public transport are non-existent. And even private cars and
motorcycles are discouraged from appearing on the streets. It is not that
shopkeepers and the like necessarily are sympathetic to the opposition but
rather that they run the risk of having their shop windows broken if they
do not comply. Dozens were hurt as police baton-charged protesters during
the bandh that I experienced. It applied only to the Kathmandu valley but
that meant that the major cities of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur
essentially closed down for the day. The Nepalese Chambers of Commerce
and Industry claimed that each bandh cost the economy 0.3% in GDP.10
The estimate appears a gross overestimate but does nonetheless indicate
the paralysing effect that they have. Early 2004 saw more bandhs and
dozens of anti-government protests in the streets of Kathmandu.
108 Inside Knowledge
King Gyanendra in Business

Another source of suspicion of Gyanendra derives from his private business

interests. The Shah family is not the richest in Nepal. It never was. But
in Gyanendra, the country now has its richest monarch for centuries.
Nepal’s royal family has long been subjected to rumors of having a hand
in the illicit drugs trade. But the new king has visible and extensive
business interests.
King Birendra personally owned the Raniban-Nagarjuna resort and the
Gokarn resort. Gyanendra inherited these. But his principal asset is his
stake in the Soaltee Group, although he shares its ownership with a
branch of the Rana family (see below). How the ownership is split has not
been disclosed.
The Soaltee Group is the third largest business group in the country in
terms of turnover, and it has estimated its net assets to be worth around
US$100 million.11 A 2001 report estimated that the Group accounted for
12–14% of the government’s total tax revenue.12
Key subsidiaries include travel companies, Himal International Power
(which has a stake in the US$100 million Bhote Kosi hydroelectric power
project), tea plantation joint ventures with the UK-based Lawrie Group, a
shipping joint venture with Denmark’s Maersk, the Tata truck dealership
for Nepal and Kathmandu’s five-star Soaltee Crowne Plaza Hotel which
incorporates the Casino Nepal.
Surya Tobacco, an associate company, is the largest private sector
company in Nepal in terms of turnover. It is the leading cigarette producer
and is 59% owned by India’s ITC Ltd, 2% by BAT and 39% by Nepalese
interests, believed to comprise largely or wholly the Soaltee Group.
Gyanendra is not the only royal with a casino. The family owns two of
Nepal’s four legal casinos. A cousin owns the Hotel De L’Annapurna in
Kathmandu which includes the Casino Anna. The same cousin also owns
the 50-room Fish Tail lodge at Pokhara in northern Nepal, the town from
which most treks to the Annapurna region begin.

The Rana Family

One might imagine that the Shah family, being the royal family and the
pinnacle of a feudal tree, was the most important and powerful family in
the kingdom. But from 1846 to 1951 it was not. During these years the
Rana family supplied the prime ministers. The Ranas manipulated the situ-
ation so that the position of prime minister became hereditary and more
 Nepal: From Democracy to Dictatorship 109

magnificent than that of the king. The Shah family was sidelined and the
king was practically kept captive in his palace. The Ranas proceeded to
award themselves the plum commercial opportunities and their wealth and
prestige grew inversely to that of the king’s family, for whom little was left.
The Ranas gave themselves the trappings of royalty: palaces; diamond,
emerald, and pearl crowns (called sirpech) topped with enormous Bird of
Paradise plums; and they sat on thrones. Many took to using the royal
“We” when referring to themselves. But they never took that final step of
actually seizing the throne of Nepal for themselves. There’s a telling
photograph in the marvelous (and very expensive) coffee table book that
the Ranas published on themselves in 2003 of a young Rana prime minister
standing on a dais before his enormous, gilded throne.13 He is crowned,
uniformed, and imperious. And to one side, standing lower, at floor level,
and looking a little lost and somewhat irrelevant is the much older king. He
was there to lend legitimacy, an act that required only his presence.
Between 1805 and 1941, the various offshoots of the Rana family built
for themselves a total of 40 European-style palaces in Kathmandu.14 They
spoke their own court language, a language that many Rana family
members continue to use. A complex system of precedence was devised,
whereby family members were divided into three ranks: A, B, and C,
according to parentage. Lower ranked Ranas were not permitted to rise to
the upper echelons of the public administration.
Relations between the Shahs and the Ranas were often uneasy but were
managed via intermarriage. The Ranas had money, the Shahs legitimacy
and so the marriages were of mutual convenience.
King Gyanendra, his predecessor Birendra and a third brother all
married Rana women. Devyani, the woman that Crown Prince Dipendra
wanted to marry but of whom Queen Aishwarya disapproved, is a Rana
too, but only of C rank. The queen, it is believed, did not approve of their
relationship. She hoped for him a wife of greater rank.
The Ranas have little overt political power today. Instead many have gone
into business. Rama Malla is among the more prominent. She owns Kath-
mandu’s Malla Hotel, with its beautiful rear garden and closely cropped
lawn. Rukma Rana is chairman of Dabur Nepal, one of Nepal’s largest
export companies. Himalaya Rana serves as the chairman of the privately
owned Himalayan Bank. Prabhakar Rana co-owns the Soaltee Group with
the family of King Gyanendra. He retired from active involvement with the
Group in 2002 and now holds the title of Chairman Emeritus. His son
Siddartha Rana replaced him as chairman. And Pradeep Rana serves as the
inspector general of police. Today, doing business in Nepal often means
doing it with or accommodating one or more members of the Rana family.
110 Inside Knowledge
The Future

Nepal faces enormous problems that are complex and interlinked. Unfor-
tunately, the key stakeholders simply do not possess the negotiating and
leadership skills to work their way through them. Low-profile international
mediators from neutral countries are needed in the way that Norwegian
mediators helped in negotiations between the government of Sri Lanka
and the Tamil Tigers.15
An expanded military might prove a problem for the future should the
Maoist insurgency be quelled. The army has had a taste of power and is
unlikely to want to give it up. The insurgency has converted it from having
little more than a ceremonial role to a fighting force. It is likely to remain
more loyal to the king than the government of the day, partly because its
senior ranks are filled by Rana family members who are closely allied now
to the Shah family on account of their repeated intermarriage.
Meanwhile the economy goes from bad worse. At one level that means
that there ought to be significant buying opportunities for outside investors
but the risks are high and the payoff might take years. On the positive side,
the country is one of the world’s premier tourist destinations. Tourist
arrivals are down with the Maoist insurgency but tourists still arrive
representing a source of continual cash flow.
China is an emerging economy. Central Asia is on the verge of
emerging. But what about Nepal? Perhaps it is Asia’s submerging
economy. Still, change is afoot, particularly with Gyanendra’s assumption
of overt dictatorial powers in February 2005. Democracy had led to a frac-
tious, corrupt, and incompetent series of governments. Would Gyanendra
do better? He could hardly do worse.
Part II

Markets

111
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter Outsourcing:

10 It Need not
be India

Outsourcing is a huge business. Some predict that the global market for
outsourcing will be worth US$1.2 trillion by 2007.1 Already about 16% of
the world’s IT services sector is carried out remotely, away from where
those services will be consumed.2 The huge investment in bandwidth in
the 1990s by governments and big telecommunications companies and
the consequent massive falls in telecommunications costs have made all
this possible.
Rarely is the extent of outsourcing visible. First Data Corporation
handles all or some of the administration involved in processing credit
card transactions for 417 million credit card accounts and on behalf of
1400 card issuers around the world. And ADP, a payroll outsourcing
company, now pays one in six private sector employees in the US.3 But
who realizes that?
India has been a big beneficiary. As described in several chapters of The
Asian Insider, its IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors are
booming. Hundreds of companies from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia,
and elsewhere have either established “captured” back office processing
centers in India or contracted out the work to outside companies based
there. Exports from software, other IT services and BPO were US$12.5
billion in 2003–04.4 It was only in 2002 that Azim Premji, chairman of
Wipro Technologies, one of India’s leading IT companies, predicted that
India would earn US$5 billion for software exports that year.5 The figure
seemed incredible. Two years later and it had paled into insignificance.
Software programming is big business in India but BPO has been the
biggest source of growth in recent years. Much of the work is not sophisti-

113
114 Inside Knowledge
cated and rests largely on two factors: cost and English language ability.
Indeed, around 70% of India’s BPO sector’s revenue comes from call
centers. Around 20% comes from high-volume, low-value data work such
as transcribing health insurance claims. Only 10% is from higher value
work such as dealing with insurance claims.6
But the work that Indian companies receive from abroad is diversifying.
Animation for children’s cartoons and electronic games is now being
outsourced to India, as is blood and urine diagnostic testing, and even the
electronic pursuit of bad debtors in the US on behalf of companies such as
American Express, Citigroup, and General Electric. Financial wire service
company Reuters has even established a team of editors and journalists
based in Bangalore to cover and report on 2000 American SMEs listed on
the New York Stock Exchange. Each company’s results and filings are
received in Bangalore electronically, analysed, written up, and then sent
out on Reuter’s wire service.7 And increasingly, India is the source of the
world’s junk faxes.
But only one thing is certain about booms. They end. Wages are bid up,
other costs rise and competitors are attracted into the marketplace. That
is happening now in India. Hundreds of outsourcing companies from
Sri Lanka, Hungary, Russia, the Philippines, Malaysia, China, Egypt,
Romania, Dubai, Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and
South Africa to name a few are springing up to challenge the dominance of
Indian outsourcing firms. Outsourcing conferences are yet to fully reflect
that India is under challenge. Why not? Because most are sponsored by the
big names in Indian IT and BPO and they insist as part of their sponsorship
arrangements that their own executives dominate conference programs as
speakers, and so India is pushed as the destination for outsourcing to the
exclusion of newly emerging competitors.

The Competitiveness Gap Closes for India

India’s IT exports grew 30% in 2004 over the previous year and that was
on top of a hefty increase the year before. Not surprisingly, wage rates in
the sector are rising at 10–15% annually. Staff turnover is extremely high
too, meaning that search and training costs are high. A 2004 KPMG study,
commissioned by India’s main IT industry body, the National Association
of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), predicted that the
industry will face an acute shortage of technical employees by 2009,
falling short by 250,000 workers.8 Who pays the piper calls the tune and
Nasscom certainly has an interest in such dramatic predications as it seeks
 Outsourcing: It Need not be India 115

to get increased government funding for business and engineering schools,

but one thing is clear: India’s competitiveness in IT and BPO is not based
so much on skills and expertise (the main outsourcers, the US and the UK
are not short of these) but on cost, and it is this aspect of India’s competi-
tiveness that will be eroded.
India produces 300,000 IT engineering graduates each year. The US
produces just 50,000. But it is a mistake to assume that they are in any way
comparable. Companies fight over India’s top 30,000–40,000 graduates.
The rest are not fought over. Another 90,000 business school graduates are
produced each year and again it’s really only the top 5000 from the top six
state-run institutes of management that are competed for. Clearly, then,
quantity is one thing and quality quite another. And it is quality graduates
that India is not producing in sufficient numbers. But even staff for call
centers are becoming more difficult to find.
Other problems are on the horizon. In mid-2004, Kiran Karnik, head of
Nasscom, the industry body in India, pleaded with the then new Indian
government to “back off” on intruding in the outsourcing sector with new
regulations that he said were like “constant pinpricks.” Instead he said the
government should focus on modernizing the country’s airports and
improving power supply which he described as “dismal.”9 Compare
Shanghai’s international airport with Mumbai’s and you’ll see what he
means. The road from the airport into central Mumbai is memorable for all
the wrong reasons, while the highway that leads into Shanghai is every-
thing that it should be, complete with a Maglev high-speed train that runs
alongside it. But who could imagine a Maglev in India?
India’s most often cited advantage other than cost is its English-speaking
population. But it’s easily overstated. English is not taught as widely in
India as is commonly believed. There is a two-tier level of schooling in
which only the elite are taught English. Often English language education
does not extend to the village level. As it is, India is not the largest country
of English speakers after the US. That honour goes to the Philippines, with
its population of 85 million, almost all of whom are conversant with
English. But the Philippines might lose this edge. India too. A bright new
star in the IT and BPO marketplace is emerging.

China on the Rise

India might be a long way out in front but the IT and BPO capabilities of
China are going from strength to strength. GE, Nokia, and Siemens all
have manufacturing-related R&D facilities there. By early 2005, the
116 Inside Knowledge
number of internet users in China had reached 94 million, making China
second only to the United States with its 200 million users. About a third
of the users in China have access to broadband connections. Foreign
interest in the internet in China is rising too. Amazon.com bought a US$75
million stake in China’s biggest web retailer Joyo.com in mid-2004, and so
joined Google, Yahoo!, and eBay who were already in China.10
China has another ingredient that has been important for India’s success
in the IT and BPO sectors: a focus on engineering in higher education. By
the start of 2005, it had around 200,000 IT workers compared with India’s
850,000, but 50,000 software graduates are being added to China’s pool
each year.11 Nonetheless, the demand in China for any capable graduate with
IT skills is high and so whereas an entry-level programmer in India might
earn US$125 a month, the Chinese equivalent earns around US$145. But
that gap is likely to close as more IT and BPO is outsourced to India and
China’s economy slows, slowing demand for graduates from other sectors.
Both India and China have populations in excess of a billion but China
scores better than India on a range of criteria. Around US$800 billion in
FDI has poured into China in the past 20 years. For India the figure is
probably around US$20 billion. Local branches of multinationals provide
a good source of domestic demand for outsourcing and China has plenty
of those. India has relatively few. The thousands of Western firms that now
have a presence in China will drive China as a new outsourcing hot spot.
Many Western firms have a good knowledge of China. Comparatively few
know much about operating in India. And so, increasingly, it will seem
only natural to outsource business processes to China, particularly if they
also have manufacturing facilities there.
Several of India’s top outsourcing companies, such as Tata Consultancy
Services, Wipro, and Infosys Technologies have picked outsourcing to
China as a future trend and are now hiring Chinese staff and opening
branches in China. Tata announced in October 2004 that it would double
the number of staff from 180 at its Shenzhen office in China’s Guangdong
province within the next eighteen months.12 Initially, Tata focused on
providing services to existing international clients that also had offices in
China. By the start of 2005, Infosys had 200 staff at its office in Shanghai
and four multinational offices.13
Some IT companies in China that provide outsourcing work to multina-
tionals in China already look offshore for clients in the same way that
Indian IT companies do. Beijing-based IT United Corporation is one such
company. Its clients include Airbus (for which it developed promotional
software in Chinese to promote its aircraft to Chinese airlines), British
Airways, Cisco Systems, Siemens, and Kraft Foods. The company has
 Outsourcing: It Need not be India 117

around 100 mostly Chinese staff in offices in Beijing, Xian, and

Shanghai. Foreign owned and headed by expatriate Cyril Eltschinger, it
offers web- and IT-based solutions and call center management services,
not just to companies based in China or with operations there but to
companies worldwide.
Literacy in China is 91%. The figure for India is just 59%. GDP per
capita (PPP basis) in China is US$5000. For India it’s US$2900. The
numbers keep changing but when China had 263 million fixed telephone
lines as at 2004, India had 48.9 million. When China had 269 million
mobile phone connections, India had just 26 million. When China had 94
million internet users, India had only around 25 million. IT research
company Gartner has estimated that when China had more than 6000
software companies, India had more than 3000. And when China’s
domestic software sales were US$4.3 billion, the figure for India was
US$2.06 billion.14
Telecommunications infrastructure in China’s main cities is of a high
standard. Starting fresh and from a low base means that they have the
latest and best. Ironically, there are many Chinese cities that have telecom-
munications infrastructure that is now more advanced than many cities in
Western Europe. The same cannot be said of India.
But there’s something else. English language skills have become a
national priority in China. It is not clear how many good English speakers
there are, but what’s certain is that there have never been so many. English
schools are springing up all over China. Foreign educationalists are setting
up in China to teach English. For example, Australia’s largest private
English provider Acl signed an agreement in 2003 with the School of
Continuing Education at Tsinghua University in Beijing to set up one
hundred English language centers across China.15
Speaking English in China has become a matter of “face.” It is seen as
progressive and modern, and for status-conscious Chinese that is important.
Nor is learning English the city-based phenomenon that it is, by and large,
in India. The entire country is in on the trend. I had a conversation with a
man in a Beijing street on a recent visit to China who spoke impeccable
English. That in itself is no longer unusual. He told me that he’d been in
Beijing for just two weeks. And from where had he come? Inner Mongolia.
Do many people where you come from speak English now?, I asked. Oh
yes, he said, everyone wants to learn English. Already, the central and some
provincial governments now tie promotions for certain senior levels in
public administration to English language abilities. And so it seems likely
that sooner rather than later the largest number of English speakers after the
US will not be the Philippines or India but China.
118 Inside Knowledge
The Philippines: A Niche at Last

But China is not the only competitor. The fact that the US accounts for at
least half the world’s potential outsourcing business is good news for the
Philippines. The Philippines, a former colony of the US, has a commercial
code that is compatible with that of the US. Language is another advan-
tage. Officially, Pilipino based on Tagalog is the first national language
of the Philippines. But less than a quarter of Filipinos actually speak
Pilipino. The true national language is English, which is spoken by 95% of
the population.
A high literacy rate (92.6%, which is higher than China’s and much
higher than India’s), a large pool of IT professionals, and a telecommuni-
cations infrastructure that might be patchy but is cheap to use all suggest
the Philippines’ potential competitiveness. With around 85 million, its
population base is not small, but wages in the Philippines even at the level
of back office services are considerably higher than in India. But the
Philippines remains attractive. The Philippines has a customer service
culture that is lacking elsewhere in Asia. Filipinos are familiar with Amer-
ican ways too, even jargon and slang.
Dozens of mostly US-owned companies have opened call centers in the
Philippines, including America OnLine, the largest internet service
provider in the US. Its center at Clark in Angeles City, north of Manila,
employs 600 locals.16
Procter & Gamble, Delta Airlines, American International Group (AIG),
and Citibank have all shifted back office work to the Philippines. Procter
& Gamble centralized its back office operations for Asia in the Philip-
pines, and US engineering giant Flour Daniel has much of its technical
work undertaken there too by a team of 800 local engineers, architects, and
draughtsmen.17 AIG’s Philippines business processing unit now has more
than 4000 staff.18 And in late 2004, Citibank Australia closed its Brisbane
call center with 120 staff and relocated it to Manila.
US call center operator Sykes Enterprises said in early 2005 that it
would move half its business from India after complaints from its US-
based customers that the accents of some Indian service representatives
were difficult to understand. It is likely that Sykes will move the business
to the Philippines where it already has facilities.19
Medical transcription has become big business for outsourcing
companies. Almost 7000 US hospitals are now required by Federal regula-
tions to convert medical records into data format. It’s a US$15 billion
market in the US. Some of the work has gone to the Philippines, which is
home now to twenty or more medical transcription companies.20
 Outsourcing: It Need not be India 119

Malaysia and its Multimedia Super Corridor

The Malaysian government has played an active role in promoting

Malaysia as a technology and business processing hub. It established the
Malaysian Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC) in 1996 to
oversee the development of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), a 15
by 50 kilometer strip of land near Malaysia’s new administrative centre
Putrajaya and its new international airport. (At 750 square kilometers, the
MSC is about a hundred square kilometers bigger than all of Singapore.)
At first the MSC looked like a white elephant and at the outset, perhaps it
was. But as its mission evolved and became more clearly defined, inter-
national companies were drawn to it, Shell, DHL, Intel, Motorola, Eric-
sson, HSBC, Standard Chartered, BMW, EDS, IBM, and Unisys among
them. Today, the MSC promotes Malaysia as a regional and even a global
hub for information and communications technology, BPO, call center
operations and multimedia organizations. Consulting firm AT Kearney in
its 2004 Offshore Location Attractive Index listed Malaysia as the third
most attractive destination worldwide for IT-related outsourcing after
India and China.
Concurrently with the physical specifications of the corridor, the MDC
developed a framework of draft laws and regulations to promote an IT and
IT-enabled services industry in Malaysia, which were then adopted by the
Malaysian government. It expedites applications to locate or relocate to
the MSC. Companies that are granted MSC status receive a lavish package
of benefits that includes no corporate tax for at least five years, generous
R&D grants, and work visas granted to qualified expatriate staff in a
maximum of ten days.
International oil and gas company Shell was an early entrant. It estab-
lished Shell Information Technology International with around 1000 local
staff in the MSC, which is one of nine hubs that it uses around the world
for its internal back office and IT needs. A financial processing center also
administers Shell’s financial transactions for the Asia Pacific region. The
work is done by Malaysians and expatriate staff drawn from the region
who can speak Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Tagalog, and English.21
The London-based bank HSBC chose the MSC for one of its five world-
wide data processing centers (the others are in Bangalore, Hyderabad,
Shanghai, and Guangzhou). The Malaysian operation provides processing
support and customer contact for the group’s operations in Europe, Asia,
and Australia in areas such as payment, trade, mortgage, and personal
financial services. Standard Chartered also has a similar operation in the
MSC, employing around 1000 staff.22
120 Inside Knowledge
Carlson Marketing Group is another international company to have set
up operations in the MSC. It has around 60 staff at its call center. Carlson
chose Malaysia over Singapore because of cost. The monthly cost of each
staff member in Singapore would be a likely US$4000, but in Malaysia the
cost was to be around US$1000, according to a company representative at
the time of its decision to set up in Malaysia.23
Some R&D facilities have been attracted to the MSC. Japan’s telephone
company NTT has its second largest R&D center outside Japan in the
MSC. And AccTrak21, a small accounting software developer, has also set
up in the MSC.

Don’t forget Malaysia

Scicom, a call center company operated in Kuala Lumpur by expatriate Sri

Lankan entrepreneur Leo Ariyanayakam, further demonstrates how the
outsourcing of business processing functions to lower cost countries is not
going all India’s way.

The company uses BT’s virtual private network and is BT’s largest customer
in the Asia Pacific region. Its principal clients are Nokia, HP, Hilton, and
Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil company. It handles all the customer service
inquiries for Asia Pacific including those that originate from Australia for
Nokia and HP. The Nokia account alone accounted for 215 staff of Scicom’s
almost 1000 staff by 2004.

Malaysian companies are getting into outsourcing too. Petronas and

Maybank, Malaysia’s largest bank, being the two prominent examples.
Maybank announced a RM1.3 billion (US$342 million) IT outsourcing deal
in 2003 with Computer Science Corporation which would handle the
bank’s IT needs from Malaysia and Singapore.24

But why did Ariyanayakam choose Malaysia? An important reason was

language. Call centers in India are adept at functioning in English and of
course the various languages that are indigenous to India, but not much
else. Malaysia’s multiethnic population means that five languages are spoken
widely in Malaysia and spoken well (English, Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, and
Cantonese). And so Scicom sought not so much to offer call center
 Outsourcing: It Need not be India 121

services to the US and UK as to the Asia Pacific market. By also hiring

expatriate workers from within the region (specifically from Indonesia,
South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines) it can offer support services in 14
Asian languages.

Another advantage of Kuala Lumpur is that office space is high quality but
cheaper than in most locations in India. This compensates for higher
employment costs for Malaysian-sourced staff. Nonetheless, most of
Scicom’s staff are graduates. And that allows the company to offer higher
end, premium call center services.

Japan

Japan ought to be a huge source of business for external BPO contractors

but it isn’t, largely due to reasons of language and culture. The highly styl-
ized keigo language that’s used when dealing with clients in person or by
telephone, an intricate form of exceedingly polite and respectful grammar
in which verb endings often are changed and exalted references for others
and more humble terms for oneself are used, is a huge barrier.25 It means
that knowledge of Japanese is insufficient. Call center workers would also
need to know keigo to be fully effective. Conventionally, a falsetto voice is
adopted by Japanese women when it comes to providing assistance over
the telephone. And so when business processes are outsourced, it’s usually
done internally, to Japan’s less prosperous and cheaper regions.
The northern island of Hokkaido, where salaries can be 30% lower than
in Tokyo, rents lower by 50%, and local governments provide salary subsi-
dies and other incentives, is one area within Japan to which business
processing jobs are being shifted. IBM and NEC have opened back offices
in Okinawa, US insurance giant AIG has moved jobs out of Tokyo to
Nagasaki and Sony Finance has call centers in Sapporo, the capital of
Hokkaido, Sendai, north of Tokyo and in Fukuoka, in the west.26
Biomedicine, however, is one area where Japan can and is outsourcing to
companies offshore.27 Rule changes in March 2004 allowed clinical studies
for drugs to be sold in Japan to be undertaken in a handful of countries
outside Japan. Diagnostic samples are being sent out of Japan to cheaper
destinations for testing now too. In 2004, logistics company TNT reported
122 Inside Knowledge
a tenfold increase in biomedical samples being sent from Japan over the
previous year. Many shipments involved blood and urine samples, which
deteriorate quickly. Consignments can reach Singapore within 24 hours, so
making Singapore an ideal destination. TNT even opened a life sciences
and diagnostics shipment office in Tokyo, exclusively to handle such ship-
ments. And so Singapore has attracted American and European firms that
wish to get a slice of Asia’s biomedical science outsourcing market. Albany
Molecular Research of the US is one example. In January 2005 it
announced plans to open its first overseas office in Singapore. Biomedical
business outsourced from Japan was specifically mentioned as one reason
for it to set up in Singapore.28 The UK’s NHS also is likely to send diag-
nostic samples to lower cost destinations for analysis. In 2004, it was inves-
tigating sending blood and urine samples to India and further afield.

The Centrality of Language and Culture

What really matters when it comes to business process outsourcing? Cost

is paramount. But so too is language. Indians have done well in high-tech
industries in the US but not in Germany. Language and culture offer an
explanation as to why.
China’s emergence as the world’s second biggest English language
country will drive its success in this area more than anything else and will
help to promote China as a serious competitor to India when it comes to
BPO. China’s English language capacity probably is yet to reach India’s,
but each new English speaker in China represents a strike at the heart of
India’s continued competitiveness.
Language also explains why some countries have been slow to outsource
back office operations overseas. Germany and Japan are examples. But
when Germany does outsource, Hungary is increasingly an option, because
Hungary is cheap and it has large numbers of German speakers. Belgium
too was an early provider of BPO services to the rest of Europe, largely
because its residents speak a number of European languages.
Similarly, India’s Infosys established operations in Mauritius to boost its
share in the European market because of the French language skills of its
population.29 Infosys intended to invest US$25 million in a disaster
recovery center in Mauritius to provide data back-up for French-speaking,
European clients. The center would employ 445 staff. “Our biggest chal-
lenge is that we are not finding enough qualified IT people here,” said the
Infosys officer in charge of the new centre. Language is what drove Infosys
to set up in Mauritius, and obviously not the pool of local IT talent.
 Outsourcing: It Need not be India 123

The IT and BPO revolution is inducing change across the world. It’s not
simply a matter of job relocation. All sorts of new trends, new opportun-
ities, are emerging. Old ties between Europe and its former colonies are
being reignited: shared language being an important driving factor in the
BPO market. Ordinary Americans and Britons who a decade ago would
never have dreamt of calling India now do so routinely as they upgrade
their insurance cover or query their telephone bills. How long will it be
before they’re also talking to Inner Mongolians who speak with flawless
English in call centers outside Beijing? And to think that two decades ago
it was practically illegal for ordinary mainland Chinese to even have a
conversation with a foreigner, and to do so would certainly have attracted
the interest of the police.
 Chapter Asia’s Art
Market: For

11 Investment and
Connections

The arguments for the antiques market as a place for sound investment are
compelling, particularly at the high end. The market grows ever narrower
and the number of museum-quality items fewer relative to demand. And
yet never before have there been so many wealthy people in Asia or
anywhere else. So, with a fixed supply of antiques by definition, and
increasingly rich populations, the sky is the limit as far as price is
concerned when it comes to quality works of art.
But there’s something else about antiques and art in Asia: a surprising
number of wealthy Asian businesspeople and politicians are collectors. It’s
often said of Asia that golf is an important way to make contacts and
cement business ties. But antiques and art present another route. Attend a
Sotheby’s auction of Southeast Asian paintings in Singapore and in one
room you’re likely to see more members of the Jakarta and Surabaya
business elites than you’ll see anywhere else. Attend a Christie’s auction
of Chinese porcelain in Hong Kong and you will be rewarded with an
overview of the Hong Kong, Taiwanese and emerging mainland Chinese
business elite.
One of the first major auctions of Asian art that I attended was the mort-
gagee sale in Perth, Western Australia, of the goods and chattels of the
Nizam of Hyderabad in 1995. Why were the Nizam’s personal belongings
being auctioned in Perth of all places? The Nizam had fled India to
Western Australia in 1971 when the then Indian Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi abolished the privy purse enjoyed by India’s hundreds of former
rulers and their families. He bought a large house near Perth and leased a
168,000 hectare pastoral estate in the north of Western Australia. Along

124
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 125

with him came a huge assortment of ex-palace chandeliers, gilded occa-

sional furniture and masses of Indian Mughal-style bric-a-brac. By 1995,
the Nizam could no longer pay his bills, he’d divorced his first wife and
his new wife had died of Aids.1 The prices paid were astounding. Art and
antiques are a wonderful hobby. They’re also big business.

Chinese Antiques Madness

Wealthy Chinese businesspeople outside mainland China have long

collected Chinese artworks. Consider for example the jade collection now
in Singapore that was built up by the Aw brothers who founded the Tiger
Balm and newspaper empire. Or the legendary Chinese ceramics and jade
collection amassed by T.Y. Chao who founded Hong Kong’s Wah Kwong
Shipping Holdings.
The market for Chinese antiques went through the roof in 2004. At
Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in October 2004, a Qianlong period (1737–95)
porcelain vase with a ruby background, estimated to be worth US$5
million, sold for US$5.3 million, setting a world record for a piece of Qing
dynasty porcelain.2
The following month a Ming dynasty (1368–1644) copper-red porcelain
dish that had been used by a family in the San Francisco Bay area to serve
cracked crab sold at Bonhams & Butterfields in San Francisco for US$5.7
million, a US record for a Ming porcelain object at auction. The estimate
had been US$1–2 million. The plate had been exhibited in Hong Kong,
London, and New York prior to the auction to excite interest.
I attended one of Christie’s auctions for Chinese works of art in London
in November 2004. The room was not filled with the elegantly tailored and
coiffed representatives of Europe’s upper echelons, but with disheveled
groups of mainland Chinese, with their giveaway short-back haircuts,
cheap clothes, and battered shopping bags from down-market Oxford
Street retailers. Only their expensive Mont Blanc pens signaled the
moneyed firepower they were about to unleash.
A seventeenth-century enamel censer with a £70,000–100,000 estimate
made £811,650; an eighteenth-century enamel vase with a £5000–6000
estimate made £139,650; an eighteenth-century porcelain moonflask esti-
mated at no more than £50,000 raised £206,850; an eighteenth-century
cloisonné enamel “vessel” and cover estimated at £10,000–15,000 made
£111,650; and a pair of cloisonné enamel jardinières that should have
sold for no more than £60,000 raised £341,250. The final lot, a pair of
eighteenth-century enamel jars, was expected to bring between £40,000
126 Inside Knowledge
and £60,000. Just as bidding started at around £60,000, a man in the room
called out a bid of £200,000, an extraordinary jump, causing a stir in the
room. Bidding momentarily ceased and potential bidders reassessed their
strategies. Bidding soon resumed. And the man’s response? He called out
another bid: £300,000. A phone bidder countered with a higher bid still,
the man in the room gave up, and the lot was sold to the phone bidder for
a stunning £363,650. It was an extraordinary end to an extraordinary
auction. Those assembled and on the telephones had spent more than £5.3
million on just 59 lots.
No doubt Christie’s has suffered some culture shock with the changing
structure of its client base. But it has not been slow to recognize new
economic realities. It had prepared a catalogue that gave each lot’s title in
English and Chinese, and an ethnic Chinese auctioneer switched between
public school English and brusque, street Mandarin to explain that some
lots had been withdrawn prior to sale.
Most of the Chinese bidders were men, middle aged or younger. They
turned the room into an elaborate, expensive game of blackjack as bids
bounced around the room. Pre-auction estimates become meaningless as
the mainlanders appeared to play a game of chicken with one another,
seeing who would blink first. They approached the bidding with the same
good-natured spirit with which they would approach a game of baccarat in
a Macau casino. When they weren’t inside bidding, they stood in groups in
the street outside, sharing Red Pagoda cigarettes.
Sotheby’s also staged a Chinese art auction in London that week. If
prices went beyond Sotheby’s estimates, they soared. Take, for example,
an eighteenth-century scroll painting attributed to Ding Guanpeng that
was estimated to sell for £8000–12,000; instead it went for £302,400. A
nineteenth-century scroll that should have made £5000–7000, went for
£130,600, and a jade bowl that was expected to bring no more than
£20,000 made £156,800.

Chinese Art or Chinese Laundry?

It’s not as if both auction houses don’t know how to value their lots. They
auction Chinese art many times a year around the world. So what is going
on? Why were their estimates so wrong, so often? It is true that the major
auction houses prefer estimates that are on the low side. Lower estimates
are believed to attract more bidders who once started won’t stop. But there
is a difference between an estimate on the low side and getting it wrong by
a factor of six.
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 127

Possibly, some mainland buyers were buying not for themselves but
were gift hunting, looking for pieces to give to public museums in China.
This would go a long way in currying favor with local officials. Or
perhaps the pieces are for the local officials themselves. Gift giving is part
and parcel of doing business and developing connections in China.
Beyond some point, gifts become bribery, but who is to say how much a
£100,000 Chinese vase bought in London is worth back in China? Only
the giver need know, and the receiver, who presumably needs to know
how thankful he should be.
Another factor contributing to the price explosion is the huge sums
accumulated in foreign bank accounts by mainland Chinese officials. The
Chinese government has become better at detecting inappropriate
payments through China’s banking system. Sometimes Chinese officials
might ask for bribes to be paid into offshore accounts, and if the briber is a
foreign firm, the funds can be paid and received offshore, never entering
China, even though that’s where the favors will be delivered. How then to
repatriate the proceeds to China?
Importing something like a sports car will attract stiff customs duties
and raise questions about the source of the funds for its acquisition, plus
the value of a sports car is easily determined. But repatriating the wealth in
the form of Chinese antiques is less likely to raise customs problems or
suspicion. The values of antique items are difficult to quantify, especially
at the border.
And so it is likely that a fair proportion of the current boom in Chinese
works of art on the international market is coming from mainland Chinese
looking for a way to get funds that have accumulated offshore into China
but without raising the suspicion that a hefty international bank transfer or
some other more visible import might raise.
Another source of demand are those officials who have absconded.
China’s own Ministry of Commerce estimated in 2004 that around 4000
corrupt Chinese officials had fled China in the last two decades, taking
more than US$500 million with them.3

Betting and Bubbles

Speculation is also driving the Chinese art boom. Previously, the market
was propelled by wealthy and serious collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the
US, and Europe. But now few of the new entrants, the mainland Chinese,
are collectors. Few study the field and make careful purchases of objects
that they want to keep for the better part of a lifetime. Instead many look for
128 Inside Knowledge
quick profits. The hassle is a lot less too. Buying a rare vase at Sotheby’s
means a lot less red tape than does buying a plot of land in Shanghai. Hong
Kong’s William Chak of Chak’s buys on behalf of mainland buyers at
auctions like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. He was the buyer of many of the
major pieces at Christie’s sale described above. He also bought the top lot at
Christie’s Asian arts auction held in Paris that same month. It was a Wanli
period (1573–1619) red lacquer box with an estimate of a5,000–7,000.
Chak bid an astonishing a217,200.4
Chak was asked in an interview in Arts of Asia magazine, published
in early 2005, what the difference was between collectors today and in
the past:5

Most collectors these days want to know what the pieces are likely to cost in the
future. When I was formerly working for Hong Kong dealer Mr Wong for over
twenty years at Fook Shing Antiques, that never happened … Now the idea is
different. In Taiwan they still have big collectors who like what they buy and do
not resell. But some mainland Chinese clients buy to invest and not to collect.

In the same magazine, well-known London dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi

described some Chinese “collectors” as “betting” rather than collecting. He
also decried the recent practice of the major auction houses reselling pieces
a year or two after they last appeared at auction, when in the past, the
informal practice had been that pieces would not be accepted for consign-
ment if their last appearance in the auction rooms was in the past five or six
years. The quick resale of pieces has given the market the feel of a bubble.
Western collectors with deep pockets have been caught up in the specu-
lative fervor, not so much out of speculation on their part but out of fear
that Chinese art objects sold to mainland buyers are unlikely ever again to
appear on the international market because Chinese cultural heritage laws
will prevent their re-export. Foreign governments eager to attract future
investment and trade deals from Beijing have shown their readiness in
recent times to help the Chinese government in this regard. The Australian
government in 2004, for example, tracked down, confiscated, and sent
back to China a large assortment of dinosaur fossils that the Chinese
government claimed had been smuggled out of China. The Australians
were obsequious. “We care about protecting Chinese culture,” said the
officiating Australian minister in front of the Chinese ambassador at a
press conference. It was the trade minister.
Whatever the rationale, suddenly big sums of cash are available over-
seas for Chinese art objects. And so the world’s major auction houses have
repositioned themselves towards China, not just Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 129

Stuttgart-based auctioneer Nagel held previews in Shanghai and Beijing

in 2004 of selected lots prior to its auctions of Chinese art in Germany.
The strategy worked well, attracting a lot of new interest from Chinese
buyers. All but one of the top ten lots for Nagel’s Chinese art auctions held
in May 2004 went to buyers based in Asia. One mainland buyer paid
a53,200 for a vase that was expected to raise a1800. And a Hong Kong
buyer paid an astonishing a186,200 for a nineteenth-century jade seal that
was estimated to bring a1200.6
Foreign auction houses were permitted to hold auctions on the mainland
itself from December 2004, as part of China’s WTO obligations. But they
are not allowed to sell art, books, and paintings dated prior to 1949 due to
cultural protection laws. So it’s likely that the spectacular prices seen in
London, Hong Kong, Stuttgart, and elsewhere for Chinese art will
continue. All the more so given that the number of rich Chinese continues
to grow exponentially while the supply of Chinese antiques is fixed.

Islamic Art Booms

The market for Islamic art and antiques is not as broad and deep as that for
Chinese art but it too has been booming. The zenith for Islamic art came in
London in April 2004, at the Sotheby’s and Christie’s Islamic art auctions.
Both put together collections and catalogues designed to ensnare one
client in particular: Sheikh Saud al-Thani, first cousin of Sheikh Hamad
bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar. The strategy worked. The Sheikh
lavished money on both auction houses and prices went not so much
through the roof as the stratosphere.
From where did the Sheikh’s money come? Qatar has a population of
just 840,000 but its proven natural gas reserves account for 5% of the
world’s total and are the third largest in the world. In February 2005
alone, Qatar signed oil and gas deals worth US$90 billion with European
and US companies. These and other expected deals are likely to make
Qatar the world’s richest country on a per capita basis. The Qatar govern-
ment is using its huge earnings from oil and gas to turn its little sandy
peninsular that juts into the Gulf from Saudi Arabia into a tourist destina-
tion. The plans are ambitious. They need to be. I spent a day and a half in
the capital Doha in late 2003. A few hours would have been more than
enough. There is literally nothing there, other than one large shopping
center, a few hotels, and an awful lot of sand. Most Qataris seem to live in
the upmarket London suburbs of Kensington and Knightsbridge. Mean-
while, back home the running of their country is left largely to guest
130 Inside Knowledge
workers. I don’t think I actually met a Qatari while I was in Qatar.
Everyone seemed to be from either the Philippines or southern India.
Part of the plan to remedy the unrelenting nothingness of Qatar is the
opening of five museums in Doha. The Emir is betting that cultural
tourism will be big business and will help Qatar to reduce its reliance on
gas and oil. And so his cousin Sheikh Saud al-Thani poured millions into
acquiring Islamic antiques to stock a new Museum of Islamic Arts, the
lead architect for which is I.M. Pei. The Qatar National Museum is being
redeveloped too and is due to reopen in 2006.
And so in that one week in April 2004, Sheikh Saud al-Thani spent over
£15 million at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions.7 Christie’s sale netted
£11 million, suggesting just how large an impact the Sheikh’s purchases
made on the market.
Among the many spectacular results was £1,036,000 at Sotheby’s
for a sixteenth-century, 27-centimeter-long Ottoman dagger with a
lapis lazuli handle and a gold-inlaid blade. Its pre-sale estimate was
£50,000–£70,000. Another £1,461,600 was paid for what was described
as a fourteenth-century Central Asian glazed ceramic cenotaph but
was subsequently rumoured to have been recently constructed from
looted materials.8
Over at Christie’s, a seventeenth-century Mughal Indian jade flask set
with gold, diamonds, and rubies that had been on loan to the Victoria and
Albert Museum sold for £2.91 million. A flywhisk of banded agate set
with emeralds and rubies that been estimated at £5000–8000 sold for just
over £900,000. Difficult questions were asked about the identities of the
underbidders. Some suspect that given the knowledge that Sheikh Saud al-
Thani would be the buyer at any price, some with an interest in the matter
ensured that the prices he paid were very high indeed. At an earlier auction
he’d paid £94,850 for a seventeenth-century Iranian pottery tile that had an
estimate of just £1000–1500. But then in March 2005, Sheikh Saud al-
Thani was removed from his position as head of Qatar’s National Council
for Culture, Arts and Heritage after having spent an estimated US$2.5
billion on art and antiques on behalf of Qatar. He was then arrested on
suspicion of misuse of public funds, a development that sent shockwaves
through the international art market.
The nine months between September 2003 and March 2004 saw Qatar
emerge as the UK’s third biggest destination for art and antiques after the
US and Switzerland, with £48.4 million worth of art, antiques, statues, and
prints exported to Qatar from the UK during that period. Included was
£25.8 million worth of antiques “over one hundred years old” in the first
six months of 2004.9 Significantly, these figures did not include the items
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 131

acquired at the April sales and certainly not the items acquired at auctions
held in October that year.
But Sheikh Saud al-Thani has not been the only major buyer of Islamic
art. He’s merely the newest. Other royal families of the Gulf’s oil states
have pushed the market for Indian Mughal jewelry to astronomic heights.
One collection already put together and on display is the fabulous Al-Sabah
Collection at the Kuwait National Museum. Sheik Nasser Sabah Ahmed al-
Sabah, a minor member of Kuwait’s royal al-Sabah family, has assembled a
stunning collection of more than 20,000 pieces of Islamic art. The peak of
his buying came in the early 1990s. His acquisition rate has slowed since.
Saddam Hussein’s forces meticulously shifted the Al-Sabah Collection
from the Kuwait National Museum to Iraq’s National Museum after they
invaded Kuwait in 1990. The UN later returned the pieces aboard a UN
cargo plane. I saw highlights from the collection in 2001 when they were
exhibited at the British Museum in London. They were stunning. Later
they were shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Sultan of Brunei has been another big buyer. He poured millions
into the Islamic antique market in the early 1990s, buying swathes of
Islamic jewels, porcelain, and early Korans for his public museums in his
capital Bandar Seri Begawan. Unfortunately as is so often the case with
Brunei, money does not mean expertise. His main Islamic museum is liter-
ally stuffed to the rafters with fabulous items but they are poorly described
and displayed. I was the only visitor on the occasion of my visit. The staff
seemed surprised to be disturbed and yet here in the steamy jungles of
north-western Borneo is one of the world’s most exquisite collections of
international Islamic art.
Another important collection is the Khalili collection of Islamic art
assembled by David Khalili, a rich property investor from a Jewish family
in Isfahan, Iran, and now based in London. His 20,000-piece collection is
probably the world’s largest collection of Islamic art in private hands.
Khalili has said that he intends to finance a museum to be established in
London to show his collection.10
And in Kuala Lumpur, there is the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, estab-
lished by the charitable foundation set up by leading Malaysian businessman
and philanthropist Syed Mokhtar Albukhary. The museum contains many
fine items in a beautiful building built to house the collection. Albukhary
paid a New York antique dealer around US$250,000 in 2004 for what he
believes is the earliest known Koran produced in China. The museum is
professional and produces expensive and scholarly catalogs. Syed Mokhtar
has told me that he “might” consider opening other Islamic art museums in
places that don’t have the resources to open them themselves.
132 Inside Knowledge
How to Make a Market

An almost surefire way of wringing money out of the antiques market is to

quietly collect an obscure, hitherto unrecognized item such as Mongolian
saddles, opium bowls, or Burmese fold-out books (parabaiks), and buy up
as many examples as possible, become well versed in the field, and write a
book about it which will stimulate interest among other collectors. A
market will be made and suddenly your large collection acquired at
modest cost will be worth a fortune, particularly if it can be sold en bloc to
a museum or gallery.
Books that in recent years have helped to make markets for an obscure
area of Asian art include Henry Brownrigg’s Betel Cutters: From the
Samuel Eilenberg Collection (Thames and Hudson, 1992) which almost
single handedly excited interest in betel cutters of India and Southeast Asia
as a discrete area of collecting to the point where I watched a single Sri
Lankan betel cutter sell at auction at Christie’s in London in October 2004
for a record £4182 against an estimate of £400–600. I saw the author
several days after the auction and told him that such a price was entirely
his fault. He didn’t disagree.
And then there are the four books on Straits Chinese porcelain, silver,
furniture, and beadwork and embroidery written by Singapore’s Professor
Ho Wing Meng.11 Again, almost single handedly, these four books created
a whole Straits Chinese industry in Singapore even though some of the
items ascribed in the books to Straits Chinese workmanship (particularly
in the silver book) are of mainland Chinese or Indonesian workmanship.
For a time, Christie’s even staged auctions of Straits Chinese porcelain,
jewelry, and embroidery. It ended these when it could no longer source
enough items to warrant staging such auctions.
The international market for Tibetan antiques is huge. One reason is
because there’s so much supply to meet demand, thanks largely to the
international diaspora of Tibetans through whose hands smuggled Tibetan
antiques pass and because huge quantities of Tibetan art flooded out of
Tibet during the years of the Cultural Revolution when thousands of
Tibetan monasteries were destroyed. Fabulous fourteenth-century gilded
copper panels from the Densatil monastery that stood southeast of Lhasa
and which was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution routinely appear at
international art auctions. The Chinese government is now cracking down
on antique smuggling from Tibet and at least one prominent ethnic
Tibetan dealer with a gallery in Kathmandu has been arrested in China in
recent years.
Has the market for Asian art changed apart from the influx of mainland
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 133

Chinese looking for quick speculative profits? London’s Theresa McCul-

lough of Theresa McCullough Ltd, a specialist dealer in Southeast Asian
and South Asian art and antiques, advises that the most noticeable trend in
the past 15 years has been a move away from “ethnological” collecting,
whereby serious collectors specialize in a field and collect one of every-
thing regardless of aesthetic value, toward big, showy pieces that are as
much about interior decorating as anything else. Accordingly, the prices of
big, museum-quality pieces such as Gandharan statues have risen signifi-
cantly in recent years relative to lesser pieces. Contemporary Indian paint-
ings have performed well, as have recent Vietnamese paintings, showy
Mughal jewelry and of course important Chinese ceramics.
With all the oil being found in central Asia, Central Asian antiques and
artefacts ought to prove good investments for the future. But I’m not the
only one who thinks so. Three gilded silver women’s headdresses from
early twentieth-century Uzbekistan were sold at Christie’s, South Kens-
ington in February 2005 with estimates of £500–700 each. They made
£1560, £3840 and £5040 respectively. Three weeks later I saw the same
headdresses at a London antiques fair. Each now had a price tag of £18,000.

The strange case of Bhutanese textiles

Bhutanese textiles are beautiful, rare and, for a long time, completely unap-
preciated by collectors and even the Bhutanese themselves. And so Marko
Bartholomew, an American who lived for a while in Nepal, quietly amassed
a huge collection of the textiles over twenty years. He was particularly
interested in designs connected to Bhutanese royalty which were often
presented to ordinary Bhutanese by the king and his family.

When one of the Bhutan king’s wives decided to open the National Textile
Museum in Bhutan, it was found that most of the quality pieces of
Bhutanese textiles were no longer in Bhutan but now belonged to
Bartholomew. He had paid relatively little for the collection; often he’d
swapped pieces for cooking oil and the like with Bhutanese visitors to
Nepal. But, in time, his collecting began to pay off. In 1978 he sold 77
pieces to the Royal Ontario Museum for US$30,000 and several years
later, 40 pieces to the Osaka Museum in Japan for US$200,000. By the
134 Inside Knowledge

time the Bhutanese queen was looking for textiles for her museum,
Bartholomew was in a position to offer the remains of his collection
(more than a thousand pieces) for US$2 million.12 The Bhutanese balked
at the price but what choice did they have? Bartholomew had almost
cornered the market.

One other significant collector was the American Barbara Adams

(mentioned in Chapter 9) who also lived in Nepal where she’d been the
mistress of Nepal’s Prince Basundhara. She built up a collection of around
300 pieces and helpfully wrote a book on Bhutanese textiles (Traditional
Bhutanese Textiles, White Orchid Books, 1984) which served to heighten
collectors’ interest and push up prices.

Within a short period Bhutanese textiles went from being discarded

to highly desirable, so much so that by late 2004, just a single piece of
eighteenth-century geometric patterned Bhutanese ritual cloth could be
offered for sale in London by renowned Asian textile dealer Linda Wrig-
glesworth for US$11,000.

The Business of Forgery and Theft

Asian art is big business and consequently so is Asian art forgery. The
biggest targets for forgeries are probably Chinese ceramics, Cambodian
Angkor period stone statues, and tenth–fifteenth-century Javanese gold.
Forgeries of Angkor stone statues have become so good that it is believed
that many famous collections around the world contain several or many
forgeries, including the collection of the National Museum of Cambodia.
And so provenance now means everything: pieces with ownership that can
be traced to the decades before serious faking began attract big premiums
over those that don’t have this.
Tibetan art is faked too, even kapala bowls which are made from the
inverted top half of human skulls and often lined with silver. Traditionally,
the skulls came from dead monks. But today, graves in cemeteries in Tibet
and along its borders are being raided by fakers for the necessary raw
materials. How to identify a bowl of recent manufacture? Smell it (really)!
Similarly, recently made conch shell trumpets can be made to look old but
the odour of dead fish is a giveaway.
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 135

Mixing Business and Pleasure

Art has always been big business in Asia. The Chinese emperors were
among the biggest collectors the world has ever seen. It is a testament to
the importance of art in China that the Chinese Nationalist forces, when
fleeing mainland China in 1948 ahead of the Communist takeover, took
with them what had been the Imperial collection of porcelain and bronzes.
It’s still in Taiwan today and forms the spectacular National Palace
Museum collection. There’s a permanent collection on display. The
remainder is stored in supposedly nuclear-proof bunkers in the hillside at
the site on the outskirts of Taipei.
Today Asia is home to some big private collectors, both corporate and
individual. Japan is by far the biggest market in Asia for European art,
particularly paintings. The end of the property bubble in Japan around
1990 saw huge quantities of paintings released back onto the international
art market after their Japanese owners went to the wall. Many paintings
had been used as loan collateral. By 1998, one finance company, Osaka-
based Lake, had seized from collectors and dealers several hundred paint-
ings with a book value of over US$600 million. Works by Picasso, Monet,
Manet, and Braque were among Lake’s cache, including Picasso’s The
Wedding Party of Pierette which had been bought by one-time Japanese
property billionaire Tomonori Tsurumaki in 1989 for an absurd US$51.7
million, a sum that Tsurumaki had borrowed.13
Samsung is South Korea’s biggest corporate collector and arts patron. It
opened the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in October 2004 in Seoul
(Leeum is a composite of Lee, the surname of Samsung’s chairman, and
um, the suffix of museum). The museum houses Samsung’s collection of
traditional Korean art and its large collection of local and international
modern art. Samsung has also sponsored the opening of other art galleries in
South Korea. It spends millions each year acquiring and supporting the arts:
around US$8.4 million in 2003, for example.14
I once asked Sofyan Wanandi, the head of Indonesia’s diversified
Gemala Group, whether he collected paintings like his brother Jusuf. His
reply was not really, he collected factories. Sofyan lost quite a few of those
factories in the wake of Asia’s economic crisis. But Jusuf still has a nice
collection of paintings.
James Riady of Indonesia’s giant banking and real estate Lippo Group,
who was at the heart of the donations-for-access “Donorgate” scandal during
the Clinton presidency, has amassed probably the world’s most important
collection of Indonesian paintings. I watched Riady’s agent spend around
US$1.5 million on a single painting at a Christie’s auction at the Singapore
136 Inside Knowledge
Hyatt Regency Hotel in March 1997. I’ve met Riady only once, at the home
of the Australian ambassador in Jakarta. We discussed paintings. It turned
out that Riady had been the buyer of a Bali painting by the Australian artist
Donald Friend that I had recently sold through Sotheby’s in Singapore.
Tsui Tsin Tong (more commonly known as T.T. Tsui), chairman of Hong
Kong’s CNT Group, has one of the world’s most important private collec-
tions of Chinese art. His private museum, the T.T. Tsui Museum in a high-
rise building in central Hong Kong, holds more than 4000 pieces of
Chinese art. He’s also a big donor. In 1995, he gave a large quantity of
porcelain and bronze items to the National Gallery of Australia in
Canberra. The gallery opened a new wing, the T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese
Art to house them. He’s also donated funds, artworks, or both, to the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the
Royal Ontario Museum of Canada, and the Shanghai Museum. For a time,
Tsui’s companies acted as a foreign distributor for Norinco, the People’s
Liberation Army-owned manufacturer of arms and weapons.
Malaysia’s Daim Zainuddin, former finance minister and one of that
country’s wealthiest businessmen who controls the International Bank of
Malaysia Group, has a large collection of Asian paintings. He has built a
freestanding gallery that comprises three main halls on his residential
compound in the hills above Kuala Lumpur. I was shown the collection
one evening, which Daim and his wife Tok Puan Mahani keep guarded by
Nepalese Gurkhas. In the collection there are watercolours by Chang Fee
Ming, a Hakka Chinese artist from Terengganu, including the Song of the
Fisherman: Melody, a large, spectacular painting that shows a group of
East Coast Malaysian fisherman from the waist down as they stand in the
water near their fishing vessel.
Chang’s works are popular with many wealthy business collectors in
Southeast Asia. Apart from Daim’s collection, his paintings appear in the
collections of James Riady, Jusuf Wanandi, Tossin Himawan of Indonesia’s
Astra Group, Azmi Wan Hamzah of Malaysia’s Land and General Group,
and Malaysian corporate collections including those of Sime Derby, Bolton
Properties, Federal Flour Mills, Bank Negara, Petronas, and Malaysian
Airline System.
Abdul Taib Mahmud, the very wealthy, long-serving chief minister of
the timber-rich Malaysian state of Sarawak, whose family controls
massive timber concessions as well as the locally based CMS construction
and banking group, is also a big collector of art. He specializes particularly
in Southeast Asian betel nut paraphernalia. He also reportedly paid almost
US$2 million for the piano that once belonged to the late American
showman Liberace.15
 Asia’s Art Market: For Investment and Connections 137

Singapore’s Wee Cho Yaw, chairman of United Overseas Bank, is a

collector of Chinese paintings. His corporate suite is decorated with
massive paintings of goldfish. Artists popular with Singapore’s rich are
Georgette Chen and Lee Man Fong. The late Jack Chia who owned Singa-
pore’s MPH book chain, had a large collection of celadon porcelain.
Hong Kong-based Adrian Zecha, who owns the ultra-luxury Amman
chain of hotels and resorts, has a large collection of Asian art that he keeps
in his Hong Kong Mid-Levels apartment. He founded Orientations, one of
the two leading Asian art and antique magazines. It is published eight
times a year.
The other magazine, the lavishly illustrated Arts of Asia, was founded
by Hong Kong-based Tuyet Nguyet, who perhaps more than any other
single figure has built up and perpetuated Asia’s antique and art market. A
collector herself, she is one of the most powerful figures in the trade. Arti-
cles on obscure topics in Arts of Asia have the power to make markets
where previously there were none. She travels the world staying in touch
with Asian art dealers, auctioneers, and collectors and at the same time
publishes six issues of her magazine each year which has become the
chronicle worldwide for the industry.
If you want to understand Asia’s most successful businesspeople, you
have to become interested in what interests them. A subscription to Arts of
Asia might be a good way to start. Art is big business, a good investment,
and a good way to make important business contacts in Asia or confirm
them. There’s nothing like shared interests outside work to help build up a
relationship. And so art is a good way to kill several birds with one stone,
which no doubt goes some way to explaining its popularity among Asia’s
business elite.
 Singapore,
Chapter Malaysia,
and the

12 International
Arms Industry

Singapore is a modern, ultra-clean city-state, with excellent tourist and

shopping facilities. It also has the highest rate per capita of executions in
the world, a large, government-regulated commercial sex industry, and is a
manufacturer and exporter of weapons that are designed to kill. The Singa-
pore government’s strong preference for execution and the city-state’s
commercial sex industry were looked at in The Asian Insider. It’s Singa-
pore’s role in the international arms industry that is examined here.

No Messing Around

Four men of Pakistani descent hijacked Singapore Airlines flight SQ117

on March 26, 1991. The flight was on its way from Kuala Lumpur to
Singapore, with 118 passengers from 18 countries and 9 crew members on
board.1 Armed with knives and canisters of explosives, the hijackers
directed the flight’s captain to take the plane to Sydney. But the plane did
not have enough fuel for the journey, so the hijackers agreed to allow it to
land at Singapore’s Changi Airport.
The four claimed to be members of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP),
Pakistan’s main opposition party. Their demands included the release of
various PPP leaders from prisons in Pakistan. Once at Changi, they asked
that the aircraft be refueled so that it could be flown to Australia and there-
after to Iraq or Libya.
The first load of fuel was delivered to the aircraft at about 3am. The
hijackers agreed to release ten women and children before the next load of

138
 Singapore, Malaysia,and the International Arms Industry 139

fuel. But they changed their minds: no hostages would be released. By

6am the hijackers decided that the plane, still with insufficient fuel for
Sydney, should now fly to Jakarta. Forty-five minutes later they issued a
deadline: if their requests were not met within five minutes, they would
start to kill the hostages.
At around 6.50am, hooded Singapore Armed Forces commandos were
given the command to storm the plane. They had been waiting beneath its
rear section. They propped their ladders against the sides of the plane and
opened its doors from the outside. Twenty commandos stormed in, from
both ends of the aircraft. They detonated stun grenades to immobilize the
hijackers, while screaming to the passengers to get down.
Automatic gunfire followed. Within minutes the commandos had
killed three terrorists with their precision shooting. The fourth grabbed a
woman to shield himself. Another passenger grabbed the woman away,
allowing a commando to open fire at close range, and the fourth hijacker
was killed instantly.
The storming was over in just four minutes. Each of the four hijackers
was dead and not a single passenger or crew member had been harmed.
The authorities had not even needed to close the airport. It was one of the
cleanest, most efficient endings to a plane hijacking ever.
Singapore has developed one of Asia’s most advanced armed forces, as
the four hijackers were to learn, if only briefly. It has also developed one
of the region’s most sophisticated defence industries. From where did
Singapore receive the inspiration for all this? Israel, with whom Singapore
has close military ties. It turned to Israel for help to create a defence force
after its separation from Malaysia in 1967, when the British advised that
they would be withdrawing their forces from the island. Malaysia did not
recognize Israel (and still doesn’t), but Singapore did immediately. And
with recognition came assistance.
Singapore’s Armed Forces routinely participate in joint exercises with
other armed forces in the region. This helps with training but also provides
knowledge of regional capabilities. Not surprisingly, the Singaporean
forces invariably are superior, and sometimes the gap is very wide.
Singaporean soldiers who have been involved in joint exercises with
the Indonesian military have told me how two or three Indonesian
soldiers are “routinely” killed when it comes to exercises that use live
ammunition. Accidents are common. Often Indonesian soldiers are shot
dead by their colleagues. In summing up the Indonesian generals’ attitude
towards their troops, one former senior Singapore army officer told me
that “life is cheap.”
140 Inside Knowledge
ST Engineering

For many, getting to know the real Singapore can be a surprise. Few
realize that Singapore is home to an armaments and munitions industry.
The biggest player in the sector is a Singapore government-linked
company, ST Engineering.2 But the sector is not simply focused on arming
Singapore’s military. It has become heavily export focused.
Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) handles
a lot of the research and development. The rationale is that there is a need
for armaments and the other paraphernalia of the battlefield to be
redesigned to fit the physique of the Asian soldier and also to function effi-
ciently in tropical conditions. With most weapons being designed in
Europe and North America for larger bodies and cold to temperate
climates, it is a marketing pitch that ought to appeal to prospective clients
in Asia, Africa, and South America.
ST Engineering has four main subsidiaries that are involved in military
research and hardware manufacturing, although not exclusively: ST
Kinetics, ST Aerospace, ST Marine, and ST Electronics.
ST Kinetics is ST Engineering’s key military hardware division. It was
formed in 2000 by the merger of Singapore Technologies Automotives
with Chartered Industries of Singapore. It has almost 3000 employees and
operates from new premises in Jalan Boon Lay in Singapore. From its
Singapore Technologies Automotives parentage, it still has considerable
automotive interests, including its ownership of CityCab, a taxi company
in Singapore with over 5000 vehicles. But it’s the military hardware
business that the company is now most eager to expand and promote.
The shopping catalog for ST Kinetics makes illuminating reading: Field
air defence mounts, advanced mortar systems, remote weapon stations,
automatic grenade launchers, machine guns, assault rifles, and howitzers
all made in Singapore are available for order. On the munitions side there
are various rounds, cartridges, and grenades.
But that’s not all that ST Kinetics produces. It has developed the Terrex
AV81, an eight-wheeled light armored vehicle. ST Kinetics later bought a
25% stake in Ireland’s Timoney Holdings, the company that designed the
vehicle on its behalf. The vehicle has become part of the company’s export
push. ST Kinetics signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) in
2002 with the Turkish automotive manufacturer Otokar to jointly develop
an 8 x 8 vehicle based on the Terrex AV81 prototype to bid for a supply
contract with the Turkish army. And it has developed infantry carriers that
have been sold to the US army.
But it’s the SAR-21 automatic rifle that is perhaps ST Kinetics’ best-
 Singapore, Malaysia,and the International Arms Industry 141

known product. (SAR is short for Singapore army rifle and 21 refers to the
twenty-first century.) For many years Singapore’s Armed Forces had used
M16A1 rifles manufactured in Singapore under license. But the terms of
the licensing agreement meant that exports were difficult. So that Singa-
pore might earn export dollars from its rifle production, it developed its
own rifles. The first local rifles to be developed were the SAR-80 and the
SAR-88. The SAR-80, for example, was then sold to South Africa. But it
was the SAR-21 into which most development and energy has been
expended. It was developed by ST Kinetics both for Singapore’s Armed
Forces and to sell overseas. Modifications allow it to be converted into a
machine gun and a grenade launcher. “The SAR-21 is among the best
handling and easiest rifles to use that the author has ever experienced,”
wrote one interviewer for Jane’s International Defence Review.3 Others
say that since it’s gas operated, it’s prone to jamming. Sales have been
disappointing. The market for rifles, like for most light munitions, has
become commoditized. They’re easy to make and replicate and conse-
quently margins are low.
ST Kinetics is a regular exhibitor at international arms fairs, including
the International Defence Exhibition in Abu Dhabi, Defence Systems and
Equipment International in the UK, the Latin America Defentech in Brazil,
and the Armor Conference in the US. In the US, its weapons are marketed
and distributed by VT Systems, an ST Engineering subsidiary.
In March 2001, it signed an MoU with Italy’s Oto Melara to co-develop
a variant of its 155mm lightweight self-propelled howitzer. It has also
developed its 40mm air bursting munitions ssystem in collaboration with
Switzerland’s Oerlikon Contraves. And there’s a development agreement
with Australia’s Innovonics for the installation of fleet management and
vehicle monitoring systems for its Bronco all-terrain vehicles.
What will the future bring? ST Kinetics is reportedly keen to move
away from production of conventional weapons, munitions, and vehicles
toward robotics, guided weapons, and unmanned aircraft. The desire is to
move toward production of more sophisticated weaponry for which
margins are higher and the potential for export earnings greater.
ST Kinetics’ sister company ST Aerospace is a genuinely global player
in the market for upgrading and maintaining military and commercial
aircraft. It provides upgrade packages to the world’s air forces to “provide
maximum performance and survivability” for fighter, transport, and rotary
wing military aircraft.
Recent clients have included the Turkish air force for which ST Aero-
space upgraded 48 F-5 fighter aircraft; the Brazilian air force, which
awarded the company a similar upgrade contract; and the Singapore air
142 Inside Knowledge
force. The US navy is a long-term client of ST Aerospace with which it
has a C-130 Hercules depot servicing contract. Upgrade programs have
also been developed for various military and civilian helicopters and
F-16 fighters.
The company has subsidiary operations in Texas. And in 2001, it set up a
joint venture with FR Aviation Group, a subsidiary of the UK-based
defence manufacturer Cobham. The joint venture, Bournemouth Aviation
Services (60% owned by Singapore Technologies) is based at Bournemouth
International Airport in the UK.4 For its part, Cobham supplies military air-
to-air refuelling systems among other defence-related products. It won a
contract to supply such a program to Malaysia in 2001.
ST Marine supplies the Singapore navy with small vessels and it too is
keen to win export contracts with foreign navies. Its capabilities also
include ship repair and ship conversion. It has produced a range of military
ship designs that incorporate advanced stealth capabilities although it’s not
clear that these have gone beyond the design stage. The company has
subsidiaries overseas including VT Halter Marine in the US. This company
has contracts with the US navy to construct logistic support vessels. It also
won a US$47 million contract in April 2003 to complete the building of a
car carrier vessel.5 In 2004, it was named as a prime contractor for a poten-
tial US sale of three fast missile craft to Egypt.6
ST Electronics designs and develops software and advanced electronics
solutions principally for road and rail transportation but also develops
systems for defence and defence training and simulation. A subsidiary, ST
Training & Simulation, offers for export state-of-the-art flight mission
trainers for pilot training that include precision-combat flight operations
and mission-simulation training. Also on offer are armor gunnery and
tactical simulators.

Keppel and Avimo

While ST Engineering dominates weapons, munitions, and military

components manufacturing in Singapore, it’s not the only local player. Yet
another government-linked company is keen to develop an interest in the
defence industry. In October 2003, Keppel Corp’s US subsidiary Amfels
won a US$73 million contract from Boeing to outfit a semi-submersible
drilling platform that would be used as a radar outpost for the US govern-
ment’s missile defence system. It was expected that when finished, the
platform would be deployed in the Pacific Ocean to be used as an early
detection facility for missiles fired from North Korea.7
 Singapore, Malaysia,and the International Arms Industry 143

Avimo is another Singapore company involved in the sector. It designs,

manufactures, and services advanced precision optics and optical coatings,
laser equipment, and the like. It won major contracts to supply systems for
Apache helicopters.
The British arms manufacturer Alvis controlled Avimo until around
2001. Alvis’s final 17% stake in the company was sold for £25.7 million to
Thales (formerly known as Thomson-CSF).8 The Kuwaiti Investment
Office held a minority stake. Thales of France is one of the world’s biggest
weapons and military systems manufacturers. Its acquisition of Avimo
means that it now has a manufacturing presence in Singapore.

The Myanmar Controversy

Singapore’s military exports sometimes prove controversial, none more so

than the alleged export of weapons and military know-how to Myanmar in
the late 1980s. Several articles appeared in Jane’s Intelligence Review in
which it was claimed that 84mm rockets and other munitions made under
license by Chartered Industries of Singapore (ST Kinetics’ predecessor)
appeared to have been shipped to Myanmar towards the end of 1988.9 This
was shortly after the massacre by the military of pro-democracy protesters
in the streets of Yangon (Rangoon) in September 1988. M16A1 automatic
rifles, 7.62mm assault rifles, and ammunition and communications equip-
ment were sent in other shipments, according to the allegations.
And then there was the separate accusation that a modular, prefabricated
factory designed and built in Singapore by Chartered Industries of Singa-
pore with Israeli assistance had arrived in Myanmar in 1998 where it was
set up to produce small arms or ordnance of up to 37mm. The Directorate
of Defence Industries of Myanmar’s Ministry of Defence had taken
delivery of the facility. It was said that the factory could be assembled and
operational within a matter of weeks and possibly could have been assem-
bled within an existing building such as an airport hanger.
The Singapore government has always denied these allegations.
Nonetheless, 104 stockholders in the TIAA-CREF, one of the biggest
pension funds in the US, sent a letter to the fund in November 2002 in
which they urged it to dump its shares in Singapore Technologies, on
account of its arms allegedly being sold to Myanmar’s military.10
However, it’s worth remembering that, regardless of whether Singapore-
made weapons and accessories have found their way to Myanmar, it is
China that is by far the biggest weapons supplier to Myanmar and the
contributions of other countries are dwarfed by China’s efforts.
144 Inside Knowledge
One of the most surreal experiences that I can recall having in Southeast
Asia occurred while I sat on rough timber benches in an open-sided teahouse
in the central Myanmar town of Thazi in the late 1990s. The teahouse was
memorable for having a telephone number that comprised just two digits.
The usual passing parade of rusting bicycles, clapped-out buses, and donkey-
drawn carts was interrupted by the extraordinary sight of three spaceship-
like, silver-colored armored tanks that tore past. They looked sophisticated
even by NATO’s standards. But here, among the dust and the poverty, they
looked utterly bizarre. No doubt they comprised “aid” from China.

Singapore and Anti-personnel Landmines

Singapore has not signed the UN’s 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. One reason is
because it has a stockpile of landmines which it wants to keep. It also has
land mine manufacturing capacity. In the past, Singapore has produced
two types of antipersonnel landmines: a plastic blast mine (VS-50) and a
bounding fragmentation mine (VS-69), both copies of Italian designs.11
Prior to 1996 it even exported them. Reportedly, Iraq was one destination
for Singapore-made landmines.
Singapore declared a two-year limited moratorium on exports of non-
self-destruct and non-detectable antipersonnel landmines in May 1996.
However, it has maintained that antipersonnel landmines are needed for
“legitimate self-defence.”12 In February 1998, Singapore expanded the
moratorium to include all manner of antipersonnel landmines, not just
those without self-neutralizing mechanisms, and extended the morato-
rium indefinitely.
It is unclear whether Singapore still manufactures landmines. But it is
clear that it maintains the ability to manufacture them. ST Kinetics
remains the only company in Singapore that either manufactures land-
mines or has the ability to manufacture them.

Malaysia Follows Suit

In its efforts to compete with Singapore in almost every sector, Malaysia is

keen to develop its own arms industry. That it should have its own indige-
nous arms industry is now government policy. In June 2003, it emerged that
Malaysia planned to manufacture its own guided missiles and was eyeing
technology from Bosnia and Brazil, two countries with which Malaysia
was studying the feasibility of cooperating in manufacturing missiles.
 Singapore, Malaysia,and the International Arms Industry 145

Malaysia’s defence procurement program appears to have ratcheted up

in recent years. Britain’s Alvis supplied eight supercat, all-terrain mobile
platforms to Malaysia in 2001 and was expecting follow-on contracts.13
The eight vehicles are believed to have cost Malaysia around £10 million.
In 2002, Malaysia decided to buy 18 Sukhoi fighter jets from Russia in a
deal believed to be worth US$900 million. It also agreed to acquire three
French-made submarines for US$1.23 billion, and ordered British and
Russian missile systems worth US$364 million.14
Increasingly, deals such as these include provisions for military tech-
nology transfer to Malaysia. In 2003, Malaysia agreed to buy 48 attack PT-
91M tanks from Poland for US$368 million. Part of the deal was that local
company MMC Defence would be involved in the tanks’ production with
the Polish manufacturer Bumar Labedy. The contract also allowed for 128
Malaysian military personnel to be trained in Poland.15
MMC Defence is part of Malaysian Mining Corporation, which is
controlled by local businessman Syed Mokhtar Albukhary. The company
was established in March 2001 from a company called MMC Engineering
Services that in turn had been set up around 1986 to venture into armored
vehicles and armaments production. The MMC Defence workshop is
located at Nilai, not far from Kuala Lumpur. It is equipped to undertake
the repair and refurbishment of armored vehicles and upgrading programs.
Then in late 2004, Syed Mokhtar won control of a local conglomerate
DRB-Hicom.16 Defence Technologies, a subsidiary, was expected to be the
major beneficiary of planned increases in Malaysian government defence
spending, that would lead to, among others, a likely US$1 billion joint
venture between Defence Technologies and Augusta of Italy to assemble
helicopters locally for the armed forces and the Malaysian coastguard. The
company already had a US$290 million contract to supply armored
personnel carriers to the army. Syed Mokhtar is likely to merge MMC
Defence and Defence Technologies, and most probably give the new entity
an export focus as well as relying on Malaysian government contracts.
Another local company involved in defence-related manufacturing is
Arsenal Malaysia. Controlled by Malaysian businessman Amin Shah, it
trades in explosives and ammunition. In 2002, Singapore’s Explomo Tech-
nical Services sought to team up with Arsenal, to jointly develop mobile
demilitarization units for places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania,
Cambodia, and Laos.17 Amin Shah also controls the listed PSC Industries,
a naval and commercial shipbuilder. In 1998 it was awarded a multi-
billion ringgit contract to construct 27 vessels for the Malaysian navy.
PSC’s principal banker is the local Affin Bank, controlled by the Armed
Forces Superannuation Fund, although legal proceedings commenced
146 Inside Knowledge

between the two parties in early 2005 over disputed loans.18 The navy was
yet to take possession of the first two completed craft amid complaints
over quality and the government seemed intent on blocking Shah’s every
move if not taking over the project completely.

Sell, Sell, Sell!

Does Singapore’s and Malaysia’s manufacture of weapons and munitions

signal a Southeast Asian arms race? No. But it does signal an increase in
locally made weapons available for other countries in the region to buy. Is
that a good thing? Unfortunately, this export focus is also occurring at the
same time as the rise in regional fundamentalist Islamic militarism. New
markets are being looked for. In late 2004, ST Engineering, for example,
announced a majority-owned IT, engineering, and defence services joint
venture with Kazakhstan Engineering in the Central Asian state.19 Lenin
once said: “When it comes to hang the capitalists they will compete with
each other to sell us the rope at a lower price.” It’s an observation that
Malaysia and Singapore might also heed.
 Chapter
13 Asia’s Great
Casino Invasion

Gambling is huge business in Asia and it’s about to get even bigger.
Millions of mainland Chinese with enough spare cash to gamble in foreign
casinos, an enormous cultural inclination to do so, and the freedom to
travel abroad like never before represent an incredibly lucrative potential
gambling market. The China Center for Lottery Studies at Beijing Univer-
sity has estimated that an extraordinary 600 billion yuan (US$72 billion)
in gambling money now leaves China each year.1
Macau has opened up its casino monopoly. Thailand is toying with
allowing casinos. So too is Singapore, despite rare domestic opposition that
even saw anti-casino petitions circulated in late 2004 by active members of
the ruling Peoples’ Action Party, which asked the country’s president not to
sign government bills that would allow the establishment of casinos. But
principles are easily sacrificed when there’s mainland Chinese money to be
had. By late 2004, the government of Singapore had invited submissions
from casino developers. It received 19 bids from international gaming
groups, some of which had linked up with Singapore government-linked
companies. And in April 2005, the Singapore government announced that
two casinos would be permitted to open. It was envisaged that Singapore
citizens and permanent residents would have to pay a S$100 (US$70)
government levy for each day that they gambled at any casino to be built or
a S$2000 annual levy. Other restrictions on Singaporeans would be put in
place.2 The real target was the mainland Chinese market.
Of course there are many illegal casinos that operate across Asia. And
then there are the legal ones that take advantage of their illegality in neigh-
boring countries. Casinos are illegal in China, for example, and, at the

147
148 Inside Knowledge
time of writing, in Thailand. And so what has this led to? No longer are
these countries surrounded by tanks and militarized zones. Instead, casinos
that have been set up along their borders just inside neighboring countries
ring them. It has also led to myriad illegal casinos, protection rackets, and
payoffs to police and local politicians within their borders. And there are
other substitutes too. In Bangkok it’s known as the Stock Exchange of
Thailand (SET), which has one of the world’s shortest average holding
times per share purchased. In 2002, the SET even suffered a marked loss
of liquidity during the World Cup as punters sold shares to raise cash to
make bets on the outcomes of each match.
The Chinese like to gamble. Of course, one must not resort to stereo-
types. But sometimes it is difficult not to. To be fair, not all Chinese
gamble. But if they don’t, they can nearly always point to some relative
who does. Gambling is an industry that is worth billions in Asia. It’s one
that is worth understanding if one is to understand Asia.
For most Chinese gamblers, gambling is less about money than it is
about recreation. It is a pastime that can be spent socializing with friends
and business colleagues. Mah jong and cards are used by many Chinese
businesspeople as social settings in which business is discussed while they
play, to relax and socialize and build up relationships. Trips to a casino
can perform a similar function. To emphasize the social nature of a
gambling session rather than its monetary aspects, the big winner of a
session often will use his winnings to buy dinner for the rest. So whereas
gambling in Western culture might be seedy and about money, in Chinese
culture it has more of a social and relationship-building role. (Mah jong
has become popular in the US, but curiously almost exclusively among
older Jewish women.)
Malaysia has dealt with the urge to gamble by licensing just one casino
and then forbidding Muslims to enter it. And so ironically, this Islamic
country is home to the biggest casino in the Asia Pacific region. But the
Malaysians are being pragmatic. Without this casino, many of the seven
million-strong Malaysian Chinese population would travel abroad to
gamble. Instead, Chinese from Singapore and Indonesia travel to Malaysia
and Malaysia is a net earner from the activity rather than a net loser like
its neighbors.
Casinos are illegal in Indonesia, but illegal ones flourish. The mayor of
Batam, an Indonesian island a short ferry ride away from Singapore, ordered
the closure of at least 46 illegal casinos in early 2003.3 Somehow though he
had given his imprimatur for one casino to operate at Batam’s Tering Bay in
cooperation with a local company, PT Dewa Menara Wisata. But the police
took a dim view of this and closed it down. It seemed only fair if they were
 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 149

no longer able to benefit from the illegal casinos. If the illegal casinos, such
as one in the Good Way Hotel in Nagoya, Batam’s main city, that had long
operated under the eye of the local police could no longer operate, then no
casinos would, as far as the police were concerned. The local administration
in Jakarta has said that it would like to allow casinos to open in the Seribu
Islands just off Jakarta but to date this has not happened.
India has around five small casinos, mostly with slot machines only. A
new license was reportedly granted for a casino in the remote state of
Sikkim in early 2004 to an ethnic Indian businessman Vivian Reddy who
operates gambling interests in South Africa. Former cricketer Kapil Dev is
Reddy’s main business partner in India.4
Nepal has four casinos, though Nepalese citizens are forbidden to enter
them. The Philippines has 12 and several slot machine arcades. They must
compete against gambling that’s associated with cock fighting which is
banned almost everywhere else except the Philippines. A Philippines
internet service provider even proposed in 2004 to introduce online betting
for cock fights.5 Japan bans almost all forms of gambling although munic-
ipal governments are lobbying for change. South Korea has 13 foreigner-
only casinos. Vietnam has one and North Korea has two. Laos has several,
Myanmar maybe seven or more and Cambodia more than a dozen. Else-
where, casinos are banned, including Taiwan, but as in Japan and Singa-
pore, the resolve against casinos is weakening.
Australia is now home to many casinos. There are casinos in Canberra,
Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Perth, Hobart, Adelaide, Launce-
ston, the Gold Coast, Townsville, Cairns, and Alice Springs. The Malaysian
businessman Jaya Tan and his brothers Kamahl and Tajuddin own this last
one, Lasseter’s Casino, through the listed Malaysian company Repco Hold-
ings.6 Each Australian casino markets itself heavily to ethnic Chinese
gamblers in Asia. Many offer high-end gamblers premium-player commis-
sions and rebates to attract their business as well as free accommodation,
flights, and meals. New Zealand too now has casinos. They too are largely
aimed at high rollers from Asia.
The stakes involved were suggested in a court case in 2003 when Eddie
Ye Li Pei, founder of the Shanghai property company Super Ocean Group,
sued Melbourne’s Crown Casino in relation to a multi-million-dollar trans-
action. Evidence presented to the court by Crown showed that Ye had a
total turnover with the casino of A$150 million (US$105 million), mostly
made up by 19 visits in 1999 when his turnover for that year was A$122
million (US$85 million). The evidence showed that the casino was
marginally ahead from Ye’s gambling, although on one visit in July 2000,
his net loss was A$5 million (US$3.5 million).7
150 Inside Knowledge
Bees and a Honey Pot: Encircling China

Gambling, as mentioned, is banned in China. So China’s neighbors have

responded by ringing the country with casinos. As China looks across its
borders with Russia, North and South Korea, Vietnam, and Myanmar, it
looks onto casinos. South Korea even has visa-free visits to the seven
casinos on its Cheju island. There’s also the Emperor Hotel and Casino in
Rajin in North Korea, close to the border with China. The casino-hotel
complex was opened in 1999 supposedly at a cost of US$180 million.
North Koreans are not allowed to enter the casino and visa restrictions
mean that its only customers are mainland Chinese. Originally, North
Korea opposed the word “casino” being in the complex’s name because it
did not want North Koreans to know what the word meant.
The casino has 52 slot machines and 16 gaming tables that offer all the
casino staples such as blackjack, baccarat, and roulette. About 50,000
mainland Chinese visit the casino each year. Many are government offi-
cials who gamble public money, several of whom have been executed
as a consequence.8
The casino was built by Hong Kong’s Emperor Group which is headed
by Albert Yeung. Yeung has had numerous run-ins with the law including
serving six months in prison in 1981 for intimidating witnesses, and facing
insider trading investigations.9 Yeung was arrested again in 2003 after a
corruption probe into the entertainment industry by Hong Kong authori-
ties, a sector in which Yeung also has interests.10
Casinos have proliferated along Myanmar’s northern borders with
China. It’s not clear what their legal status is, which is suggestive. The
ethnic Wa people, who variously have fought an insurgency war against
Yangon and are among the world’s biggest amphetamine producers, also
run casinos in Mongla, across the border from China’s Yunnan province.11
On weekends, Mongla is jammed full of Chinese tourists who visit for the
gambling and the prostitutes. Myanmar’s Minister for Hotels and Tourism,
Major General Saw Lwin, toured the hotels and casinos of Tachilek and
Mongla in January 2002. The tour received a write-up in Myanmar’s
government-sponsored newspaper.12 So, whatever their legal status, they
do appear to have official backing.
And along China’s borders with Russia there are yet more casinos. One
example of a Russian border casino town is Blagoveshchensk, a city that’s
just 500 meters from the Chinese border and home to thirteen casinos.
They are not as classy as some of their southern competitors: “Nobody
would ever mistake the Las Vegas Casino for a Las Vegas casino … The
only floor show is a very drunk prostitute trying and failing to find her way
 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 151

out the door,” wrote one underwhelmed visiting New York Times jour-
nalist.13 But Macau is the biggest draw for mainland Chinese gamblers.

Macau, Casino City

In 1961, the Portuguese administrators of Macau, a narrow peninsular and

two small islands of just 23 square kilometers south of Hong Kong,
awarded a syndicate, the Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau
(STDM), the monopoly right to operate casinos in the territory for the
next 40 years. Ho Hung-sun, better known as Stanley Ho, controlled the
syndicate and still does. It has made him and his fellow investors fabu-
lously wealthy.
A Eurasian, the octogenarian Ho is a mix of European and Chinese
influences. He is every bit as aggressive in business as the other senior
Hong Kong magnates, but he is also passionate about ballroom dancing
and tennis. Like many old-style successful Chinese businessmen, he is
polygamous. He has at least three concurrent “wives,” each with her own
mansion in Hong Kong. He fathered his seventeenth child at the age of 78.
Ho is the biggest stockholder in the STDM, with a 30% stake. There are
thirty stockholders in all. Another is his younger sister Winnie Ho Yuen-ki
who has a 7.5% stake. And their Shun Tak Holdings has another 5%.
Cheng Yu-tung, the head of the Hong Kong real estate company New
World Development, is another stockholder, with 10–12%.
But the second biggest stockholder of STDM is Henry Fok, with a 25%
stake. Fok is one of the richest men in Hong Kong and has long been one
of Beijing’s most ardent supports in the territory. He had his start in
business by organizing a smuggling ring to break the UN’s embargo on
trading with China during the Korean War.14 His smuggling on behalf of
China (to which he freely admits) earned him several lucrative contracts
and concessions with China.
The STDM partners opened their flagship Lisboa Hotel and Casino in
1970. The high-rise building is shaped like a giant birdcage, on the advice
of feng shui experts, so that money, once it has flown in, stays there.15
With legal gambling in nearby Hong Kong restricted to bets placed on
horse racing, Ho’s casino monopoly has been like a license to print money.
Up until the STDM’s casino monopoly was ended, it had eleven casinos
on Macau. In total, they had a combined 808 slot machines and 338
gaming tables. That’s an average of just 73 slots and 31 tables per casino.
So each casino was not big. About 15,000 people were employed in
Macau by Ho’s interests, or about a fifth of the territory’s labour force.16
152 Inside Knowledge
Ho’s casinos accounted for more than half of Macau’s economic activity.
Annual revenue for the privately held STDM runs to billions. And in 2003,
the STDM paid an unprecedented US$1.4 billion to the Macau govern-
ment in taxes.17 Compare this to the not quite US$800 million paid in
taxes to the state of Nevada by all the casinos in Las Vegas and the rest of
the state that same year.18
Ho’s casino monopoly ended in 2001 and three licenses were made
available. Each of the new licenses would allow the holder to operate
casinos in Macau for up to 20 years. And each will have to pay 40% of
gross revenues to the government.19 The successful tenderers were Stanley
Ho’s STDM, the Las Vegas casino giant Wynn Resorts, and a company
owned by Las Vegas Sands which operates the Venetian Casino in Las
Vegas. So Ho was back but he would now have to share the industry that
he had built.
Las Vegas Sands opened its first Macau casino in May 2004. This
US$240 million casino, with 250 gaming tables and 600 slot machines,
was the first casino to open and thousands of gamblers, mostly from main-
land China, lined up outside the building for hours before the doors
opened for the first time. When they did open, it wasn’t long before secu-
rity guards needed to shut them again to avert a stampede.20 The casino
was expected to pay for itself in its first year. The company intended to
next develop a string of hotels, shopping centers, and gambling complexes
on reclaimed land in Macau at a cost of US$1.8 billion.21 The Waldo Hotel
and Casino, with 38 tables and 100 slot machines, was opened the
following month by Hong Kong businessman Lui Che Woo who shared a
casino license with Las Vegas Sands.22 Meanwhile, the Wynn Macau
Casino was due to open at the end of 2006.
So how did Stanley Ho respond? He opened yet another casino, the
Greek Mythology Casino, the first phase of which opened in late 2004 with
228 gaming tables. The second opened a few months later, doubling the
number of tables. Melco International Development, a Ho company, also
commenced work on a massive Grand Hyatt Hotel and casino complex that
was due to open in Macau in late 2007. Ho sold a 28% stake in the project
for US$163 million to the Australian billionaire Kerry Packer who in turn
owns Melbourne’s Crown Casino and Perth’s Burswood Casino for which
he’d paid around US$1.8 billion.23 Ho and Packer also agreed to cooperate
in all future casino projects that either would undertake around Asia from
that point on. The first such cooperation was to be the joint submission of
plans for a casino and resort in Singapore.
The single event of Macau opening up its casino sector triggered a
building boom that saw the territory’s economy grow by an astounding
 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 153

15.6% in 2003 and an even more incredible 25% in 2004.24 Macau would
have at least 20 casinos by 2007.

Encircling Thailand

Casinos are illegal in Thailand as they are in China. And so Thailand must
contend with as many as thirty casinos that ring the country from just
across its borders. They have been set up for no other reason than to attract
Thais, especially ethnic Chinese Thais, to come and part with their cash.
As many as 500,000 gamblers from Thailand are attracted to these casinos
each year. The Thai government has estimated that it loses almost US$200
million a year at these casinos.25
Poipet in Cambodia is the principal gambling haven to which Thais
head. It is in western Cambodia, within easy reach of Bangkok. It has no
less than eight casinos. The first was established only in 1999 as part of
deliberate Cambodian government policy to profit by helping Thai resi-
dents get around the casino ban in their country. “Legally speaking, we
might be in Cambodia, but practically speaking, it is in fact Thailand,” one
casino manager was reported to say.26 Certainly, the casinos are not there
for Cambodians to patronize; they’re banned from them.
The casinos have names like Grand Diamond City, Golden Crown
Casino, and Star Vegas and are owned by investors from Thailand,
Cambodia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China, with management
teams drawn from as far afield as the US, the UK, Australia, and France.
Many are owned in part by politicians. The Casino Star Vegas Resort, for
example, is owned by Major General Ti Soth, the elder brother of
Cambodia’s Defence Minister Tia Banh, and Wattana Asavahem, the
leader of Thailand’s Rassadorn Party.27
The latest to open is owned by Ho Wah Genting, a listed Malaysian
company (and no relation to the Genting Group) controlled by Chen Lip
Keong. It is a big investor in Cambodia, not only in casinos. The first
phase of the casino, when complete, will include a 200-room hotel costing
US$3 million.28
The larger of the Poipet casinos have massive gambling halls with all
the kitsch decorations that might be expected. The Princess Hotel and
Casino is the largest, with 166 slot machines and 96 gaming tables. In
total, the eight casinos have 939 slot machines and 482 gaming tables.
Each also has its own in-house pawn shop where punters can pawn gold
rings, watches, necklaces, and mobile telephones so that they can keep
gambling or sometimes to raise cash for the journey home.
154 Inside Knowledge
During Chinese New Year, the Poipet casinos are lavishly decorated
with red and gold decorations and thousands of Thais of Chinese descent
flock to them. More than a thousand and as many as 5000 Thais cross the
border each day at Poipet. And they don’t need to go far to reach the
casinos, as the closest is just 20 meters from the border.
The Poipet casinos are legal but like casinos in many places attract jeal-
ousy and rivalry. Two bombs exploded at the Princess Casino and Hotel in
January 2002, wounding two security men. And the previous December,
the manager of the Grand Diamond City Casino was almost killed in a car
bomb explosion. He was killed not long after by a gunman while in a taxi
in Bangkok.29
The enormous wealth generated by the Poipet casinos was suggested in
the aftermath of the rioting that broke out in January 2003 in the Cambodian
capital Phnom Penh. Unsubstantiated reports that a Thai actress had claimed
that Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex really belonged to Thailand
inflamed existing anti-Thai sentiment among many Cambodians. Thai inter-
ests in the Cambodian capital were damaged badly, including the Royal Thai
Embassy. Thailand reacted angrily. It demanded that financial compensation
be paid by the Cambodian government for the damage to its embassy.
The Cambodian government agreed to pay the Thailand government
almost US$6 million in compensation. But it was strongly rumored that the
real sources of the compensation were Kok Ahn and Pad Supapa, two men
who own casinos in Poipet. Their interest in the matter? Thailand had closed
its border to Cambodia and this and other restrictions severely hampered the
ability of Thais to get to their Poipet casinos. The two men are said to be
extremely wealthy and are close to Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen.30
Casinos once thrived in Phnom Penh itself. More than 65 large and
small casinos are believed to have operated in the capital prior to their
closure by Hun Sen in 1999. Thereafter, casinos have only been allowed to
operate legally in areas along the Thai border, although several licenses
have been awarded since for casinos in Phnom Penh.
Ho Wah Genting was awarded a license in January 2003 to operate a
seven-storey, 197-room hotel and casino complex with at least 100 gaming
tables in Phnom Penh. A related company Ariston owns a seven-storey
floating barge that operates as the Naga Casino. It’s moored on the
Mekong River in Phnom Penh.31 Patrons are required to lodge their guns
and knives at the cloakroom before being allowed entry.
Myanmar has several casinos just inside its border with Thailand
including two at Thahtay Kyun island, Kawthaung, in the country’s far
south and just opposite the Thai town of Ranong. They are the Andaman
Club & Casino with 25 gaming tables, where patrons must exchange a
 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 155

minimum of US$6,000 for casino chips on arrival, and Treasure Island,

with 130 slot machines and 22 gaming tables.32 The Andaman Club
belongs to Thai Senator Vikrom Aisiri.33
Three more are on the Thai/Myanmar border at Tachilek in Myanmar’s
Shan state. They are the Allure Resort with 133 slot machines and 16
gaming tables, and the Regina Entertainment Resort, with 30 slot
machines and 12 gaming tables. Allure is controlled by Thailand’s Allure
Group, which is headed by the Thai businessman Upakit Pachariyangkun.
And in early 2000, the Paradise Resort opened in Tachilek. It includes a
144-room hotel and cost US$25 million to build. Thai real estate investor
Jiratha Anupavatham built it with Prasit Phothasuthon as his partner. Prasit
is a brother of the then Thai Agriculture Minister Prapat Pothasuthon.34
Another casino said to have opened along the Thai-Myanmar border is the
Riverside Club. It’s believed to be owned by Tong Jo, son of opium
warlord Khun Sa who surrendered to the Burmese government in 1996.
(Khun Sa now lives comfortably in Yangon.)35
In Laos, a new casino opened in Tha Khaek, a town on the border with
Thailand, in January 2003. It is owned by a Chinese businessman who
plans to open another at Chai Kong, also in Laos and just opposite Thai-
land. There’s also the Dansavanh Casino in Vientiane, close to the border
with Thailand, with 150 slot machines and 60 gaming tables. And the
Casino Daen Sawan Nguem Resort which counts the Laotian Deputy
Defence Minister Nakon Sinanon as a stockholder.36
Thailand’s neighbors have done much to subvert the Thai govern-
ment’s ban on casinos. The casino business around Thailand is such big
business that there’s even a casino management company based in
Bangkok: the PCM Group, owned and managed by several Western expa-
triates. The Allure Resort and Treasure Island casinos in Myanmar and
the Tropicana Resort casino in Poipet are among the casinos that it helped
to set up and manage.
By 2004, the Thai government was on the verge of bowing to the
inevitable. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra indicated that his govern-
ment would license casinos in Thailand. Why should Thailand continue to
lose this business to its neighbors? It’s a step that the Malaysian govern-
ment took decades ago.

A Visit to the Genting Highlands, the Biggest of them All

Lim Goh Tong is Malaysia’s richest man and a US dollar billionaire in

clear and net terms. To most Malaysian, he is known as “Uncle Lim.” He
156 Inside Knowledge
was born in 1917 in China’s Fujian province and remains very much of the
old school. He is most fluent in his native Hokkien, speaks some Malay
and no English.
In 1965, Lim Goh Tong and Mohd Noah bin Omar, a Malay partner, set
up a private company called Genting Highlands. (Mohd Noah bin Omar
would become father-in-law of two of Malaysia’s prime ministers.)
Between the years 1965 and 1970, they made applications to the Pahang
and Selangor governments for 4940 hectares and 1110 hectares of freehold
land respectively. Eventually, the applications were granted, so now Lim
controls a huge swathe of lands in the highlands. Back then it was nothing
but mountainous jungle. Now, different Genting company developments
dot the area, with all the roads and other infrastructure having been paid
for by Genting, largely out of casino profits.
“Lim’s name has a lot of wood in it,” a Chinese friend told me. “That is
why he made his fortune in the jungle. All that wood. That’s what we
Chinese say.” Indeed, Lim’s name in Chinese does comprise several char-
acters that include the symbol for wood or tree (the symbol actually looks
like a tree). His surname includes a double of the symbol, meaning forest.
Lim was single-minded in his determination to create Genting. He has
never shied away from spending what was required. And he always knew
that the development would live or die on the basis of politics and political
whim. Successive prime ministers protected Lim and his casino. Undoubt-
edly Lim must be one of the country’s most important political donors.
Long-lived monopoly rights to a large casino do not come free of charge.
Genting is also believed to pay more than a 20% gaming tax on top of the
usual corporate taxes.
Genting is in the highlands above Kuala Lumpur about 50 kilometers
from the city. The highlands are indeed high and noticeably cooler. The
resort is often bathed in cloud and on the occasion of my visit, clouds actu-
ally visibly passed right through the open-sided, high-rise car parking
facility, providing an unusual effect.
The road to Genting is steep and infamous for the number of deaths that
occur along it. Accordingly, the Lim family has spent a lot of money to
widen it to try to make it safer. Two lanes now run in each direction along
most of the ascent. They have also spent heavily on landscaping the verges
and the medium strips, landscaping that is well maintained. The road
lighting on the way up to the casino is solar powered. It’s an impressive
ascent. It’s also one that is always busy. Genting receives more than 15
million visitors each year.
Along the way, the road passes a terraced section of hillside that looks
out across a valley. It too has excellent landscaping with well-trimmed
 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 157

grass and shrubs. To the casual observer a lot of trouble has gone into this
site but to no obvious purpose. But this, I was told, will be the final resting
place for Lim Goh Tong, an exclusive, private cemetery with just one
occupant. The site’s feng shui is said to be excellent and is likened to a
large, comfortable chair with excellent panoramic views.
Further along is the Chin Swee Temple. Lim built it as a religious haven
for gamblers who need to call on something other than mere luck,
although many suspect that it works more on his behalf.
I had expected something seedy, smoky, and gaudy prior to my visit,
perhaps something like the old STDM casinos of Macau. I was wrong. The
resort is world class. And it is huge. And that goes for the gaming part
especially, which is divided into the Casino de Genting where most of the
gaming tables are and Starworld, which is where most of the slot machines
are. The casino is easily the biggest in Asia. There are 3140 slot machines
and 426 gaming tables that offer baccarat, blackjack, tai sai, and the like.
Australia’s two biggest casinos, Crown Casino in Melbourne and Star
City in Sydney, are considered large by world standards. But even they
only have 2500 slot machines and 350 tables, and 1500 slot machines and
200 tables, respectively. The Casino Lisboa, long Macau’s flagship casino,
has just 107 slot machines and 146 gaming tables. In actual fact, Genting
is bigger than all the casinos in Macau combined. It is a monster. But an
elegant one.
The interior design is very opulent, surprisingly so. Millions have been
spent on luxurious furnishings. A walkway between two large gambling
areas comprises an extravagant stained and frosted glass ceiling similar to
that in the casino at Monte Carlo. Painted, wooden carousel horses are
placed here and there to further lend a continental feel. Everywhere secu-
rity camera bubbles dot the ceiling and tuxedoed attendants carefully
watch the gaming tables and the patrons. There are even large no smoking
areas (this is Asia, remember). Clearly, the Genting Casino is one well-run,
highly professional operation.
Mostly, the patrons are Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese. Indonesian
Chinese also come but not in the numbers that might be expected. The
crowd is surprisingly young too. Malays are not allowed to enter the
gaming halls.
But Genting is more than a casino. The 40-page guide available for visi-
tors to the complex has just one page devoted to the development’s casino
operations. All the rest is about its restaurants, shopping facilities, and
theme park attractions. While the Chinese are all in the casino, outside in
the shopping arcades and fast-food restaurants, most of the patrons are
Malay. And that is important. The only reason for Genting to exist is the
158 Inside Knowledge
casino. But Lim is trying to do as much as possible in this predominantly
Muslim country to have his complex thought of as anything but a
gambling one.
Five hotels circle the complex. The theme park is large and has over 40
rides. There’s a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! gallery, a shopping plaza with
more than 70 outlets and over 80 outlets that sell food in one form another
including Italian and Chinese restaurants. There are two cineplexes, a 28-
lane bowling alley, a massive concert hall, a snow house “with real snow
falling all around you” and a cable car service. The coffeeshops and other
stores and restaurants all help to give Genting the feel of an alpine village.
Indeed, the hills drop away steeply from the complex and tree ferns tower
through swirling mist.
Genting is around 40 years old but it keeps getting bigger and better.
There is no sign that its popularity is abating. In 2002, then Prime Minister
Mahathir – who cannot set foot inside the actual casino by law as he is a
Malay – formally opened the first 3300-room stage of what is claimed to
be the world’s biggest hotel, the First World Hotel. When completed, the
hotel will have 6300 rooms. World-class golfing facilities have been devel-
oped at the nearby Awana Genting. A new resort village called Gohtong
Jaya has also been developed.
Still there remains considerable political risk, particularly should the
Pahang state government fall to the Islamic opposition party PAS. In this
event the federal government probably would use its powers to protect
Genting. Nonetheless, Genting has sought to diversify. It has power gener-
ation interests, plantations, paper mills, oil and gas exploration interests,
and has also developed the highly profitable Star Cruises, the world’s fourth
largest cruise line. Its ships are luxurious and, like the Genting resort,
extremely well maintained. They also have casino facilities which can
operate in international waters without political interference. Genting also
controls Norway’s NCL Holdings, another cruise operator. Genting did
have management contracts and equity interests in the 1990s in four
casinos: Burswood Casino in Perth, Adelaide Casino, Lucayan Beach in the
Bahamas, and Subic Bay Casino in the Philippines but it disposed of these
to concentrate on building up Star Cruises.37
Lim’s son Lim Kok Thay has also entered into several deals in the US
whereby they lend tens of millions of dollars to Indian tribes so that they
can establish casinos on reservation land. To date more than US$200
million is believed to have been lent by the Lims for this purpose.
And in 2004, Genting increased its presence in the UK casino industry
ahead of expected liberalization that would allow big, American-style
casinos to operate in London and the rest of the country instead of the
 Asia’s Great Casino Invasion 159

existing casinos that are modeled more on gentleman’s clubs with limited
gambling facilities. There were 135 such casinos at the start of 2005.
Genting raised its equity in London Clubs International, the biggest casino
operator in London which owns well-known London casinos Les Ambas-
sadeurs and 50 St James, to more than 15%.38 Later that year, Genting
acquired a 10% stake in London Clubs’ main competitors and the biggest
casino operator in the UK, Stanley Leisure. Genting had earlier bought
London’s Maxims Casino for £10.5 million and part of the deal with
Stanley involved it acquiring a 50% stake in Maxims from Genting.39
Stanley and Genting were likely to jointly bid for new casino licenses that
the UK government was intending to grant.
Lim stepped down as Genting’s chairman at the start of 2004. He was
by then an old man. An autobiography was published that same year.
“Medical Crises in My Life” is the title of one chapter. Here’s an excerpt:

In late November 2001, I started to have constipation problems. One Saturday

night, I suddenly developed severe abdominal pains and was rushed to Subang
Jaya Medical Centre. On admission, I was found to be mentally confused besides
being in severe pain.40

Let that serve as a warning to other aging billionaires not to self-publish auto-
biographies in a language that they can’t read and thus edit for discretion.
 Chapter
14 Diamonds, Jains,
and Jews

Eight out of every ten diamonds sold in the world today have been handled
by Indian Jains. Jain family members have fanned out across the world to
corner diamond processing and handling, be it in the traditional diamond
capitals of Antwerp, London, New York, Tel Aviv, and now, of course, in
India. Their story is remarkable.
Jainism is a subsect of Hinduism but it is more like Buddhism, with its
emphasis on not harming living creatures and non-violence. It emerged in
India in the sixth century. At least seven million Jains live in India, largely
in Mumbai, Bangalore, Gujarat, Punjab, and Delhi.
The preference to avoid killing and the accordance of all living things
equal status means that orthodox Jains can be seen in Indian streets gently
sweeping the path before them lest they inadvertently tread on an insect as
they proceed. It’s an outlook that many carry into business.
Jain ethical codes mean that the close dealings with government offi-
cials and the corruption and questionable practices that go with it tend to
be avoided. But such dealings are necessary to be an industrialist in India.
It means that Jainism does not sit well with going into industry. And so
although Jains are famous in India as canny businessmen, typically they
are traders rather than industrialists.
The desire to avoid killing means that strict Jains, along with orthodox
Jews, are among the world’s fussiest eaters.
The kashrut or dietary laws of the Jews are set out in the Book of
Leviticus (11:2–46) and Deuteronomy (14:3–21) in the Bible and also in
the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish civil and religious law.1
Animals that both chew the cud (meaning herbivores) and have cloven

160
 Diamonds,Jains, and Jews 161

hooves (which means that they cannot hold prey and thus be carnivores)
are considered clean and are permitted. All others, such as pigs, rabbits,
horses, and beasts of prey are unclean and prohibited. All birds of prey and
certain birds such as owls, storks, and ostriches are forbidden. So too are
animals that have died of natural causes. Game that has been hunted and
killed by gunshot is also forbidden because of the obligation of ritual
slaughter. When it comes to fish, only those that have both scales and fins
can be eaten. So all shellfish, octopuses, stingrays, sea urchins, and eels
are forbidden. So too are all reptiles and insects. Blood is absolutely
forbidden. Milk cannot be consumed with or after meat – in Eastern
Europe the local custom is six hours. Among Dutch Jews, the prohibition
is just one hour.
Most Jewish communities have a Jewish bakery that specializes in
producing matzo bread, the crisp bread that when crumbled is made into
matzo balls for chicken soup. It’s also the bread that’s used for Passover
because it is unleavened (that is, yeast is not used in the baking process.) A
rabbi blesses the flour that is used. The growing, harvesting, milling, and
storing of the wheat and flour are all supervised to ensure that there is no
contamination with any moisture that might cause fermentation. When it
comes to making the bread itself, no more than 18 minutes must elapse
from the time that the ingredients are mixed until the commencement of
baking according to Jewish law, lest fermentation occur.
These are the basics for the preparation of food that is kosher. There are
many more complexities, owing in part to differing local interpretations
but this should suffice to give an idea of the food constraints one must
accept if one is to be an observant Jew.
Now here are the dietary rules of the Jains: devout Jains are extreme
vegetarians. Meat and fish are avoided but so too are many other foods.
There are 22 classes of prohibited items. Among them are vegetables that
grow underground such as carrots, potatoes, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and
onions. The reason being that insects might be harmed during cultivation
and harvesting. Orthodox Jains also avoid pulses that produce no oil such
as chickpeas, pickles more than a few days old and honey because its
extraction is thought to harm bees. Fruits and vegetables that contain a lot
of seeds, such as pomegranates, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, okra, and
kiwi fruits also are prohibited. Butter, eggs, ice, hail stones, eggplant
(aubergine), gram flour, mushrooms, and sprouted pulses are prohibited. A
whole range of fruit, vegetables and grains that are specific to India are on
the prohibited list as well. Many Jains also prefer not to consume alcohol.
And all plant products must be thoroughly washed because the consump-
tion of soil is prohibited.
162 Inside Knowledge
Some Jains do not eat after dark and drink only filtered water lest they
inadvertently consume insects and other small animals. In some respects
there is an analogy here with a controversy that arose in 2004 in relation to
New York tap water and whether it could properly be considered kosher.
Ordinarily water is kosher. But several rabbis in New York discovered that
harmless, microscopic creatures called copepods were finding their way
into the city’s water supply. Although not visible to the naked eye, cope-
pods are crustaceans and crustaceans are forbidden by Jewish dietary laws.2
But probably it is easier to be an observant Jew than it is to be an obser-
vant Jain, at least as far as food is concerned. But such rules are exclu-
sionary and help to keep small communities intact. And that is useful if
business is to proceed along ethnic lines and be contained within dispersed
ethnic networks.
In India, some young Jain boys become novice Jain monks. They are
the munis. Ideally they do not have fixed places of abode but sleep in Jain
temples. They rely on charity for their food and go from Jain house to
house in search of food donations. Jain houses typically have a Jain
emblem, tile, or even a sticker at their entrance so that other Jains can
identify it as belonging to fellow Jains. (Many Jews similarly have their
mezuzah at the entrances of their houses or shops, not for identification but
as a blessing for the occupants of the house. The mezuzah is a cylinder
that’s fastened to the right-hand doorpost as one enters. Inside is a parch-
ment with Deuteronomy (6:4-9) and (11:13-21) lettered on one side and
the word Shaddai (Almighty) on the other.)
I’ve included all this detail because it’s fascinating in its own right. But
also because Jews (or at least Hassidic Jews) and Jains have something
else in common: diamonds.
The world diamond distribution and processing trade has been the
preserve of a small, powerful group of Hassidic Jews until recently. (The
giant De Beers cartel is itself controlled by the Jewish Oppenheimer
family.) It’s a trade that’s based on trust as any trade in small, high-value
consignments must be, particularly if it’s across international borders.
Hence, it’s a business for which families and small, cohesive ethnic groups
are well suited.
The main centers for the trade were Antwerp, London, and Israel. In
London, it centers on the old Huguenot stronghold of Clerkenwell, where
Hassidic Jewish businessmen can still be seen rushing around the streets
with their dark hats and mobile telephones.
But gradually the Hassidic Jews are being squeezed out by Jain fami-
lies. This has gone hand in hand with India’s rise as the world’s most
important diamond processing country.
 Diamonds,Jains, and Jews 163

The success of the Jains in outcompeting the Hassidim has been such
that they now dominate the trade even in Tel Aviv. Rough gems are
imported by Jain-owned firms in Mumbai from Jain dealers in Antwerp,
London, New York, and Tel Aviv from where they are taken to Jain-owned
cutting and polishing factories in Gujarat. From there they are sent back to
Mumbai and re-exported to gem centers around the world. Bangkok too is
becoming more prominent in the diamond cutting and polishing trade,
with the small Jain community there handling much of the business.
India earned US$7.78 billion in 2001 from the export of gems and
jewelry, which accounted for 17.6% of all exports. About 80% of the
exports were diamonds. Gold jewelry accounted for 15% and the rest was
made up of colored stones, silver jewelry, and costume jewelry. Diamond
exports amounted to 33.12 million carats, representing 80% of the world
diamond trade by volume but 55% by value.3
About 80% of India’s diamond processing work is done in the northern
Indian state of Gujarat and more than half of it in and around the city of
Surat. Nearby Ahmedabad, a noisy and chaotic city that is famous for its
dust, is also an important processing center.
Surat has a population of around three million. And today it’s booming,
thanks in large part to the newly emerged diamond trade. Around 10,000
diamond processing units are believed to operate in the city. Together they
notched up exports of US$7.7 billion in 2002.4 Overall, around 900,000
people are believed to work as basic diamond polishers in India.5
The processing is contracted out to thousands of small family-owned
workshops. Labour costs are low and many gem-quality diamonds are cut
and polished for as little as a dollar a piece. The contractors almost invari-
ably are Jain diamond merchants.
Antwerp has long been the center for cutting and polishing larger
diamonds. The city’s diamond district lies just beyond Central Station. It
begins on Pelikaanstraat and comprises about a square kilometer inhabited
by more than 1500 diamond companies. More than half the world diamonds
pass through these few blocks of Antwerp. The area is purely functional.
Security is tight, shutters are kept down, and by and large there’s little to see.
It is a curious area inhabited largely by bearded Orthodox Jews and Indian
Jains. Indeed, many of Antwerp’s 18,000 Jews work here, but there are also
Lebanese and Armenians. But even here the Jains are ascendant.
Many of the overseas Jains involved in the diamond trade are from
Palanpur, a town on the Gujarat-Rajastan border. With such a specific
ancestry, many share the similar surname of Mehta, and so it is common
today to find diamond traders from London to Israel with the surname
of Mehta.
164 Inside Knowledge
Typically, Jain diamond families place a member in say, Tel Aviv, one in
Antwerp, maybe another in London and one in Mumbai to manage family-
owned companies in each location. These then cover each major segment
of the international diamond market. The family behind Arjav Diamonds,
a De Beers’ “sightholder” (one of approximately 120 exclusive De Beers’
contractors) is a case in point. Ashit Mehta is the principal at the Arjav
Diamonds office in Antwerp. Family members Anuj and Ashay are based
at the company’s offices in Mumbai and another family member heads up
Arjav International in Tel Aviv.

Money from myths

The De Beers family of South Africa has dominated the world diamond
market for almost a century.The family has grown immensely rich by monop-
olizing the world’s rough diamond supply, building up huge stockpiles of
diamonds and erroneously letting consumers think that diamonds are rare. It
supports this falsehood with massive advertising campaigns to market
diamonds as rare, an investment, and as luxury goods. It spent US$180 million
on advertising in 2003. Its clients spent a further US$270 million.6

The selling of diamonds is unique in the world. De Beers’ outrageous prac-

tices wouldn’t be tolerated in any other industry. It did, however, settle
price-fixing charges in the US in 2004 in respect of industrial-quality
diamonds by paying a relatively modest US$10 million fine (the De Beers
family is thought to be worth around US$4.5 billion). De Beers executives
can now enter the US without fear of arrest, something that they’d been
unable to do for almost a decade.

De Beers has no interest in processing stones. It directly mines diamonds

and buys up others that are not produced from its mines and then sells
them in rough form in lots to invited clients or sightholders. The
sightholders do not have an opportunity to sort through the rough
diamonds on offer. They are simply offered presorted lots on a take-it-or-
leave-it basis. Sales occur ten times a year in London after which
sightholders have the diamonds in their lots cut and polished before selling
them on.
 Diamonds,Jains, and Jews 165

New mining entrants have sought to challenge De Beers dominance of the

industry but they too have an interest in artificially maintaining world
diamond prices and so now, De Beers effectively heads an informal cartel
rather than a monopoly.

The Gembel Group is one of Belgium’s more prominent diamond

cutters and exporters. Based in Antwerp, it was founded in 1956 by
Kirtilal Manilal Mehta, an Indian-born Jain. He claims to have helped
1800 other Jains set up their own diamond businesses in Antwerp. Gembel
now has a network of offices in Antwerp, New York, Tel Aviv, and
Mumbai. Each is managed by a Mehta family member.
B. Vijaykumar & Co is another Jain-owned diamond firm. It is India’s
largest importer of rough diamonds and was founded by the Jain busi-
nessman Vijay Shah. The company has cutting and polishing factories in
Bangkok, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Surat, and Palanpur, and collec-
tively they employ 22,000 people.
An Indian Jain-controlled company, Inter Diam, acquired control of the
company that runs one of Singapore’s better known jewelry stores,
Mondial Jewellers, located in the giant Ngee Ann City complex.7 Inter
Diam is linked to Asian Star, a De Beer’s sightholder that is controlled by
the India-based Jain Shah and Kothari families.

Why the Jains and Why Now?

A number of factors have contributed to the rise of the Jains in the world
diamond industry. In 1947 after India’s independence from Britain,
bizarrely the Indian government banned the import of rough and polished
diamonds into the country. Only in 1962 did the government decide to re-
allow the import of rough diamonds. And so India’s diamond processing
industry was reborn. Effectively, the import prohibition had handed the
diamond processing business to the Hassidic Jews.
Another, more recent factor, was the opening of the massive Argyle
diamond mine in the Australian state of Western Australia. Rio Tinto’s
Argyle diamond mine has revolutionized the world diamond market. The
main processing plant at Argyle was commissioned only in 1985 and yet
today the mine accounts for around 35% of annual world diamond produc-
166 Inside Knowledge
tion. It is also the world’s single biggest producer, with 40 million carats
annually compared with De Beer’s 31 million carats. But Argyle diamonds
typically are small and so the opening up of this mine has flooded the
world market with small diamonds.
Israel, Antwerp, and London specialize in cutting larger diamonds.
India’s comparative advantage is in cutting labour-intensive, small
diamonds. And so Argyle has helped India and the Jains in their rise to
prominence in the world diamond industry
 Chapter From Starbucks
to Coffee Bean:

15 Asia’s Coffee
Shop Revolution

I was tired. I was thirsty. And more than anything I was jet lagged. I was in
Beijing’s Forbidden City, the very cradle of Chinese culture, the home to
generations of China’s emperors, their concubines, and their eunuchs. And
then I saw it, next to the Jing Yun Men (the Gate of Great Fortune), right in
the heart of the Forbidden City. It was discreet. It was small. But it was
there. It was Starbucks.
“Many foreigners are not happy when they see this here,” a young
Chinese said to me. But I was too jet lagged to be purist. I had a café
Americano with three shots and imagined the Son of Heaven sitting in
the corner doing the same. Hadn’t Pu Yi, the last emperor, caused howls
of outrage among his eunuchs when he had a telephone installed in the
Forbidden City in the 1920s? Perhaps the problem is not so much that
there is a coffee shop in the heart of the Forbidden City, but that it
is American.
Revolutions used to be planned in the coffee shops of Europe. But in
Asia, it is the coffee shops themselves that are the revolution. Tea is the
traditional beverage of Northeast Asia and India. And yet it is coffee
shops that have marched into Asia creating huge demand where before
there was none.
Coffee has long been consumed in Southeast Asia. Kopi tubruk remains
popular among ordinary Indonesians. It is gritty, served hot in a glass and
with several spoonfuls of sugar. The grains are not filtered off but left in
the glass where they sink to the bottom.
Traditionally, coffee beans in Malaysia, and especially Penang, were
not roasted and blended but fried with butter and sugar. The beans were

167
168 Inside Knowledge
then powdered and put into a muslin strainer. This was then placed over
an enamel mug and hot water was passed through it. The resulting
beverage was then sweetened with sugar and condensed milk and served
hot or over ice.
The new-style coffee shops are not the open-air kopi tiam of old with
marble-top tables and Brentwood chairs but Western-style coffee shops
that cater to young, affluent Asians. American chains are making the
greatest inroads but they’re not having it all their own way. Many locally
owned chains also have gone into business.
Coffee, which is the world’s second most widely traded commodity
after oil, is also grown increasingly in Asia. It is the main commercial crop
of East Timor. It’s grown in Indonesia and Thailand too. And Vietnam has
planted millions of hectares of coffee trees in only a short time, such that
its annual production of robusta beans rose from 85,300 tonnes in 1990 to
965,200 in 2000. It is now the world’s second largest producer.1

The Starbucks Revolution

Starbucks has been the most aggressive among the new entrants to Asia. The
Seattle-based company is the world’s largest coffee chain. By 2005, it had
more than 6100 outlets in the US and almost 8500 worldwide.
Its overseas expansion has been phenomenal, particularly as Starbucks,
like most of its imitators, spends next to nothing on advertising. Star-
bucks might be the McDonald’s of coffee but when it comes to adver-
tising and marketing expenses the two could not be more different.
Instead, its stores are its advertising. Enormous research goes into deter-
mining the location of each store. They must be visible and they must be
accessible to the right demographic. Emphasis is also put on lifestyle. The
stores are not so much a place to buy coffee as a good place to sit, meet
friends, and generally hang out. The price of a coffee is effectively the
price to rent a table.
Starbucks’ first overseas outlet opened in Tokyo in 1996. Its expansion
since has been phenomenal. By 2005 there were 1169 Starbucks stores in
East Asia, 544 of these were in Japan. Sazaby is its local partner in Japan.
Sazaby too is a retailer. Its more than 180 stores in Japan sell a wide range
of products that it manufactures, including furniture, interior decorations,
clothing, and handbags. The licensing agreement with Sazaby became the
prototype for its expansion elsewhere in the region: choose a good local
concessionaire, license them, and let them do the rest.
But Starbucks has struggled to be profitable in Japan not so much
 From Starbucks to Coffee Bean:Asia’s Coffee Shop Revolution 169

because it’s not popular – it is – but because of high costs. Almost half its
products are imported and attract high trade tariffs. Also it faces signifi-
cant competition from Japan’s biggest coffee shop chain, Dotours, which
has around 2000 outlets. Nonetheless, Starbucks’ Japanese stores are its
busiest in the world and have average revenues of 1.5 times those of its
US stores.2
Taiwan was next. Starbucks opened 138 stores in Taiwan between 1998
and 2005 in conjunction with Uni-President Enterprises, its local partner.
The first Starbucks opened in Shanghai in May 2000, the first of 50
stores planned in partnership with Uni-President Enterprises.3 Renmin
Square was the site for big protests in 1989 echoing those in Tiananmen
Square in Beijing. Today, the square is lavishly landscaped and there’s a
Starbucks in one corner. Another Starbucks is at an equally strategic spot in
the city, on the Pudong waterfront where it’s visible from almost anywhere
along the Bund on the opposite side of the Huangpu river.
In southern China, more Starbucks stores were planned, this time in
conjunction with its 50:50 partner, Maxim’s, a Hong Kong cake shop
company that’s 50% owned by Dairy Farm International. By 2005, 111
Starbucks stores had opened across mainland China (including 44 in Beijing
and 43 in Shanghai) plus another 34 in Hong Kong and one in Macau.
One hitch for Starbucks in China came when a local entrepreneur regis-
tered the Chinese name for Starbucks, Xing Ba Ke, before the authentic
Starbucks could. At least two copycat stores under the name of Shanghai
Starbucks Coffee House opened. Thus the genuine Starbucks was able
only to trade using its name in English unless it bought the rights to the
Chinese name.4
Starbucks opened in South Korea in May 2000. Its partner in South
Korea is the local Shinsege Group and together they planned to open at
least 45 stores there in the following five years. But they did far better than
that. By 2005, 106 Starbucks stores had opened in South Korea. And in
2002, it opened its first store in Indonesia with local partner PT Mitra
Adiperkasa, a part of the Gajah Tunggal Group. By 2005 there were 27
Starbucks stores in Indonesia.
By 2005, few Asian countries had not been touched by Starbucks. India
was the most notable exception. But elsewhere Starbucks had 50 outlets in
Thailand, 53 in Malaysia, 71 in the Philippines, and 34 in Singapore.
Again local partners were used to facilitate the roll-out. The diversified
Berjaya Group controlled by local entrepreneur Vincent Tan is its
Malaysian partner. And in Singapore, its partner initially was Bonstar, a
subsidiary of Bonvests Holdings, the owner of the local Burger King fran-
chise and controlled by local businessman Henry Ngo. But in mid-2004
170 Inside Knowledge
Bonvests sold the Singapore franchise back to the international chain for
around US$8.5 million. Bonvests said that despite Starbucks’ ubiquitous
presence in Singapore locally the chain was not profitable.5 And that
apparently is a common experience. Starbucks insists that its concession-
aires (it insists that is doesn’t have franchisees) source branded ingredients
from the head office in the US even though they might be sourced more
cheaply locally.
The head of Starbucks in Thailand was reported to say in mid-2004 that
Starbucks in Thailand sells on average 44,000 cups of beverages each
day.6 With 50 outlets, that’s less than 900 a day per outlet. As ubiquitous as
Starbucks is becoming in Bangkok too, it is unlikely that the local conces-
sion holder is making much or even any profit on sales like that.
Starbucks’ chairman Howard Schultz, while on a visit to Taiwan, said
that eventually there could be as many as 6000 Starbucks’ outlets in Asia.7
It’s a phenomenal number for a region that traditionally largely drinks tea
but then McDonald’s had around 3890 restaurants in Japan alone by the
end of 2002 and another 540 in China and hamburgers are anything but a
traditional Asian dish. But what’s perhaps more astonishing is that so
many potential concessionaires are willing to line up to carry the Star-
bucks brand forward when there’s little evidence that there’s much profit
in doing so, at least not for the concession holders.

And the Rest

Starbucks is hardly alone in going into Asia. California-based Gloria Jeans

Coffees, with almost 300 outlets worldwide, had begun its long march into
Asia too. By 2005 it had 44 stores in East Asia in Japan, South Korea,
Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Agreements signed in
2002 with TT Resources of Malaysia, its master franchisee in the region,
required that at least 45 outlets be opened in Malaysia, Singapore, and
Brunei by 2007 and another 25 in Thailand.8
Another prominent chain in Asia is Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Victor
Sassoon, a Singaporean of Iraqi Jewish descent, acquired the chain’s fran-
chise for Asia (other than Japan) in 1996. He and his US-based brother
Sunny Sassoon bought the California-based parent company with an Amer-
ican partner two years later. It gave them the global franchise for Coffee
Bean which by 2005 encompassed around 250 stores worldwide including
38 Coffee Bean outlets in Singapore, 41 in Malaysia, 1 in Brunei, 7 in
Indonesia, 30 in South Korea, and 4 in the Philippines. Two had opened in
Shanghai, one in the Super Brands Mall in Shanghai’s Pudong, a massive
 From Starbucks to Coffee Bean:Asia’s Coffee Shop Revolution 171

US$450 million shopping complex developed by the Charoen Pokphand

Group of Thailand. Additional Coffee Beans are in Israel and the United
Arab Emirates. To further underscore the family’s Jewish origins, the
Sassoons made the entire line of beverages and food at all 60 Coffee Bean
outlets in Los Angeles kosher. All beverage products (teas, coffees,
powders, and syrups) are made under the supervision of Kosher Supervi-
sion of America. And all baked goods are produced under the eye of Rabbi
Moshe Benzaquen’s Kosher L.A.9
Victor Sassoon credits the American singer Paula Abdul with the idea to
buy Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. While he stood in a queue at an outlet in Los
Angeles in 1995, who should wave to him from down the line but the
singer. (Sassoon had been a rock promoter in Singapore and so is
acquainted with many well-known rock artists.) As Sassoon told a jour-
nalist in 1999, “We chatted and she said, ‘This is the best coffee in the
world. You gotta get this company.’”10 He approached the owners for the
franchise for Southeast Asia. Finally they agreed. And when they decided
to retire, it was to Sassoon that they offered to sell their company.
Pizza Hut in Singapore announced in 2003 that it would transform its
outlets so that they could operate as up-market coffee shops between the
hours of 2.30pm and 5.30pm when the restaurants were not busy selling
pizzas. It figured that the transformation costs would be minimal but it
would be a way of utilizing retail space that is otherwise idle for a large
part of the day, and capture its share of the coffee boom.11
Australia’s Dome Cafés is another outside entrant. The Perth-based
chain has set up in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore via local partners.
The Malaysian partner is the Melium Group. Operated by local business-
woman Farah Khasn, Melium also has the Dome franchises for Dubai and
the Philippines. In Malaysia, Melium varied the Dome concept from
Australia where it is more a coffee shop to be more of a café. And so the
Malaysian version has a greater emphasis on quick bistro-style food with
an Asian fusion touch, and table service. It did this to avoid competition
from Malaysia’s increasingly congested coffee shop sector. According to
Melium’s CEO Richard Curtis, food accounts for 60% of Dome’s revenues
in Malaysia.
Other outside chains to set up in Asia are San Francisco-based Spinelli
Coffee, with 17 outlets in Singapore by 2005, and Delifrance. The latter
belongs to Singapore-based Delifrance Asia, a unit of Prudential Asset
Management Asia. It sells coffee and bakery goods under license from the
French-based Grand Moulins de Paris Group. It had more than 170 outlets
by 2005 in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Sri Lanka, the Philip-
pines, China, and Hong Kong and had plans for many more.12
172 Inside Knowledge
Coffee-cat

But local brands have appeared too. Singapore is home to the local
Burke’s Coffee chain, and to Coffee Club, a chain of almost twenty outlets
in Singapore with others in Malaysia, China, and Indonesia. It is a
subsidiary of a Hong Kong arm of Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation, which
bought it in early 2003 after its parent company, coffee and spice trader
Hiang Kie defaulted on its loans.13 Hiang Kie’s problems were not due to
Coffee Club. That was the only profitable asset that it owned. Also, there’s
tcc (the coffee connoisseur). Only founded in mid-2003 in Singapore, by
2005 it had 12 branches and plans to expand offshore.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was concerned
by the number of foreign coffee shops that had opened in Malaysia and so
suggested to Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, a local businessman with whom
the former prime minister enjoys close relations, that he consider opening
a genuinely Malaysian chain. And so Shalala Coffee was created. The first
Shalala outlet opened on the North-South Expressway, the highway that
runs the length of peninsular Malaysia. Its coffee is priced at less than
foreign-owned competitors, herbal tonics are available that can be mixed
with the coffee, and local pastries and desserts are available. SMTC
Shalala, the owning company, announced at the end of 2004 that it
intended to open twenty outlets over the next three years, up from the
current six.14 It intended to concentrate on opening in or near Malaysian
universities and along busy highways.
Malaysia also has its locally owned but American flavor San Francisco
Coffee. It had 26 outlets mostly in Malaysia by 2005. It is owned by a
company called Coffee Partners, which is controlled by Veiven Goon,
Zuraidah Binti Atan, and Robert Boxwell.
Thailand has given rise to at least two locally owned coffee chains:
Coffee World and Black Canyon. By 2005, Black Canyon had around
100 outlets in Thailand, three in Malaysia, one in Singapore and one in
Indonesia. Coffee World had 37 outlets in Thailand and plans to open in
India (where it owns the large Pizza Corner chain), Cambodia, China,
and Brunei.
Hong Kong has its Pacific Coffee chain. It had 39 outlets in Hong Kong
by 2005 and three in Singapore.
Taiwan has two large coffee chains: SPR Coffee and Dante Coffee.
Both had established outlets in mainland China by 2004. SPR Coffee,
owned by Taiwan-based businessman Lee Chien-li, had opened 87 outlets
in China. Dante was moving more cautiously. It had opened just two.15
The revolution has even swept into Vietnam. Trung Nguyen, a chain
 From Starbucks to Coffee Bean:Asia’s Coffee Shop Revolution 173

founded by the local entrepreneur Dang Le Nguyen Vu, commenced oper-

ations in 1998. Within four years it had around 420 franchised cafés
around Vietnam.16 Two outlets were opened in Singapore in 2003 and
there are outlets in Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan.
India perhaps is one of the toughest markets for coffee. Indians drink
tea. Many have never tasted coffee. Indeed coffee consumption is around
55 grams of coffee per person per year. (It’s even lower in China, around
one gram.) It’s a tiny amount. Nonetheless, a home-grown up-market
coffee chain has appeared in the centers and affluent suburbs of India’s
bigger cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai. Barista Coffee was founded
by Indian entrepreneur Amit Judge.
The key is to sell a lifestyle rather than cups of coffee, particular in a
country where tea is the national beverage. And so Barista Coffee outlets,
with their bright orange signage, pastel decor, and full-wall, plate-glass
fronts, are made for hanging out in. They are venues in which young
affluent Indians can socialize, and, while there, drink coffee. It’s been the
modus operandi of new-wave coffee shops across Asia.
So how is Barista doing? The signals are mixed. A café Americano at
Barista Coffee costs around 40 rupees (about US$0.90). But on every
other street corner in India, a glass of chai, sugared, spicy, milky tea,
costs around 2 rupees (about US$0.04). But by 2005, 130 Barista
branches had opened in India, several in Sri Lanka, and one in Dubai, and
this when the first Barista store opened only in 2001, in New Delhi. Later
that year, Tata Coffee, a part of India’s biggest conglomerate, the Tata
Group, paid around US$5 million for a 34% stake in the company.17 But
then in late 2004, a majority in Barista including the entire Tata stake was
acquired by the Sterling Group, controlled by non-resident Indian busi-
nessman C. Sivasankaran.18 At the time, Barista was not intending to
open new stores but rather to consolidate existing ones. That seems
consistent with anecdotal evidence: Barista outlets in India often have
few or no customers, whereas, say, Starbucks outlets in China often are
relatively busy.

How do you take it?

What is the most popular way to drink coffee in Asia? In Southeast Asia, at
least, it is not a café Americano, a latte or a short macchiato, but ice-
blended coffee – mixtures of coffee, ice, chocolate or vanilla and milk
blended together and then topped with whipped cream. Between half and
three-quarters of all beverages sold in stores like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
174 Inside Knowledge
and San Francisco Coffee in Malaysia and Singapore are not hot coffee but
these ice-blended drinks.
The hot, humid climates of Southeast Asia are not conducive for
drinking hot coffee. But another factor that hampers coffee consumption is
ignorance on the part of local consumers about the various forms that a
cup of coffee can take, although this is hardly unique to Asia. Many
customers do not understand the difference between a macchiato, an
espresso, or an Americano. There have been occasions in Mumbai and
Kuala Lumpur when I have ordered an espresso only to watch the curious
looks on my fellow customers’ faces as I head to a table with the tiny cup
that holds it.
In any event, the ice-blended drinks have higher margins. Whereas a
cup of coffee at a traditional food stall in, say, Malaysia might cost the
equivalent of US$0.25, an ice-blended coffee at any of the new-wave
coffee shops sets customers back the equivalent of US$2.00–4.00.
But who is drinking all this coffee? University students and young
professionals are the main customers. Suddenly, lingering over coffee has
become fashionable. Instead of hanging out in shopping centers, for the
price of a cup of coffee young people can now hang out in any of the
modern coffee shops with bright modern decors, wicker chairs, and ceiling
fans. Many of the coffee shops are located at well-chosen vantage points –
perfect from which to watch the passing people or be watched. Many also
feature outdoor areas, which is revolutionary in itself, given the propensity
in Asia for anything deemed modern to be enclosed and chilled with heavy
air conditioning.
Ironically, the new breed of coffee shops hark back to the old days of
open-sided Hainanese and Fuzhou coffee shops that sold tea, noodles,
char siew pow, tow sar pow, and maybe cups of Nescafé spooned from
tins and laden with condensed milk, all served by the owner dressed in
white shorts, a blue singlet, and worn flip flops. The irony is that Asia’s
young and trendy think that they are doing something new. The reality is
that they are reverting to the habits of their grandparents. It’s only the
pricing that’s different. And that is what the real revolution has been, not to
get people in Asia into coffee shops but to get them to pay so much for the
privilege and to make them think that they’re getting value for money.
In China, a typical cup of coffee at Starbucks costs around 20 yuan
(about US$2.40), when average monthly income is little more than 1000
yuan. So patrons of Starbucks and its equivalents in China tend to treat a
visit not as a quick pit stop to have a burst of caffeine and go, or as a place
to get coffee to be taken away, but as a place to sit and spend several hours.
This much can be seen when visiting a Starbucks in China: locals come and
 From Starbucks to Coffee Bean:Asia’s Coffee Shop Revolution 175

make a single cup of coffee last all day if necessary. And so Starbucks
outlets in China typically have plenty of seating. Many are in pleasant loca-
tions and have windows with views. In the US, Starbucks is selling a drug:
a quick caffeine hit. But in Asia it knows that it is selling lifestyle.
Care is put into designing the decor, packaging, flavors, and even back-
ground music. And so while US$3 for an iced beverage is expensive, it is
very much cheaper than purchasing a restaurant meal. And so while the
venues are up-market, the total spend need not be.
Religion is another factor for the success of new style coffee shops in
Asia. Alcohol consumption is forbidden in Islam. And many Muslims do
not feel comfortable even being in premises that serve alcohol; indeed
some local laws prohibit them from entering such places. So the new-style
coffee shops present a modern alternative where Muslims can mix and
socialize freely with non-Muslims. This is clearest in Malaysia where
Malays and Chinese can be seen readily at Starbucks or Coffee Bean
outlets. They may not be at the same tables, but they are at least able to
enjoy the same venues.
Finally, whilst all chains have sought to appear “modern” and
“Western,” they also have introduced variants to appeal to local tastes, in
much the same way that McDonald’s introduced a teriyaki burger to its
Japan stores and Burger King introduced rendang burgers to its stores in
Singapore. And so Gloria Jeans Coffee introduced its “Chinatown” Salad,
Starbucks its tea Frappuccino and for a while San Francisco Coffee even
served lemon grass cake with iced vanilla drinks blended with fresh
mango juice. The success of the revolution is clear.
Perhaps it is in Malaysia that the explosion of coffee shops has been
most obvious. In 1996, there was hardly a single modern-style coffee shop.
Now there are dozens. In several areas of Kuala Lumpur the congestion of
coffee shops became extraordinary. Once, while sitting having coffee at
the relatively small shopping precinct of Bukit Bintang, I counted no less
than seven other American-style coffee shops, most of which were in
view, plus two up-market teashops. It’s little wonder that Carlsberg in
Malaysia has lost market share since around 2000. But not to other
brewers. To coffee.
 Chapter The Peculiar

16 Market for
Birds’ Nests

A joke that I’ve heard several times in Asia goes something like this:
An American lady walks into a Chinese restaurant.
“Would you care for bird’s-nest soup?” asks a waiter.
“Bird’s-nest soup? What sorts of birds’ nests?” asks the lady.
“Real birds’ nests, Madam,”
“What? With sticks?”
“No. The soup is made from the nests of a special type of bird. They
make their nests using their saliva only. There are no sticks.”
“Their saliva! That really is disgusting. I’ll have an omelette.”
Birds’ nests are a multi-million-dollar business in Asia. Certain types of
swiftlets common in Southeast Asia produce the nests. They are made
from congealed saliva that is produced by two large lobed salivary glands
under the birds’ tongues. They are translucent, have a plastic-like consis-
tency, and easily fit into the palm of the hand.
Good nests sell for astronomic sums. In 2003, the price at the producer
level in north Sumatra, where many of the nests come from, was around
US$1200 a kilogram for top-grade, “white” nests. The price is very much
higher at the retail end, in the Chinatowns across Asia. Top-grade nests in
Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown were selling for M$200 (US$52) per ten
grams. That works out to M$20,000 (US$5,263) per kilogram. But there
are many grades of nests below that. A popular lower end brand in Kuala
Lumpur is the “Swallow Brand.” A box of five average-to-poor-quality
Swallow Brand nests sells for M$200 (US$52). These nests are imported
from Medan and packaged in Penang.
The birds construct the nests on the sides of caves or other surfaces and

176
 The Peculiar Market for Birds’Nests 177

so they are half-moon shaped and not round like conventional nests. Red
birds’ nests are also available from Indonesia and Sarawak. The nests are
red because of the seaweed that the birds eat.
Birds nests are not commonly eaten in China. But demand for them is
growing, as increasingly wealthy diners search for new status foods. Tradi-
tionally, they are more a Cantonese fare. The Cantonese have long
believed them to have medicinal properties. They are a “cooling” food to
be consumed when the body is feverish and are also believed to help with
skin complexion. Rich in protein, the nests taste like chickens’ eggs to the
extent that they have much taste.
Usually, the nests are boiled into a soup but they are also served
as a dessert. A typical Cantonese recipe for savoury birds’ nest soup
includes the nests, vegetable oil, fresh ginger, chicken, mushrooms, and
perhaps quail eggs. The Empress Room at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel serves
nests as a dessert. They are boiled with rock sugar, ginger, and ground
Chinese almonds.
Traditionally, birds’ nests are harvested from caves, but such nests are
usually heavy with limestone contaminants. Local governments in
Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand still give concessions to harvest nests
from caves, but also from the undersides of bridges and traffic overpasses.
Perhaps the Brazil nut offers an analogy. The nut comes from Brazil and
Bolivia. All attempts at cultivation have failed, and so the nuts are
collected from wild areas of the Amazon rainforest. The nuts fall to the
ground when ripe and natives collect them. Thousands of government
concessions have been awarded to allow private individuals to collect the
nuts commercially.

Small Nests, Big Profits

The profits involved in collecting birds’ nests mean that few places are left
unharvested, and everyone is keen to be involved. A Chinese friend and I
once were discussing the birds’ nests markets while being driven through
the streets of Jakarta. He owns several gold shops and trades in birds’ nests
on the side. Suddenly, the driver, who, as drivers typically do in Jakarta,
simply drove and rarely said anything, interjected with an offer to sell
birds’ nests. Some caves near to the house of a cousin had attracted the
swiftlets and he and the cousin planned to harvest them. A few days later,
the personal assistant of one of Kuala Lumpur’s most prominent business-
people was telling me how she and some friends planned to form a syndi-
cate to invest in birds’ nest production in north Sumatra.
178 Inside Knowledge
But the top-quality nests now come not from caves but from houses.
Sometimes they are houses built for human habitation but if the birds move
in, the human occupants move out, aware that they are now sitting on a
gold mine.
Ramshackle houses near Jakarta in which the birds take up residence
are transformed overnight into desirable properties. Such houses, previ-
ously worth little, suddenly change hands for US$500,000 or more. One
producer outside Jakarta is rumoured to earn US$50,000 a day from the
nests that he harvests from his houses.
Otherwise, purpose-built houses are constructed. I visited one such
house at Bekasi, outside Jakarta. I climbed a ladder to reach the second
storey and entered through a small window. The room was completely
dark. There was a strong, musty smell of bird excrement and feathers, and
dozens of small swiftlets flew around the room. The walls dripped with the
nests – many thousands of dollars worth. The birds came and went at will.
The owner pulled a nest from a wall and handed it to me. It was a top-
grade nest and worth about US$5 in its raw state, he said.
Another advantage of harvesting nests from houses rather than caves is
that houses are on private land and so government licensing to harvest the
nests is not required. Acquiring a government concession typically is
expensive and fraught with bribery and corruption, particularly as most
concessions are handled at the local government level.
But it is the area around the Indonesian city Medan that has become the
centre of Asia’s birds’ nest industry and particularly the town of Lubuk-
pakam. Mostly, nests produced in the Medan area reach the outside world
first via Chinese traders based in Penang in nearby Malaysia. Typically the
Penang buyers speak Hokkien, the same language as most Chinese from
Medan and the surrounding districts. This, say the participants, is one of
the driving factors of the trade.
Purpose-built houses for the birds exist even in central Medan, a city
of some two million people. At no. 3 Jalan Ahmad Yani (Medan’s main
commercial street), next to the colonial white PT London Sumatra
Indonesia building, there are two five-storey buildings that do not house
offices like the neighboring buildings but exist solely for habitation by the
swiftlets. The buildings do not have conventional windows but small holes
and slits that allow the birds access. The birds fly in large flocks over the
city center at dusk as they look for insects before returning to these
purpose-built buildings for the night.
Prices for the nests are trending down. Supply has grown rapidly due to
a massive increase in investment in production as producers build more
 The Peculiar Market for Birds’Nests 179

houses for the birds to occupy and have become more knowledgeable
about how to attract the birds. Demand too is rising, but not as fast.
The Indonesian producers now face more competition from new
producers in the Malaysian state of Kedah and elsewhere in Indonesia, and
from competition from existing producers in Sarawak and southern Thai-
land. The sides of the road that stretches along the northern coast of Bali,
for example, is now dotted with cement buildings, three to four storeys
high, with thin slits to allow swiftlets to fly in and out instead of windows.
No one has yet found a way to keep large numbers of the swiftlets in
captivity. The birds determine where they will nest so it is largely a case of
building a house near a traditional nesting area and trying to attract them.
This can be expensive, given that the birds prefer houses at least as large
as conventional human housing. But beyond that there are no feed costs –
the birds find their own – and there are no breeding stock costs. Another
advantage is that birds’ nest are non-perishable so can be stored if market
prices are down.
A north Sumatran producer told me that the steps now to start up in
business are:

1. Acquire land in an area known to be inhabited by the right type of bird.

2. Have a house or some other similar structure of up to five storeys high
constructed for the birds.
3. Attract birds with bird droppings and discarded feathers. The droppings
should be spread around on the floors of the darkened rooms so that
birds will think that the house is already inhabited by other birds and
therefore safe.
4. Play bird noise cassettes in the early mornings and at dusk when the
birds are flying around looking for insects. This too will encourage them
to come and nest.
5. Have a source of water inside the house for the birds, but there’s no need
to supply food. The birds find their own (which helps with margins).

Bizarrely, so many would-be producers have merged in north Sumatra that

there is now a thriving secondary market in the swiftlets’ droppings that
are used to attract new colonies of birds. Usually, they are sold in eight-
kilogram bags. Typically, these bags sell for around US$300 each. And so
producers can now profit from the birds’ nests and their excrement.
Malaysian Chinese have tried to form consortia to invest in bird houses
in Indonesia but production largely remains in the hands of local Chinese.
Theft is the biggest problem. It’s also one of the main impediments to
180 Inside Knowledge
forming joint ventures. Sumatran nest producers complain that robberies
happen, but off-site or overseas (Malaysian) investors might then claim
that there was no robbery; that the local partner must have taken the nests.
So it seems likely that birds’ nest production will remain in the hands of
Chinese family firms.
The nature of the industry with its quick profits for little effort attracts
the full range of nefarious business practices and characters. One of the
more notorious participants was Ari Sigit, a grandson of Indonesia’s
former President Soeharto. Around 1996, he and his partners engineered
the reorganization of Indonesia’s Bird Nest Association into a cartel with
him placed at its top. Hitherto it had been a grouping of ethnic Chinese
birds’ nest producers and traders. He then sought government backing to
give the association monopoly rights on the export of the nests. Next, he
imposed a fee of around US$70 on each kilogram of nests exported, osten-
sibly to help with the running costs of the association. In reality, it was
simply a private export tax.
Attempts to control exports naturally led to another source of income
for Indonesia’s customs officials as they were then able to collect bribes to
allow nests through on threat of confiscation. Producers with suitcases
stuffed full of nests would board flights for Hong Kong after first having
“negotiated” with airport customs officials. The sums involved grew to
enormous proportions, given that as much as US$50,000 worth of nests
could be packed into one or two suitcases.
In 1997, Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade announced that Ari’s association
had no legal basis to collect the fee and it was canceled. The funds that had
been collected had already disappeared.1
In mid-2003, the Chumphon provincial administration in southern Thai-
land held a tender for various concessions to harvest birds’ nests in the
local area. Indicative of the high stakes involved, this local tender was crit-
icized in Thailand’s national parliament. One Democrat Party politician
complained that a syndicate of companies had been formed to rig bids and
that potential bidders were unable to obtain tender documents. Others
claimed that they could only obtain them by buying them from local
politicians (one prospective bidder said that he had been offered one for
almost US$15,000, when the documents were ostensibly free of charge).2
It later transpired that one of the potential bidders was a Bangkok-based
firm that was believed to have ties to several Democrat MPs.
More than 100 policemen supervised the bidding to prevent collusion –
and yet there were only seven principal bidders. But then the more
policemen there are, the more difficult it is to pay them all off and so the
more likely that the bidding will be fair. The strategy seemed to have
 The Peculiar Market for Birds’Nests 181

worked. The amount raised from selling all the concessions was about five
times what was expected.3
The stakes are big. Big enough to kill for. In three years, one leading
exporter of Thai birds’ nests reportedly hired a crackshot who killed 14
birds’ nest thieves who had attempted to raid the exporter’s concessions.
The hired gun was shot dead himself as he left a restaurant in Phattalung,
southern Thailand.4
It’s difficult to say what the future will bring to Asia’s birds’ nest
industry. So many new investors have emerged in the last few years that
supply will continue to expand. But then demand will too as the taste for
the nests continues to spread in China beyond Guangdong and Hong Kong
and as incomes rise. Prices might continue to decline but returns are still
enormous. The aggregate size of the industry will continue to multiply and
it will remain one that is almost exclusively in the hands of ethnic Chinese,
both as producers and consumers.
 Chapter Wheeling and

17 Dealing in Asian
Distressed Debt

With change comes opportunity even if that change involves a meltdown

such as the 1997–98 Asian economic crisis. The crisis succeeded in
turning the region into the world’s biggest market for bad loans and
defaulted debt. Since the late 1990s, Asia’s governments and banks have
sold or resolved more than US$1,000 billion in distressed assets.1 Some in
Asia might view such a market as the preserve of opportunists and
vultures. But it’s also essential for mobilizing capital, removing it from
failed entrepreneurs and giving it to others to manage, thus helping
economies to recover faster than they otherwise would.
Bad loans and defaulted bonds are not traded in any designated
exchange. Instead they are traded privately, often via debt brokers. But
what has been the cause of Asia’s defaulted debt? Property, by and large,
is the answer. Many in Asia love property. It’s physical; a showy, tangible
indicator of strength and success. And it’s easy to manage, which is
important in a region where good management skills are in short supply.
But these attributes don’t help to service the loans that are acquired to
develop it.
San Gimignano is a walled, medieval village in Tuscany, located
between Siena and Florence. Its population today is about 7000. There’s
little to suggest that it was ever much more than that. The walls that
contain it run for little more than a kilometre. An afternoon is all that’s
needed to visit each of its cobbled streets at least once. But there’s plenty
of evidence that it once was very wealthy. It was on the medieval overland
pilgrim route from northern Europe to Rome and then onto the Holy Land.
Pilgrims could find accommodation there and food. All travelers need

182
 Wheeling and Dealing in Asian Distressed Debt 183

money, so apart from inns and cafés, San Gimignano also became a place
for financial services. Pilgrims were able to deposit money with religious
orders, say, in London, and in San Gimignano draw against their deposits:
an early version of the traveler’s check.
But then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries something odd
happened. The town’s leading families (and there were quite a few)
decided to outdo one another by building enormous towers using the red
clay bricks that are synonymous with Tuscany. Each family had to have
its own tower and each had to be taller than the rest. And so it wasn’t
long before the skyline of this Tuscan village was dominated by no less
than 72 of these towering stacks of bricks, one for each wealthy family,
plus the two towers of the commune. None had any purpose whatsoever
other than to stand as testaments to each family’s success and wealth.
The plague of 1348 put paid to the building boom and thereafter the
towers were dismantled as people came to their senses, recognized the
misallocation of capital for what it was, and decided that the bricks could
be put to better use. Today just 13 towers still stand. But that’s enough to
make San Gimignano worth visiting. The drive up to the town’s walls is
made interesting by the towers that lord it over the surrounding vine-
yards. They are symbols of the waste to which family pride and one-
upmanship can lead.
And that brings us to Bangkok. Anyone who wants to see what
competing families in league with compliant banks and bondholders can
do to a city’s skyline ought to go to the top of any tall building in central
Bangkok and take in the view. Or they could hire a car and drive. And
keeping driving. Bangkok sprawls for many kilometers in all directions
but the most interesting thing about the sprawl is that the tall office
towers don’t stop. Their numbers thin but that just makes those that do
stand on Bangkok’s outskirts look even more absurd. What is the
commercial rationale for a 20-storey office tower an hour’s drive from
central Bangkok that’s surrounded by nothing taller than a shophouse?
What is the rationale for the dozens of office towers like this that dot
Bangkok’s outskirts? The lack of rationale is clear now as many of the
towers are not finished. Work stopped on them years ago and now they
stand like decaying, rusted brooding hulks, the targets of graffiti artists
and occupied by vagrants. Every major business family in Bangkok went
into property and every family seemed to want to build a tall office tower.
Or several. And so Bangkok today is like a modern version of San
Gimignano. But which Bangkok family should receive the prize for
outdoing practically everyone else, San Gimignano style? Without a
doubt, it is the Kanjanapas family.
184 Inside Knowledge
A Touch of Tuscany in Thailand

Muang Thong Thani is about an hour’s drive from central Bangkok. It’s a
massive residential and office complex on the city’s northern fringes that
was supposed to be a satellite township for middle-class office workers.
The Thai/Chinese Kanjanapas family, which founded the property devel-
oper Bangkok Land, spent US$800 million on the project. At best it’s a
monument to great ambition. At worst it’s a monument to sheer idiocy and
to the cargo cult culture that’s prevalent among many Asian property
developers: build buildings and the people needed to occupy them will
materialize as if by magic. Never mind adequate research to see if people
actually will want to live in them. The research came too late for the
Kanjanapas family. The buildings were already built. It’s the golden rule
of business: first establish the level of demand and then decide if you can
meet it. But in Asia, too often local businesspeople operate as if the largely
discredited Say’s Law applies: “supply creates its own demand.” It
doesn’t, as the Kanjanapas family and its creditors were to learn.
If I were designing a Grand Tour of the Orient for business executives,
Muang Thong Thani would be one of the star sightseeing stops. It is in two
parts: residential and office accommodation for middle-class Thais, and
the same again for the lower middle class. The two parts of the estate are
split by a highway, but each is as breathtaking as the other, for all the
wrong reasons. The site itself is unexceptional. It is flat and featureless and
prone to flooding in parts.
The lower-middle class section features row upon row of residential
accommodation, each 16 floors high. And remember, this is in an area of
largely vacant fields. It’s rural. Each grey and white block is huge, built
around an enclosed central courtyard, and has a large number to identify it
(T5, T7, T15 and so on) painted in black letters on large concrete blocks on
the roof. The blocks do not look residential but that’s what they are. Their
appearance is more of cheap office accommodation. There are more than
twenty of these towers. Nearby are actual office towers, but not a single one
appeared to be occupied on my visit, eight years after they were built. Most
of the residential towers appear to have at least some occupants, but not the
emerging middle-class office workers that the Kanjanapas family had
hoped for. Instead, the towers have become accommodation for low-
income families. Several towers remain completely unoccupied and are
shuttered. Maintenance has not been kept up. The roads and pavements
throughout the complex are stained by oil; weeds grow through the cracks.
Walls are water-stained, marked with graffiti and crumbling here and there.
Nearby is a large, enclosed low-cost food court. Many of the stalls are
 Wheeling and Dealing in Asian Distressed Debt 185

occupied, but there are few customers, at least during the day. The most
memorable stall is one that sells soft drinks and juices and is staffed by a
small team of excitable transvestites (katoey), their deep voices incon-
gruous with their heavily made-up faces. It’s a measure of how ubiquitous
the katoey are in Thai culture, to the point that they even have a bit part in
Thailand’s biggest property flop.
So that is the first half of the development: 20 towers of 16 storeys
each plus ancillary buildings. The more up-market part of the develop-
ment lies on the other side of the tollway. And it’s here that the core
lesson on real estate bubbles really begins. No less than 30 residential
towers stand there, all along one side of a palm tree-lined avenue. Each of
these 30 or more towers is 30 storeys high. They are an astonishing sight.
And opposite, on the other side of the avenue, are about 30 six-storey
office blocks. Almost every residential tower remains completely unoccu-
pied, most with white-washed windows. Most of the office blocks are
similarly empty. Several residential towers remain unfinished. Creepers
and vines now cover their lower levels. Windows on some of the ground
levels of the finished towers are painted with promises of shops to be
opened in December 1995, promises that clearly went unmet. Each of the
residential towers has an extravagant name: Riviera, Victoria, Superior,
Geneva, although the lettering has fallen from one or two towers. Little
but empty fields lies behind each office block and tower. This is purely a
strip development; it’s no more than a building deep on either side of the
road. And at one end of the avenue lies the eight-floor and largely empty
Eastin Lakeside Hotel. It is a ghost village of skyscrapers with a ghost
hotel – a modern San Gimignano all of its own, except that people actu-
ally lived in San Gimignano.
Twenty towers at 16 storeys high, plus more than 30 at 30 storeys and
maybe another 50 ancillary buildings, all largely empty and surrounded by
featureless fields, and shrouded by smog that drifts from Bangkok. Who
paid for all this? Essentially, the stockholders in Bangkok Land and the
holders of the company’s debt – bondholders and lenders. Each minority
stockholder and bondholder in Bangkok Land would do well to make the
trip out to the Muang Thong Thani Estate to see what their money has
bought. It might help them to remember the virtues of adequate research
for next time.
The government did try to help the Kanjanapas family. The family had,
after all, been an important donor to the New Aspiration Party, the party of
then Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh. Ridiculously, one prominent
brokerage even rated the company’s stock a “buy” even though it was
on the point of collapse, simply because it was perceived to be “well
186 Inside Knowledge
connected”. Never mind the fundamentals. In 1997, a parliamentary
committee dominated by government legislators recommended that the
government buy a large tranche of the by then hopelessly indebted estate.
The committee argued that it could be used as the site for a temporary
parliament building. But its recommendations were met by a public outcry.
They made no sense in terms of logistics or possible government savings
and so were dropped.2 Not even political connections were going to save
this white elephant.

Not Worth the Paper …

And so what happened to Bangkok Land? It became a basket case, a long-

term defaulter on its bonds, which traded for as little as 5% of their face
value. Of all the Asian commercial paper sold on the defaulted debt market,
Bangkok Land’s was among the trashiest, although many vie for the honor.
Another prime contender has been the bonds of Asia Pulp & Paper
(APP), the Singapore-based, Indonesia pulp and paper producer founded
by the Indonesian Chinese Widjaja family. They traded at less than 5% of
their face value in 2003. They too were in default, although things picked
up after a debt workout was agreed to in 2004. APP had debts of at least
US$13 billion, of which around US$1 billion could not be accounted for.
Investors were looking at returns of more than 1000% if things did work
out. If APP did start to service its bonds along the lines promised in its
prospectuses, then bondholders who had bought the bonds at huge
discounts stood to make enormous windfalls. But there was no chance that
APP would keep its promises.
The discounts might be big but buying the defaulted debt of companies
like Bangkok Land and APP is not for the faint hearted. Yet again, weak
laws and weak enforcement of the laws in much of Asia – the same weak-
nesses that allow delinquent debtors to retain control of their companies
years after they have stopped servicing their debts – are often exploited by
controlling families to frustrate even the buyers of their distressed debt
quite apart from their initial bondholders. For many, there is no dishonor in
defaulting on their debt obligations. Indeed, when laws are weak, it’s the
smart thing to do. Here’s why.
Let’s assume that you’re an Asian entrepreneur who’s keen to raise
cash. You set up a company in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, or
some other economy that barely has a bankruptcy system to speak of. You
have the company issue bonds worth, say, $100 million. You hire Credit
Suisse First Boston, Morgan Stanley, or some other fee-for-service outfit
 Wheeling and Dealing in Asian Distressed Debt 187

to do a swish marketing job and roadshow on your behalf. The issue is

launched, it’s taken up, and the money pours in.
The business does not go as you’d hoped so you declare a unilateral
interest moratorium. Bondholders will not be happy, of course. They could
attempt to have you wound up but they, like you, know that the bankruptcy
system is unpredictable, quite possibly corrupt, and takes years to be
worked through. So instead they start to offload their bonds onto the
market. The price of the bonds falls. It might even collapse. If it does, then
you can buy them back at maybe just 10% of their face value. Then you
can cancel them.
But the market for Asian bonds that are in default is an illiquid one.
That means that not all the bonds will be offered for sale. Your next option
is to put an extraordinary resolution to your bondholders that you will call
in the remaining bonds and pay 20% of their face value. The prospectus
for the issue allows for an extraordinary resolution to become mandatory if
it’s agreed to by more than 70% of bondholders. To ensure that you get
across the line, you have your friends and relatives buy some of the bonds.
And you do a secret side deal with a major bondholder in exchange for
favorable treatment. So when it comes to the time for the resolution to be
voted on, it’s carried. And now you can buy back all your debt at an
average of less than 20% of its total face value. It’s a great deal. You spend
less than $20 million but get to keep the original $100 million and you
wipe out your debts in the process. The private jet doesn’t have to be sold
off after all. Instead you can aim for an upgrade.
The market for Asian defaulted debt is a curious one. There’s little
transparency and the instruments traded are issued by companies that
themselves invariably lack transparency. The market is highly unregulated
and illiquid. Determining the market price for defaulted Asian debt is diffi-
cult. One company that matches buyers with sellers is Hong Kong-based
DebtTraders. Bangkok Land bonds, for example, are on its books, and so
its customers have the opportunity to buy bonds that are backed by almost
a hundred, mostly unoccupied, high-rise towers in what is essentially rural
Thailand. Rarely are the results of trades disclosed, so the actual prices
paid for distressed bonds are not usually known. Offers to buy and sell are
made known but many of these offers go unmet.
But why would anyone want to buy bonds that are in default in an
economy where bankruptcy is not a realistic option because local legal
processes are so poor? It comes down to information. Investors must make
a judgment as to the likelihood that a defaulting company might restruc-
ture and be able to repay bondholders amounts that are substantially higher
than the market price of the bond when it falls due.
188 Inside Knowledge
One London-based fund manager who trades in Asian corporate bonds
said to me that the lesson that he had learnt from the market was that:

you can’t make investment decisions on the basis of financial statements. The
statements are not worth the paper they’re written on. You have to know the
people. And you must do your research.You need people on the ground and you
must be prepared to commit a lot of resources.

But surely even the debt of apparently strong Asian companies is risky if
they are based in economies where legal structures are poor? That is true.
And so Asian bonds tend to be issued with higher coupon yields than debt
issued in more regulated and better structured legal environments.
But bondholders are also becoming wiser. They have learnt to insist on
better protection and limitations on issuers. The limitations tend to be on
subsidiary indebtedness whereby the issuer must agree to limit new debt
that subsidiaries can take on; negative pledge provisions whereby the
issuer must not pledge any assets if doing so will lessen the security for
existing bondholders; and maintenance covenants whereby various
covenants and guarantees on gearing ratios and EBITDA to debt service
ratios are reviewed, say, quarterly. In the past, limitations like these were
either loosely specified or weakly applied.

The Market for Non-performing Loans

A corollary for Asian distressed bonds is Asian distressed loans. The Asian
economic crisis generated hundreds of billions of dollars in non-
performing loans. Much of this debt was excised from Asia’s banks by
government debt workout agencies. And in China billions have been
carved from the asset sheets of the various state-owned banks in a bid to at
least make them appear solvent ahead of WTO-induced banking deregul-
ation in China.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, and
private equity group Lone Star Funds have been among the big buyers of
Asia’s bad loans. It has been profitable too. Not because recovery rates are
high, but because the prices at which the bad loans have been acquired
have been so low. It just goes to show that there’s no such thing as a bad
asset, just overpriced assets.
Japan has been an important source for bad debt. Billions of dollars in
bad loans were hidden away on the books of Japan’s major banks. But it
was only around 1997 that a lot of the bad debt was made apparent and
 Wheeling and Dealing in Asian Distressed Debt 189

then available under pressure from the Japanese government. In the next
four years, around US$600 billion in bad loans were removed from
Japan’s banks. Foreign investors were deluged with opportunities to buy
defaulted debt and distressed assets. Recovery rates were high, thanks to
Japan’s comparatively robust legal system that made it relatively easy for
investors to force assets sales or seize collateral.3
The Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA) was one of South-
east Asia’s biggest acquirers of bad debt. The sale of IBRA’s debt “assets”
occurred in the wake of the 1997–98 economic crisis. It was thought that
by and large IBRA would be fortunate if it was able to achieve an average
of ten cents in the dollar recovery on the debt that it acquired. Indonesian
parliamentarians criticized IBRA for this. Many felt that somehow IBRA
was letting off delinquent debtors too lightly with such low rates of
recovery. But then what choice did IBRA have? Indonesia had no func-
tioning bankruptcy system, and so IBRA was unable to do little more than
sell off the loans cheaply. And that played directly into the hands of the
delinquent debtors themselves. Many were able to buy back their loans for
next to nothing, have the debts canceled, and retain full rights to their
assets. They were able to resume business debt free. It was an extraordi-
nary situation. Many used nominees to make the purchases on their behalf
and so names that no one had heard of before suddenly emerged in Jakarta
“owning” major assets for which they had apparently paid very little.
And so many of the old names were able to get back in charge in
Jakarta, names like Anthony Salim of the Salim Group and the Tanoto
family of Raja Garuda Mas Group, despite only just a few years ago
having been at the helm of billion-dollar bank collapses.
Elsewhere, defaulting companies fold. But not in Asia’s emerging
markets. Like snakes that wriggle out of their skins, they shed their debts
and their creditors, and start anew. As the London fund manager said to
me, “in Asia, I’ve seen companies raise capital even though they’ve
defaulted on their bonds or their loans. That would never happen in
America.” Italy has one San Gimignano. Asia has many. And they’re still
being built. Just take a look at Pudong, Shanghai.

China: Bad Debt Bonanza?

But by 2005, much of the big tranches of bad loans in Japan and Southeast
Asia had been cut out of the region’s banks, packaged up, and sold off.
Many large foreign financial institutions had done well from the business.
Recovery rates often were low but not as bad as might have been expected.
190 Inside Knowledge
If a billion dollars in bad loans could be had for US$60 million, and
against these, US$120 million in asset sales could be realized, then their
buyer had achieved a 100% return. So where next could buyers of bad debt
turn? The answer is China.
China represents the world’s biggest untapped market for non-
performing loans – it is sitting on tens of billions of dollars in bad loans.
By the end of September 2004, China’s four state-owned asset managers
had recovered about US$14.5 billion in cash from bad loans since 1999.4
But with total bad loans amounting to as much as US$400 billion, that was
just the tip of the iceberg. And then towards the end of the year, Great Wall
Asset Management, one of the four asset managers, started China’s biggest
yet sale of bad loans, offering to foreign buyers the equivalent of US$18.1
billion in bad loans. The market for distressed Asian debt was back in
swing. But the loans were not the best quality and comprised assets in
mostly rural areas; Great Wall deals mostly in the bad debt of the Agricul-
tural Bank of China. Towards the end of 2004, it had achieved a recovery
rate of around 10.6% of the value of the face of the loans.5 Presumably, the
loans it had left were even more delinquent and problematic.
India too is coming on board. By early 2005, it was preparing to invite
foreign interest in acquiring bad loans cut from its banking system,
although the potential market was estimated to be much smaller than
China’s, at around US$22 billion. But some regulatory obstacles remained.
Restrictions on foreigners owning real estate such as apartment blocks and
factory land meant that foreigners might be able to own bad debt but might
have legal problems foreclosing on assets. The Indian government under-
took to examine some of the regulatory issues.6 In early 2005, it
announced that it planned to allow FDI in all real estate projects, including
housing, but the fine print remained to be seen.7 But the big potential bad
debt market remains China, where restrictions on foreign ownership are
less and the bad debt problem is substantially worse.
By 2005, China represented a potential distressed debt market of
1997–98 Asian economic crisis proportions. It remains to be seen if
foreigners will be allowed similar access to it. If they are to be, then the
world’s debt specialists are in for a bonanza. Who would have thought that
the best way to make money in China might not be from owning and oper-
ating car plants or bottling beer but from acquiring and trading in bad
debt? But for foreigners, it is the market for bad debt that might yet prove
to be the one that is genuinely and significantly profitable among all
China’s industries and sectors.
 Chapter The Secrets of
Asia’s Five-star

18 Hotels and
their Guests

If I’m not staying with friends, then I usually stay in hotels during my
regular travels around Asia. They tend to be the sort of hotels in which
business travelers stay, indeed, the sort of hotels in which you as a reader
of this book probably stay. I often take the time to chat to the staff. Hotel
staff are an excellent source of information on the state of the local
economy, which big local business families are intermarrying (the recep-
tions are usually held at large hotels), and about the activities of other
hotel guests. Several in Asia have become friends and I have interviewed
them intensively about their work. What they have to say provides a fasci-
nating insight into how big hotels in Asia operate, as well as on the differ-
ences in the habits of hotel guests in Asia according to the countries from
which they come and how those varying habits affect hotels’ costs.
How many guests of five-star hotels in Asia, and particularly in South-
east Asia, think about the backgrounds of the staff who tidy their rooms or
check them in? In the evenings, hotel staff leave the marble and the air
conditioning, exchange their pressed uniforms for jeans and a T-shirt, go
home probably on a public bus, back to what is probably low-cost housing
without air conditioning and maybe without a shower. And so Asia’s top
hotels bring together hotel staff, many of whom work for comparatively
low pay, and guests who typically are wealthy or have expense accounts.
One irony is that the hotel housekeeping staff tend to be remarkably
well informed about expensive luxury products such as fragrances,
cognacs, and accessories, despite their low salaries. This comes by virtue
of all the duty-free purchases to which they are exposed as they tidy
rooms. Their knowledge of what’s hot and what’s not probably rivals the

191
192 Inside Knowledge
best data that many consumer research companies can generate. But it is
their knowledge of comparative sociocultural knowledge that comes from
observing the habits of their internationally sourced room guests that
makes them particularly fascinating.

How Guests Differ

A five-star hotel is a unique social laboratory in which to observe close up

the differences among people from different cultures as they go about their
personal habits in what they assume is the privacy of their hotel room. So
what are some of the characteristics observed among the guests of some of
Asia’s top hotels? By necessity what follows is largely anecdotal but the
observations still yield interesting insights.
Cash is still king among most people in Asia. Credit card usage remains
comparatively low, possibly because of the insistence of many retailers in
Asia to pass on to customers the credit card commission on their
purchases. Accordingly, Japanese travelers typically carry large sums of
cash with them, in money belts hidden inside their shirts or the fronts of
their trousers. (This has become a problem for many non-Japanese Asian
tourists abroad. One Chinese friend was attacked in Spain by a group of
thieves who insisted on thrusting their hands down the front of his
trousers. He thought that he was about to be sexually assaulted. But
instead the would-be thieves thought that he was Japanese. They were
looking for his low-slung money belt.)
But among Asian travelers it is Indonesian business travelers who have
the reputation among hotel staff in Asia for carrying with them the biggest
stashes of cash. Inexplicably, many Indonesian hotel guests do not keep
their cash in the in-room mini-safe but prefer to stuff it between the
mattresses of the bed. Occasionally these stashes are forgotten, much to
the delight of cleaning staff. Stories of Indonesians leaving behind tens of
thousands of dollars after checking out and then failing to reclaim their
cash are legendary among hotel staff in Asia.
Middle Eastern tourists are coming to Asia in increasing numbers. Most
come from just three countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait. Their
peak holiday season is around the middle of the calendar year. Anecdo-
tally, most avoid jet lag by simply keeping their home times. So, they tend
to be late risers as guests and they go late to bed. This creates logistics
problems for hotel housekeeping staff. Rooms that ordinarily would be
cleaned by early afternoon only become available for cleaning around that
time. This upsets staffing rosters and affects housekeeping costs.
 The Secrets of Asia’s Five-star Hotels and their Guests 193

Middle Eastern hotel guests can affect hotel costs in other ways. Some
are unusually untidy compared with other guests, and so hotels might need
to take on extra cleaning staff during the Middle Eastern holiday months.
Hotel guests from India can cause similar problems perhaps because
they’re used to having servants at home.
One unusual aspect of Indian guests is that the stick-on/peel-off red dots
that married Indian women wear on their foreheads known as bindi often
are left behind in the room. Sometimes they are found stuck to the mirrors
in the bathroom, or inside the room’s wardrobe, or on a wall that happened
to have been convenient. The job then for housekeeping staff is to locate
the bindi after their Indian hotel guests have checked out. Another aspect
of Indian travelers apparently is their preference for bath oils and so
cleaning bath tubs after guests from India have stayed often takes longer
than is normal, adding to housekeeping costs.
But it is Middle Eastern visitors who can impose the highest costs. I
once knew a housekeeping supervisor who left employment at one hotel
because the general manager had started to promote the hotel to Saudi
Arabian tourists. Rooms that had been easily cleaned suddenly took much
longer to clean and no longer could he cope with the complaints of his
housekeeping staff. I observed some of these problems during a stay at
one Kuala Lumpur five-star hotel in mid-2004 when many of the other
guests were from the Middle East. The scenes around the breakfast buffet
were astonishing.
To be fair, most of the Arab diners left their tables in the same condition
as anyone else. But enough didn’t to seriously undermine the efficient
running of the breakfast café. And when they did not, the mess was unbe-
lievable. The condition of the table and the floor beneath one Arab family
near to me on one morning defies description. But I’ll try because it was
not an isolated example.
Three and possibly more bread rolls had been crumpled and crumbed, the
pieces had been strewn across the table, anywhere in fact but on the plates.
Half-used butter and jam sachets had been dumped on the floor and across
the table. Small pieces of half-eaten fruit lay on the floor. A bowl of sugar
had been up-ended near the centre of the table. Bits of scrambled egg had
been slopped across the table, some of which were now leaking down the
side of a table leg. Other pieces of unidentified food scraps which appeared
to have been chewed and dribbled or spat out lay across plates, but more
typically in piles beside the plates, or at least where the plates should have
been. And far too many empty and half-empty glasses of gargled juice stood
in this inexplicable layer of filth, dotting the table in a random fashion. This
mess was not typical of all the Arab guests. But nor was it unusual.
194 Inside Knowledge
Two Malay staff members came over to survey the scene. They
grimaced as they went about their work of sweeping, wiping, and
cleaning. The importance of personal cleanliness is stressed in the Koran.
It is cardinal. And Malay Muslims are exemplary on this. They are metic-
ulously clean. I’ve been to many Malay Muslim houses and have stayed
with Malay Muslims. Cleanliness is always paramount. So how is it
possible that their fellow Muslims from the Middle East can be respon-
sible for leaving such a trail of utter filth?
And it doesn’t end with the tables in the public dining areas. Hotel room
cleaning staff have told me on many occasions that they despair the mid-
year Arab holiday season. The rooms occupied by many Middle Eastern
families are left in a state of utter chaos. Food scraps are walked into
bedroom carpets and bathrooms are left in an indescribable state. Many
Middle Eastern guests bring cooking equipment with them and then cook
in their rooms, leaving burn and scorch marks on the carpet. Typically,
rooms that have been occupied by Middle Eastern guests require twice the
time to clean as rooms occupied by other guests. The cooking and
smoking mean that the rooms soon develop strong, bad odors. One hotel
cleaner told me that sometimes she goes into such guests’ bedrooms and
just stands there and cries.
An additional complicating factor of the Middle Eastern and Indian
holiday periods for Asian hotels is that Indian and Arab tourists tend to
shop for shoes in Asia more than any other groups. The practicalities of
this for hotels is that shoes tend to come in large cardboard boxes and so
during the Arab and Indian holiday season, the amount of garbage
removed from guests’ rooms in Asia can swell by as much as three times
the usual amount, as discarded shopping bags, empty shoe boxes, and
wrappings from toys must be thrown away. Once again, it’s a seasonal
factor of which hotels need to take account.
Even how hotel beds are used for sleeping differs according to the
nationality of the guest. Western guests always sleep between the sheets.
But Taiwanese guests often choose to sleep between the top sheet and the
blanket. Many Indonesian travelers sleep not so much in the bed between
the sheets as on it, leaving themselves uncovered and with the room
temperature turned up high.
Taiwanese typically travel in groups. Indonesians tend to travel alone or
with their families. Taiwan’s is a frugal society perhaps borne of its resi-
dents’ refugee backgrounds. And so Taiwanese travelers rarely take
unopened soaps and shampoo packs from the room; their personal
frugality seems to extend to how they treat the hotel.
Taiwanese and Japanese guests are very tidy and are a favorite with
 The Secrets of Asia’s Five-star Hotels and their Guests 195

housekeeping staff. Little needs to be done to clean up after them. West-

erners almost never leave tips for the room cleaning staff but Japanese
very often do and almost invariably leave them not on the dressing table
but under the pillow of the unmade bed. While Westerners might rarely
leave tips, they’re generally in the good books of housekeeping staff
because they tend to be tidy.
Mainland Chinese still tend to travel on group packages even for
business. History is a key attraction when they travel abroad, but history
that relates to overseas Chinese. Anecdotally, mainland Chinese are
particularly interested to see how Chinese in other countries live. And so
travel tends to be to countries that have a significant Chinese population
and published itineraries invariably include visits to local Chinatowns.
They are price-sensitive travelers and often prefer to eat out in cheap
cafés and food stalls rather than dining in expensive hotel restaurants. A
significant subsection of the Chinese outward-bound travel market
comprises young mainland Chinese women who arrive in other countries,
including other Asian countries, often on a student visa, to work as pros-
titutes. Short-term visitors will stay in a hotel (usually booked for them
by a pimp and in their pimp’s name) so that it can be used as the venue
for their trade. Some might even stay for just one or two weeks, earn cash
and then return to China.
And which types of hotel guests from within the region complain the
most in Asia? Anecdotally it is guests from India. And one of their most
common complaints relates to room temperature. Typically Indian guests
prefer the room to be chilled as much as possible, perhaps lower than the
lowest settings of many Southeast Asian hotels. And so many such guests
complain that their rooms are too warm.
Anecdotally, Australians are among the fussiest about the cleanliness of
rooms and hotel facilities. But rarely do they complain in person or during
the course of their stay. They prefer to put up with the annoyance during
their stay and then fill out a guest suggestion card that is read after they’ve
checked out. And what type of dirtiness upsets hotel guests more than any
other? Hair left behind in bathrooms either by the previous guest or even
stray hair from cleaning staff.
One attribute that is common among many hotel guests no matter what
countries they are from is the tendency to use obvious codes for in-room
safes. Hotel staff have said to me that the number of five-star hotel guests
who choose code combinations such as 1-2-3-4-5-6 or 1-1-1-1-1-1 or 0-0-
0-0-0-0 is incredible. Perhaps guests feel that such codes are so obvious
that no one would suspect them of using them. This means of course that
many people do use them and so the logic becomes self-defeating.
196 Inside Knowledge

Dealing with the “other” guests

Many Chinese are superstitious. The presence of ghosts is a particular

concern. Here’s some advice that some of my Chinese friends have circu-
lated among each other to cope with ghosts in hotels:

Most hotels have or should have at least one room left vacant at all times.
No matter how full the hotel is, the room should not be sold to anyone.
The room is “reserved” for “special guests” [ghosts]. So if you plan to stay in
a hotel, always book in advance. Try to avoid walking in. If the receptionist
says that there are no rooms left, do not insist on one and do not offer
bribes to be given a room. Otherwise you might be given the “special”
room. Sometimes “special guests” might visit other rooms too, so here are
some tips on how to protect yourself:

■ Before entering your room, always knock first, even if you know the
room is vacant.

■ After you enter the room, if you feel cold suddenly, then right away leave
the room quietly and go to reception to request a change of room.
(Most of the time the receptionist will understand what’s happening.)

■ After you enter the room, immediately switch on all the lights, and open
the curtains to let the sunlight in.

■ Before you go to bed, arrange your shoes so that one of them is upside
down.This is to represent yin and yang to protect you while you’re asleep.

■ Try to leave at least one light on while you’re sleeping, preferably a light
in the bathroom.

■ If you’re staying alone and your room has twin beds, do not sleep with
the other bed vacant. Store something heavy like your luggage on the
other bed while you sleep.

The Floors are High and the Wife is Far Away

There’s another factor that differentiates hotel guests from one another:
their sexual habits. Among all business travelers in Asia, the anecdotal
 The Secrets of Asia’s Five-star Hotels and their Guests 197

evidence suggests that it is Japanese businessmen who are most likely to

utilize the services of local prostitutes. But rarely, if ever, do they allow the
prostitute to stay over night. Western business travelers are much less
likely to use prostitutes. But they are far more likely to allow the prostitute
to stay until morning.
All this leads to another aspect of the job for hotel housekeeping staff:
used condoms. Of course these are normally flushed down the toilet. But
not always. Anecdotally, Chinese guests who do not dispose of them via
the toilet are likely to leave them on the floor beside the bed. Japanese
guests with their apparent predilection for neatness are more likely to put
them in the drawer of the bedside cabinet. And so housekeeping staff in
some Asian hotels are advised to check these drawers on the departure of
unaccompanied Japanese male business travelers. Nothing could be more
distressing to a guest who reaches inside the bedside drawer for a Gideons
Bible or The Thoughts of Buddha but instead discovers something else left
by the previous guest.
Pornographic material is another item that housekeeping staff need to be
alert for. Guests who do not want to take it with them might be loath to
openly leave it in the wastebasket. Instead, they might choose to hide it in
their rooms on departure. A common hiding spot is between the top and
bottom mattresses of the bed.
Many hotel staff in Asia have stories to tell about being propositioned for
sex by hotel guests. Logically, they are easy targets for such approaches and
female housekeeping staff are particularly vulnerable. So too are room
service staff but, increasingly, most hotels use only male staff to deliver in-
room meals to guests. In Asia, anecdotally it is Western and Middle Eastern
hotel guests who are more likely to proposition hotel staff while they are in
their rooms. Japanese and other Asian guests, on the other hand, are more
accustomed to engaging the services of local prostitutes.

Ripping off the Minibar and Other Cultural Observations

Minibar charges in hotels typically are high. Many guests no doubt feel
that such high prices justify their attempts to steal from the in-room
minibar. Some go beyond merely consuming and then not declaring. Some
resort to subterfuge.
One of the more obvious abuses is to refill miniature bottles of vodka
with tap water, brandy miniature bottles with black tea and so on. Bottled
beer and white wine are also candidates for being refilled with tap water,
their colored glass bottles making detection more difficult. But some
198 Inside Knowledge
guests are more creative than this. Soft drinks cans are frequently opened
with a hole being punctured in their bottoms, their contents drained and
then put back in the minibar, right way up and with the ring pull still
intact. The alert minibar attendant who is pressed for time knows that the
way to check for this is not to pick up each can in each minibar in each
room to feel its weight but simply to swing open the minibar door and take
a pen and run it across the line-up of soft drink cans. The emptied cans are
those that give a hollow-sounding ring.
Cylinders of Pringles’ crisps are another favorite target of light-
fingered hotel guests. The cylinders are opened carefully, the crisps eaten
and then, to restore the cylinder to its unopened weight, some guests stuff
them with a hotel-provided washcloth, the net weight of a cylinder of
Pringles being approximately that of a washcloth. The protective foil is
then folded back over the mouth of the cylinder, and the plastic lid is put
back – all in the hope of avoiding being charged. When unsuspecting
minibar attendants pick up such Pringles cylinders, they feel heavy and
look unopened.
Pistachio nuts are another trap for the hotels. Why? Because they come
with hard shells that when placed back in the packet give it a weight that’s
similar to one that has been unopened. Adept guests can open them, eat the
nuts, leave the shells, and then reseal the packet to avoid being charged.
But who actually bothers to rip off the minibar? Japanese and Chinese
hotel guests almost never do this. In Asia, the guests who rip off the
minibar almost always tend to be Western. Not business travelers but
tourists and the flight crews of Western airlines.
What else tends to be stolen from hotel rooms? Towels remain the
favorite target of light-fingered guests. Towel theft occurs most when
hotels order in new towels. And so some hotels prefer their towels to
become noticeably tatty. Not so much because they don’t want to replace
them but more because they don’t want to deal with the significant
increase in towel theft when they do.
The desk compendium is another favorite of thieving guests, especially
if it is embossed with the hotel’s monogram. Wooden coat-hangers are the
next most popular item, followed by coat brushes, and shoe horns. Many
five-star hotels no longer provide these last two items because the rate of
theft is too high.
But hotel thefts not only occur from bedrooms but from the public areas
such as the lobby, the lobby washrooms, and the hallways between rooms.
Ever wondered why many five-star hotels now use folded linen napkins in
their public washrooms for people to dry their hands instead of conven-
tional hand towels? It’s not because they look more elegant. The real reason
 The Secrets of Asia’s Five-star Hotels and their Guests 199

is because guests and visitors to the hotels’ public areas are less likely to
steal the napkins.
Room service crockery is another target for thieves. Why do room
service trolleys and trays often come with a message instructing guests
not to leave empty trays and trolleys outside the room but instead to ring
room service to have them collected? Sure, trolleys and trays with dirty
plates are unsightly if left in the corridor but they also become prime
targets for theft on the part of other guests who might want to help them-
selves to the monogrammed teapot or the ceramic vase used to hold the
single red carnation.
Sometimes, thefts from hotels are more serious. One Singaporean guest
at a five-star hotel in Kuala Lumpur once made off with the room’s televi-
sion set. The hotel tracked him down and suggested that the police might
be contacted if the television did not reappear. It did. The guest explained
that he had merely “borrowed” it. Another hotel guest entirely stripped his
hotel room of practically everything that could be lifted or prised off. Even
the curtains went. He packed everything that he planned to steal into boxes
and to add insult to injury asked the hotel’s bellboys to take the boxes
downstairs to a waiting taxi. But such instances are rare. Minor pilferage is
the real problem for hotels.

Emperors without Clothes

Ordinary business and other travelers are not the only guests to come
under the scrutiny of hotel staff. Hotel staff are a font of knowledge on
world leaders and senior business figures in a way that most people never
think about. They have access to the kinds of people who are generally off
limits for almost everyone else. Not only that but they get to know the
details of their private habits, the sort of information that most spy agen-
cies would love to have.
When staying in foreign hotels, Sri Lankan President Chandrika
Bandaranaike Kumaratunga demands that, for security reasons, no ethnic
Indian staff service the floor on which she’s staying. Nonetheless, hotel staff
with whom I’ve spoken describe her as polite but strong in private. Former
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew insists that his room be kept at
16–19°C. If he is to attend a banquet, strict instructions are given that he is
not to be photographed whilst eating. And if he is to give a speech, no flash
photography may be used. The Sultan of Brunei always takes an entire floor
even if only a few rooms are to be used, to ensure privacy.
I could go on with detail that is more salacious, such as which Asian
200 Inside Knowledge
head of state wears homebrand underwear, which one hires prostitutes for
orgies while his wife sleeps in another room, and which senior Asian
politician gives hotel staff money to go out and buy hawker food off the
streets rather than eat food provided by the hotel. But that would be unfair.
But it remains the case that hotel staff are not simply adept at tidying
rooms and preparing meals. They are like the three wise monkeys in
reverse: they see everything, they hear everything, and sometimes they
speak. A hindrance to heads of state and other hotel guests but a gold mine
for researchers and writers of books such as this.
 Chapter Who Owns
Patpong?

19 Thailand’s Sex
Industry

In Singapore, prostitution is effectively legal, as the government adminis-

ters as many as six official designated red light areas in which as many as
400 licensed brothels operate. In Thailand, however, prostitution is illegal.
It is one of the great ironies of Asia. Anuch Mokhawes, Thailand’s deputy
interior permanent secretary, said in respect of Thailand’s many massage
parlors, “It turns out that some of them provide commercial sex to
customers.”1 Well, who would have thought? There are at least 2000
massage parlors in Bangkok alone.
The commercial sex industry is worth billions of dollars to Thailand. It
is believed to generate more revenue than drug trafficking, arms trading,
contraband trade in diesel fuel or gambling. Tourists account for only a
part of the industry’s earnings; Thais probably account for more. Brothels
exist across Thailand including the many areas where foreigners rarely
visit. Surveys of the sexual habits of Thai men routinely find that many or
most lose their virginity to a prostitute. So it seems that Thailand’s
famous prostitution industry is not the creation of visiting foreigners as
some in Thailand would have the rest of the world believe. Indeed, the
Thai government initially sought to play up the country’s image of sexual
licentiousness.

Sanuk? It’s the Thai way of describing anything that gives you pleasure. In other
words, anything you enjoy doing. In other words, whatever turns you on. When
you fly to London with Thai International, we’ll introduce you to the meaning of
sanuk with superb food, generous drinks and charming Thai girls who know what
service is all about … Thai International: Get into it.

201
202 Inside Knowledge
So read a full-page advertisement for Thailand’s 100% government-owned
airline, placed in foreign magazines and journals in 1973.2 This text
appeared below a close-up of a young Thai woman’s heavily made-up face
with a suggestive gaze. Nothing about her appearance suggested that she
was a flight attendant, but then flight attendant or prostitute, it didn’t matter.
The text in this Thai government-sponsored advertisement suggested that
Thai woman are submissive and obliging, almost that the country’s airlines
were being served by flying hostess bars.
In 2003, the Thai government introduced a 10% tax on massage parlors
and sex-oriented saunas, because being essentially illegal, they were
outside the tax system. And so the government was then in a position of
attempting to impose a specific tax on an industry that the kingdom’s laws
actually outlawed. But defining the new tax without explicit reference to
commercial sex services (presumably because they are illegal) meant that
many conventional spas and saunas were caught up in the legislation,
attracting complaints from their proprietors.3
Patpong, that area of Bangkok that is home to sex clubs and brothels in
a concentration greater than perhaps anywhere else, is one of the great
brand names of Asia. It’s a name that is recognized around the world. But
for all the wrong reasons.
Who owns it? Who runs it? And who lets it exist? The answer to the last
question was suggested in part one hot afternoon while I sat in a café near
Patpong and watched the scene across the street. The premises opposite
bore all the hallmarks of a brothel. Young, scantily clad women turning up
as if for work and not leaving; no outward sign of the line of business
carried out in the clearly commercial premises; and the tell-tale mirrored
door at the entrance that allows those inside to see out but not those
outside to see in.
On this afternoon, I watched one policeman after another alternately
enter and leave the premises opposite. Some still adjusted their flies and
gun holsters as they left, their police motorcycles parked in a neat row
outside. The protection that this brothel paid seemed to be provided not
only in cash but in services. But that is typical.

The Patpongpanich Family

The area now covered by the Patpong nightclub strip once was a banana
plantation. It was used as a Japanese military headquarters in the Second
World War II. And then in 1946, it was sold to an emigrant from China’s
Hainan island, who had been awarded the Thai name of Patpongpanich
 Who Owns Patpong? Thailand’s Sex Industry 203

(also sometimes rendered as Patpongpanit) by the king. Patpongpanich is

said to have paid 60,000 baht (then about US$2,400) for the land. He
bought it with the intention of building a house for his brothers and sisters
and cut a road through the property to connect Silom Road to Suriwong
Road. This road is what is known as Patpong 1 Road today.
Udom Patponsiri, Patpongpanich’s eldest son, inherited the land and
built shophouses along the road that his father had built. Udom then found
tenants for the buildings and so began Patpong as it’s known today. Udom,
who was born in 1916, had a remarkable life.4 He studied at the London
School of Economics from 1936 to 1938 after his early education in Thai-
land. He returned to Thailand in 1940 but was then sent to finish his formal
education at the University of Minnesota in the US where he earned a
business degree.
Thailand’s government supported Japan in World War II and so like
many Thai students then in the US, Udom joined the pro-Allied Free Thai
movement. He received training from the US army and from the Office of
Strategic Services (later to become the CIA) at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Included was parachute jump training. In 1943 he went to India for more
training and was scheduled to return in Thailand in 1945 as an undercover
agent but the war ended before that could happen. (He and 13 other Thais
who received parachute training were finally honored by the US with their
wings in January 1995, 50 years after qualifying for them.)

Sex Sells

In the 1950s, Udom concentrated on developing his family’s real estate

interests, of which the Patpong area was the largest. Patpong’s transfor-
mation into a nightclub zone occurred quickly. The massive build-up of US
armed forces in Vietnam and Thailand in the 1960s saw the demand for
evening entertainment grow rapidly in Bangkok. By 1968, a variety of
nightclubs had opened along Patpong. These overflowed into Patpong 2 in
the early 1970s, a smaller street that runs parallel with Patpong 1. It too is a
private street owned by the Patpongpanich family. The bars transformed
into the “go-go” bars as they’re known today and massage parlors also
opened for business. Several clubs opened upstairs bars in the early 1980s,
which featured more explicit shows and greater nudity than the go-go bars
downstairs. The show bars became very popular and gained worldwide
notoriety. Patpong’s further development into what it is today came in the
late 1980s, when the Patpongpanichs decided to close Patpong 1 Road off
each night and rent out small lots of the street to stallholders. And so now,
204 Inside Knowledge
Patpong 1 Road is home each evening to a massive outdoor market with
stalls selling clothing, souvenirs, and pirated VCDs, DVDs and CDs.
Today Patpong is one of Bangkok’s most valuable pieces of real estate
but it remains underdeveloped. Nearby are tall office towers but Patpong is
lined with the shophouses that Udom built in the 1950s.
One of the Patpongpanich family’s biggest lessees is the King’s Group,
owned and managed by another Thai/Chinese businessman and his son. It
runs six of the biggest go-go bars in Patpong, a restaurant and the King’s
Body House massage parlor around the corner on Soi Surawongse Plaza.
Indeed almost all the business owners and operators in the Patpong area
are ethnic Chinese. Ethnic Thais get their cut via the police who are paid
off to look the other way when it comes to the various nefarious activities
that occur in the area.
Soi 4, Silom Road, also known as Soi Katoey and sometimes as
Patpong 3, runs parallel to Patpong 2. Like Patpong 1 and 2, it is a
privately owned road. The family that owns it lives at the end of the Soi.
But it is a family that is separate from the Patpong family. Their road has
become the centre for gay nightlife in Bangkok and contains several well-
known gay-oriented bars and cafés.
Udom died in 1996. On his death, Patpong Co. Ltd, the privately owned
company that holds the family’s Patpong interests, had seven stockholders,
including his daughter Varita Vajrabhaya who now heads up the family’s
business interests, his two remaining sisters Boonying Patpongpanit and
Somtawin Amathayakun, and a nephew Poompong Patpongpanit.5
The land department valued the land on which Patpong sits at around
US$100 million at the time of Udom’s death, although Bangkok land
prices fell significantly soon after.6 Today, the family is believed to collect
120 million baht (US$3 million) a year in rent from its Patpong holdings.
It does not own any of the businesses in the area, it simply lets premises to
them, many of which are then subleased again. “Our rent is not high,” said
Udom’s daughter Varita. “We are running a family business which has
turned into a tourist attraction. We tell our clients to try to project a good
image for Thailand.”7 They certainly project a strong image. But through
the haze of cigarette smoke, that’s pierced with ping-pong balls and blow-
darts, few would agree that it’s a good one.

The Davis Group

Another prominent operator in Bangkok’s commercial sex sector is Chuwit

Kamolvisit, owner of the Davis Group, which owned a chain of six of the
 Who Owns Patpong? Thailand’s Sex Industry 205

largest, up-market massage parlors in Bangkok: Victoria’s Secret, Honolulu,

Hi-Class, Emmanuelle, Copacabana, and Barbara, as well as the Davis
Hotel, a five-star central Bangkok hotel popular with tourists. For years,
Chuwit had paid enormous bribes to the Thai police for protection and to
look the other way so that he could run his businesses in peace. But in 2003
it all unraveled. Chuwit was involved in the illegal demolition of Sukhumvit
Square, a Bangkok mixed-use site over which there was great confusion as
to its legal title. Moonlighting military and police officers were employed to
participate in the bulldozing of the site. The incident attracted so much criti-
cism that it was no longer possible for Chuwit to escape the law.
He was charged in relation to the demolition, then for procuring under-
age girls to work for him, and then with a host of other charges. Chuwit
was outraged. What had all that protection money been for? Not only were
the police corrupt, Chuwit charged, but now it seemed they had no honor.
His thoughts turned to revenge. At one press conference after another he
revealed how he had paid millions of dollars to the police in bribe money,
had bought them “whole trays” of Rolex watches, office furniture,
computers, and refrigerators to make their police stations more comfort-
able, paid for their cars to be maintained, given them tickets to boxing
matches, golf memberships, meals, wine, and even paid for their home
repairs. And of course he’d allowed them to be entertained for free at any
of his six massage parlors. (“Have sex, flash your badge and skip the bill”
was one headline in the local English-language Nation newspaper.) But to
what end? Now, he faced criminal charges.
Chuwit’s revelations did not stop there. Two police commanders had
owned stakes in two of his massage parlors, he said. Three (unnamed)
cabinet ministers were frequent visitors to his parlors (not me, piped up the
Deputy Interior Minister Pracha Maleenont – he might have visited massage
parlors in the past but not any more, he explained). And Chuwit said that he
had bought expensive wines in France to entertain police and politicians
which he kept in a bonded warehouse in Singapore where the police and
politicians could collect it themselves to avoid high Thai import taxes. The
total cash bribes that Chuwit claimed he had paid to police so that he could
stay in business amounted to around US$300,000 a month.8
Chuwit was held in custody for most of May 2003 before being released
on bail. He was not repentant. He came out of jail and announced that
while there he’d bribed senior officials at Bangkok Central Prison to the
tune of 300,000 baht in exchange for better treatment. The Ministry of
Justice announced an inquiry.9 The administration of the law was rotten,
with corruption at every level in Thailand, and Chuwit was determined to
show it.
206 Inside Knowledge
All Bangkok was titillated by the drama. But Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra was outraged. The police at one station should all be demoted
to what Thaksin called “lower income stations” meaning districts with
fewer bribe-taking opportunities, although the reality was that this would
mean that a whole new batch of policemen would therefore be “promoted”
to replace them. In defence of the police, the national police chief Sant
Sarutanond offered that he was sure that “more than half” of them were
honest.10 He went on to defend an unorthodox raid on Chuwit’s massage
parlors in which scores of police officers had sex with the girls employed
in them and then confiscated the used condoms as “evidence.”11
Thaksin ordered an inquiry into Chuwit’s claims that he had bribed the
police. It was conducted by the police. And so its inevitable conclusion
was that no senior police had committed any wrongdoing. Thaksin was
even more embarrassed. He ordered another inquiry. Chuwit argued that
rather than hypocritically make a fuss about his line of business, the
government should instead support massage parlors by allowing them to
list on the stock exchange. He pointed to the case of Australia, where a
brothel had recently been listed on the Australian stock exchange.
The police countered that if Chuwit was paying as much in bribes as he
claimed, he must be earning at least a billion baht a year, and so a tax
investigation was launched on his earnings. Chuwit was even more
annoyed. All that protection money and once again he was unprotected.
And then the tax office itself expressed its annoyance that Chuwit had paid
more in bribes to police than he had in tax. Next, the Anti-money Laun-
dering Office froze around one billion baht in Chuwit’s assets and he was
charged with running a prostitution business at “one” of his massage
parlors. Chuwit claimed that the freeze left him penniless. He did not have
enough money even to buy his wife a cake for her 42nd birthday, he
complained. It isn’t clear if Chuwit decided to bake one himself. The alle-
gations continued to fly backwards and forwards and the result was that
everyone looked dirty. Chuwit then ran an unsuccessful campaign to be
elected Bangkok’s governor. He ran on an anti-corruption platform. It
would all be so much easier if Thailand simply followed the Singapore
model. Prohibition might outlaw prostitution but it doesn’t get rid of it.
 Flowerhorn
Chapter Fish,
Huanghuali,

20 Zi Beads, and
Bollywood

Asia is home to crazes and fashions that take off nowhere else. It’s impor-
tant to be acquainted with them if one is to truly know Asia – they are of
interest to large segments of the region’s population. Huge resources are
devoted to these otherwise obscure markets. Here is a selection of a few
from fish to food to furniture. And then there are the movies, high on
drama, low on character development, to match the region’s love of spec-
tacle and ornamentation.

Flowerhorn fish

Malaysian company Xian Leng Holdings’ plant and equipment are well
protected. There is a security watchtower, closed circuit televisions, a
double perimeter fence and at night around 40 guard dogs are let loose
around the compound to deter intruders. And what has all of this been
installed to protect? Fish. That’s right: Fish – ornamental fish.
It’s not everywhere that an ornamental fish breeder is listed on the local
stock exchange but Xian Leng Holdings is.1 Not only that but it’s highly
profitable. Pre-tax profits for the year ended January 31, 2003 were
M$21.5 million (US$5.7 million) on revenues of M$49.5 million (US$13
million). Results for 2004 looked like being either comparable or better.2
The company’s leading product is the Asian arowana, for which the
company is the world’s top breeder and exporter. It comprises about 65%
of its business. The rest is largely made up of flowerhorn fish and Japanese
koi. Export sales comprise around 90% of total sales. The main export

207
208 Inside Knowledge
destinations are Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. By
2005, the market still had plenty of room for expansion. Demand for all
types of aquarium fish exceeded supply at existing prices and Xian Leng
intended to increase its farm size from around 60 hectares to more than 160.
Ornamental fish are big business in Asia. Routinely on Amazon.com the
bestselling books among the online retailer’s customers who are based in
Thailand and Malaysia are not books on business but books on how to care
for ornamental fish, with titles like The Interpret Encyclopedia of Koi and
Guppies Today: A Complete and Up-to-date Guide.
Xian Leng is part of this phenomenon. It has 96 breeding ponds and a
permanent staff of 30 workers. Arowanas are aggressive and prefer their
food live and so a sizable cockroach farm has been built to supply live
cockroaches.
At the wholesale level, arowana fry fetch US$50–2500 each, depending
on their characteristics. Xian Leng injects passive integrated tags the size
of a rice grain into each fish so that they can be scanned for inventory
control. The tags also allow the authorities to later identify the farm at
which the fish was bred. (It’s similar to a program in Thailand to implant
the country’s 2460 domesticated elephants with microchips so that they
can be monitored more effectively.)
But it’s the flowerhorn that is the glamour fish of the moment. The craze
for the fish started only around 2000, shortly after it was cross-bred from
several species. Particularly good flowerhorns sell for as much as
US$20,000. But one was expected to bring more than US$300,000 at
auction in 2003.3 The craze for flowerhorns started when someone decided
that they could divine lottery numbers from the black markings along
the sides of the fish. And overnight the flowerhorn fish frenzy was
underway. The distinctive hump on the fish’s back is also said to look like
a similar hump on the Chinese god of longevity. The fish are also associ-
ated with prosperity because of their red-pink coloring. So suddenly,
people believed that the flowerhorn would bring them wealth and luck.
The fish are highly territorial but very responsive to humans which adds to
their attractiveness.

Huanghuali

The market for Huanghuali furniture, another seemingly obscure

collectible in Asia, also has gone through the roof. Huanghuali translates as
yellow rosewood. The species is a hardwood that is now extinct in China
due to overharvesting. It is valued for its open, yellow grain, particularly
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 209

those pieces with marks in the grain that are shaped like tiger stripes. But
the pieces that fetch the highest prices are those with a grain that includes
marks that look like pairs of “ghostly eyes.” This peculiar manifestation
does indeed look like ghostly eyes. They seem almost to waver.
Huanghuali furniture attracts enormous prices. The supply is fixed but
demand continues to rise. Unlike the market for rare antique Chinese
porcelain which is prone to faking, Old Huanghuali furniture is almost
impossible to fake, the primary material now being extinct so there is
almost no available wood with which to make new pieces.
Important collections of antique Chinese hardwood furniture that
include Huanghuali pieces exist in China, for example in the Shanghai
Museum, and elsewhere. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas
City holds one of the world’s best collections. New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and London’s Victoria
and Albert Museum also have important collections.
Pieces do come up at auction. They sell for extraordinary prices.4
Christie’s New York sold several pieces in 1996. An artist’s painting table
sold for US$173,000, a horseshoe-back armchair went for US$530,500,
and even a pair of smallish traveling scholar’s bookcases made
US$200,500. The following year, Christie’s New York sold another
Huanghuali painting table for US$134,500, a small incense stand went for
US$46,000, another horseshoe-back armchair made US$244,500, and a
plain footstool sold for US$17,250. And then on September 19, 1996
Christie’s sold a seventeenth-century Huanghuali standing screen with
marble for US$1,102,500 – a record price for a piece of Chinese furniture
sold at auction. A year later, Christie’s New York auctioned one of the
biggest private collections of classical Chinese furniture – the collection of
Mr and Mrs Robert Piccus. Huanghuali pieces comprised most of the lots,
and around one hundred lots were auctioned for a total of US$2,371,885.
Among the highest prices, was US$321,500 for a pair of Huanghuali
folding stools.5 More recently, a late sixteenth-century daybed sold at
Christie’s New York in September 2004 for US$186,700.6

Sandalwood

Huanghuali is extinct in China because of overharvesting. Another wood

that is in danger of the same fate but in India is sandalwood. India was the
world’s biggest producer of sandalwood, which is prized for its strong
fragrance and the oil that is distilled from the wood. For centuries sandal-
wood has been a part of Hindu and Parsi religious rites. Sandalwood logs
210 Inside Knowledge
were burned along with the body at Hindu cremations. But few can afford
this now. Sandalwood powder is also an important ingredient for joss
(incense) sticks that are burned in China, among Southeast Asia’s Chinese
communities, and in Thailand and Indochina. The oil is also important for
the perfume industry. Among the scents for which it is an ingredient are
Calvin Klein’s Obsession, Christian Dior’s Poison and Yves Saint
Laurent’s Opium.
The southern Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu were home to
the country’s biggest sandalwood forests. But these were nationalized in
the 1960s as was the trade in the wood. But as is usual with public owner-
ship, being owned by everyone means being owned by no one and so the
forests have been overharvested and subject to poaching. Nor has there
being an adequate reforestation program. Now India’s sandalwood forests
are almost extinct. One of the more prominent poachers was Koose
Muniswamy Veerappan, India’s most wanted bandit for more than a
decade. He started out illegally killing Indian elephants for their ivory.
When they became too rare, he moved onto poaching sandalwood. Along
the way he murdered more than a hundred people. His career came to an
end when he himself was killed in a police ambush in October 2004.7
Sandalwood poaching is not only a problem in India but also in Thai-
land where poachers and factory owners have been charged with illegally
acquiring sandalwood (or mai hom as it is known in Thailand). East
Timor was also once a producer of sandalwood, but the poaching and
pillaging there has left little but stunted heathlands where sandalwood
once stood. Most smuggled sandalwood oil is channeled to dealers in the
Middle East.
Prices for the wood and its oil have risen fivefold since 1995. Wood
from a single tree can now bring as much as US$2000.8 Part of the reason
is the length of time taken to maturity. The trees take 25–40 years to reach
commercial viability.
The wood’s growing scarcity in India has had a devastating effect on the
country’s hundreds of sandalwood carvers who produce small sculptures
in intricate designs from the sweet-smelling wood. Many started as ivory
carvers but as ivory grew scarce and subject to international embargoes,
they moved to carving sandalwood. Now they are attempting to switch to
inferior rosewood.
So the country which is now the leader in sandalwood production,
surprisingly, is Australia. Not only that but Australian producers are
moving downstream into incense and joss stick production.9 Increasingly,
they are supplying the ancestor worshippers of Asia with the necessary
accoutrements of their customs.
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 211

The huge demand for sandalwood for incense was apparent on my

opening night visit to the Nan Thien Kwang Chinese Temple in Ampang,
Kuala Lumpur, for the Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods. I accompanied
a local Chinese friend around the temple complex as he prayed before
various deities and offered incense to them. Hundreds of others were there
to do the same. It’s an important occasion in the Chinese calendar – the
nine emperor gods are believed to confer luck, wealth, and long life.
Dozens of stalls are set up outside the temple for the festival period.
They sell ang khoo, turtles made from dough and painted bright red to
symbolize abundance. Many also sell incense sticks, armfuls of them.
Devotees do not burn one or two sticks at a time but handfuls. And so the
temple inside was hazy with blue smoke from thousands of smoldering
sticks. We emerged with sandalwood ash on our clothes and hair.
It’s a nine-day festival that’s celebrated by Chinese communities across
Asia. And that equates to a lot of incense and therefore a lot of sandal-
wood powder.
Australian sandalwood (santalum spicatum) is closely related to the
tropical version. It was first exported from Fremantle in Western Australia
in the 1840s. The early shipments all went to Asia. By 1848, more than
1000 tonnes of the wood was being exported and it was the young
colony’s top export earner, accounting for almost half of export earnings.
By 1901, Western Australia exported almost 8000 tonnes a year. And by
1920, 14,000 tonnes were cut for export. It was sent to India – three tonnes
of Australian sandalwood were added to the funeral pyre of Mahatma
Gandhi in 1948 – although China was the principal destination where it
was processed into joss sticks. But civil war and then revolution saw
China almost disappear as a market.
But today, the market for sandalwood is growing again. Demand for
sandalwood from China is expanding by around 50% a year, as softening
Communist prohibitions on religion and ancestor worship mean that
incense and joss stick burning are coming back into vogue. Today,
Australia exports more than 3000 tonnes of the wood a year. Government
regulations on harvesting have capped exports to around this level but they
will rise when the growing number of sandalwood plantations being
developed in Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Queensland
mature. That takes time though. Sandalwood is a parasitic plant. Devel-
oping a plantation means that first a host plant must be cultivated on which
the sandalwood can then support itself.
One Australian company, Wescorp, exports 200 tonnes of logs and chips
each month. That probably accounts for about a third of the world market.
But it is also developing other export lines such as joss sticks. It produces
212 Inside Knowledge
more than 15,000 sticks each day. Powder is also exported to be made into
incense in China. Sandalwood and sandalwood products are Wescorp’s
core business. A tonne of high-grade Australian sandalwood sells for
around US$7000. Each tonne yields a maximum of only 50 liters of oil.
But the oil fetches around U$350 a litre. And so sandalwood is far more
valuable as oil. Distilleries have been constructed in Australia. And even
after the wood has been through the distillation process, it can still be sold
on to China to make low-grade incense sticks.

Rare Food

Chinese are on a par with the French when it comes to the centrality of
good food. The French, for example, insist that oysters from Concale in
Brittany are far superior to oysters from anywhere else, including just
along the coast, when outsiders are unlikely to discern any difference. The
Chinese particularly in China have many equivalents.
When Chinese mothers send their daughters and particularly their sons to
study in the West, their biggest concern is how their offspring will survive
away from traditional food. The truth is that Chinese supermarkets in, say,
London’s Chinatown are better stocked with a wider variety of Asian food
than most in Asia. One of the reasons is because Western Chinese communi-
ties typically draw on Chinese from across Asia and so the supermarkets
reflect the tastes of Chinese from Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong
Kong, and China rather than the tastes of Chinese from only one country.
Fresh durian, Thai holy basil, snake beans, kaffir lime leaves, betel leaves,
bamboo shoots, jackfruit (nangka), and Indonesian black rice for pulut hitam
are all readily available in London. There’s no shortage of Chinese restau-
rants either. One, the Four Seasons restaurant on London’s Queensway,
almost has cult status among expatriate Chinese for the tenderness of its
roast ducks. It is said that this one unassuming restaurant sells an extraordi-
nary 300 roast ducks a day. There’s usually a queue to get in and inside,
conversation among the customers proceeds in Cantonese, Indonesian, and
Thai, but all are ethnically Chinese.
The desire for strange food in China is well known. But other parts of
Asia follow suit. One of the most expensive coffees in the world is
supposed to be from coffee beans collected in north Sumatra from the
droppings of the civet or wild cat. The cats eat the beans and they pass
through intact, supposedly imparting a wonderful taste to them. They are
collected, ground, and brewed. Coffee obtained in the usual manner
fetches around US$2 a kilo, but civet dropping coffee brings US$100 a
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 213

kilo. “One crappuccino, please.” read the headline in Singapore’s Business

Times over the article that alerted readers to this delicacy.10
The Hong Reng Tang Imperial Herbal Restaurant is famous among
Singaporeans. It’s located in a hotel behind Raffles Hotel; its proprietor is
a local Hainanese Chinese. Inside, at one end, there is a pharmaceutical
counter manned by a white-coated doctor from China. He’s on stand-by to
diagnose the dietary and pharmaceutical needs of the diners. Diners
describe to the doctor how they feel, he might take their temperature or
their pulse, and on the basis of his diagnosis, dishes from the menu are
prescribed. Diners in need of an energy boost are advised to order dishes
that will invigorate them. Those with slight fevers are told to order
“cooling” foods, and so on.
During the 2003 SARS paranoia, the Imperial Herbal Restaurant
prepared a herbal brew designed to boost one’s immunity to the disease.
But on the occasion of my visit, I opted for something more potent: a glass
of deer penis wine with wolfberries. “Good for the eye and blood circula-
tion,” said the waiter. He might have added “but bad for hangover and
wallet.” It was extremely potent and very expensive. No visible evidence
of the penis was in my glass. That remained floating in the bottle. To eat I
had fried egg white with dried scallop, polygonatum and ladybell root;
shredded fish with Chinese yam; and herbal tonic soup with black chicken;
and then a menthol jelly, “clears heat, lubricates lungs,” said the waiter.
Sautéed diced chicken with spicy sauce and walnuts was described as
“good for heart and kidneys.”
The fascination for the perceived medicinal properties of obscure
foods in Asia, however, is undermined somewhat by everyday staples. A
curious aspect of cultivated food crops in Asia is the tendency for them to
have higher cyanide content than elsewhere. Cassava, a tuber cultivated
and eaten by poorer people in Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma has one of
the highest levels of natural cyanide compounds of all cultivated foods.
Most of the cyanide is given off as hydrogen cyanide gas when the
cassava is cooked. But not all of it. Tiny amounts of cyanide might help
to protect against malaria and sickle cell anemia, but larger amounts ulti-
mately are fatal.
Lima beans, which originate in Peru, also contain cyanide. The varieties
grown on Java and in Burma have 20 to 30 times the amount of cyanide as
those varieties cultivated in the US and Europe. Other cultivated crops
popular in Asia that have atypically high levels of cyanide are sorghum,
bamboo shoots, and sweet potatoes.
Gingko nuts are on the menu at the Hong Reng Tang Imperial Herbal
Restaurant. The gingko tree is an ancient tree that has changed little since
214 Inside Knowledge
the time of the dinosaurs. It’s also known as the maidenhair fern tree on
account of the delicate, fern-like shape of the foliage. Gingko nuts in
China and Korea are believed to have medicinal properties and also are
used in traditional cooking.
More than 40% of the 270,000 roadside trees in metropolitan Seoul are
gingko trees. But gingkos are either male or female and it’s only the
female trees that bear nuts. And so of the 108,000 gingkos along public
roads in Seoul, just 13,000 are believed to be female and nut-bearing.11
Picking the nuts is illegal in Seoul. They are the property of the various
municipal councils, which like to harvest them, usually for charity. The
harvested nuts are either sold or given to homes for the aged. The nuts
are believed to be good for relieving coughs and asthma especially among
the elderly.
Another big agribusiness subsector in Asia is orchid cultivation. The
world market for orchids is estimated to be at least US$2 billion annually.
Singapore has long had a foothold in the industry, exporting its cut Singa-
pore orchids around the world. But now the market leader is Thailand.
Almost all the orchids in the leis (garlands) given to tourists as they arrive
in Hawaii now come not from Hawaii but Thailand. Hawaii must now
contend with raising and selling potted orchids. But even this is under
threat. Under a government plan, Taiwan has invested millions in the
potted orchid business and now aims to become the world leader in
exported potted orchids.12 It won’t be long before mainland China follows.

Pearls, Jade, and Zi Beads

Short-term crazes push up the prices of certain stones when fashion

suddenly dictates that they are a necessity. The price of black pearls rock-
eted in Bangkok after the death of the king’s mother in 1995, for example
(who, incidentally was half-Chinese.) Strings of them became the fashion-
able way among wealthy Bangkok women to remain both expensively
attired and demonstrate their loyalty to the royal family with their
mourning. There was ample time in which to wear them. Her Royal High-
ness the Princess Mother (as she was known) died on July 18, 1995. Her
cremation was almost eight months later on March 10, 1996. The crema-
tion ceremony was spectacular and televised on national television. The
extraordinary funeral pyre was 30.5 meters high and was even featured on
a postage stamp issued by the Communications Authority of Thailand.
Black pearls, death and royalty have something of a history in Asia.
Cixi, the powerful dowager empress of China, after her death in 1908 was
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 215

interred with funeral robes that were sewn with 33,560 pearls and 3,660
rubies, sapphires, emeralds and cat’s eyes. But it was a black pearl the
size of a nugget of coal that was popped into the dead woman’s mouth to
feed her spirit on its journey to the afterworld.13 The lot was stolen by
tomb robbers.
But among most Chinese, white and not black is the color that is associ-
ated in death and in Penang, the wealthy Straits Chinese women used to
reserve jewelry with white pearls set in silver for their periods of
mourning. Otherwise they preferred diamonds set in high-carat gold.
China is now the biggest pearl producer in the world. Many come from
the Chinese city of Shanxiahu. Its success has been such that there is now
an international pearl glut. Prices have plummeted. And the market is
likely to deteriorate further. One estimate is that by 2010, China will
produce almost 10,000 tonnes of pearls a year.14 Why China and why
freshwater pearls? The abundance of rice paddies is the answer: farmers
have been substituting pearl production for rice production. And so no
longer are pearls the stuff of luxury and rarity. A trip to the pearl market in
Beijing will confirm that, where it’s possible to see sculptures of horses,
dogs, and goats perhaps as much as 30 centimetres high that are
completely covered in freshwater pearls. With bargaining, they can be had
for as little as US$30 a piece.
Jade has long been a stone held to be precious almost uniquely among
the Chinese. Emperors collected it and sought it as tribute. A jade necklace
once owned by heiress Barbara Hutton and which comprised 27 round
jade beads sold for US$4.3 million at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong in
October 1994. It was the highest price ever paid for an item of jade. A
month later Sotheby’s sold another jade necklace in Hong Kong. This one
comprised 99 smaller beads. It sold for US$1.1 million. Jade necklaces
continued to fetch incredible prices. One sold at Christie’s in Hong Kong
in 1996 for US$2.29 million, for example.
But then another single strand of 27 jade beads came up for auction at
Christie’s in Hong Kong in November 1997. It was known as the “Doubly
Fortunate” necklace and so it proved for its consignee. It sold for US$9.44
million, a new world record for an item of jade and a record for anything
sold at auction in Asia. On a carat-by-carat basis, it made top-quality jade
more expensive than any diamonds or other precious stone. The necklace
had been cut from a lump of jade that originally had weighed 50 kilograms.
The rock had belonged to one of Burma’s most famous rough jade dealers.
But perhaps the most extraordinary recent phenomenon in Asia in the
jewelry stakes is the craze over Tibetan Zi beads (also written as tsi, gzi,
zee and dZi). The beads come from Tibet but do not originate there. Typi-
216 Inside Knowledge
cally they are made from black and sometimes brown agate and have
white stripes, bands and “eyes.” They became fashionable among wealthy
Tibetans who wear them to protect them from ill health. Tibetans believe
that the beads either appeared from the side of a remote mountain in Tibet,
belonged to the sky gods who dropped them, or were small crawling crea-
tures that became fossilized. In fact, they’re all manufactured. Many are
artificially colored. But by whom and when is no longer clear.
The beads are still worn by Tibetans.15 Few wear more than a single
bead. If a bead spontaneously breaks, it is believed to have served its func-
tion, having absorbed the negative energy that otherwise might have seen
its owner mortally injured. Rarely do Tibetans let others touch their beads
and seldom do they part with them even for large sums of cash. If a
Tibetan is willing to sell his or her Zi beads, it’s unlikely that the beads are
especially auspicious. Sometimes the beads are ground to a powder and
swallowed for medical reasons.
The beads are relatively rare and have attracted collectors. But 30 years
ago, the top prices were around US$100. Now they sell for as much as
US$50,000. And that is the price per bead, not per strand. What happened?
The story may be apocryphal but it’s said that perhaps a decade ago, a
building collapsed in Taiwan. There were many casualties and just one
survivor, a man. He was wearing a strand of Zi beads to which his survival
was attributed. And so the scramble for Zi beads was ignited. Their prices
ballooned: tulips, Tokyo apartments, dot.coms, and now the Zi bead
bubble. The craze for Zi beads has spread to other parts of Asia. Busi-
nessmen wear then for luck, such as Lim Chong Kim, head of Malaysian
timber products company Limahsoon, who wore one on a bracelet on his
right wrist at a mid-2004 press conference held in conjunction with his
company’s listing on the local stock exchange.16 Perhaps it worked. The
shares listed with a premium.
With the huge prices that the beads attract, they are now one of the most
faked articles among all Asian antiques. Mostly, the fakes are produced in
Taiwan. From there they even find their way back to Tibet where Tibetans
wear them as if they are original. But copies also are produced in India,
China, Pakistan, and Nepal from serpentine, glass, bone, horn, resin, and
plastic. Glass copies have even been made in Murano, Venice. Itinerant
Nepalese gem traders such as those who operate out of Jalan Petaling in
Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown help to pedal the copies across Asia.
Slowly, the Zi bead fad has spread to the West and found a ready audi-
ence among those enamoured with “Eastern” chic. The rock star Sting, for
example, appeared in Hello! magazine photographed entering a London
society ball in late December 2004 wearing a single conspicuous Zi bead
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 217

hung from a black cord around his neck.17 Perhaps Zi beads are set to be
worn in place of crucifixes among the Hollywood set, breathing more air
into the Zi bead bubble.

Bollywood and the Rest

Movies are not unique to Asia but the films around the region typically
have unique content and formats. The Indian film industry is the world’s
second largest after Hollywood in terms of revenue. Hong Kong’s film
industry is the third largest. But India’s is the largest in terms of new
releases, around 1000 last year. Around 200 films are made by the film
industry that’s centered on Mumbai. Others are produced elsewhere in
India, most notably in the south, where Tamil language movies are
churned out in their hundreds, a comparable industry to Bollywood that
has become known as Sollywood. Spectacular and usually inexplicable
dance scenes are the standard fare of Indian movies. And so India is also
the world’s second largest producer of new release recorded music.
Traditionally, Indian films outside India largely have met demand from
non-resident Indian communities. Or they have been sold as cheap
programming for free-to-air television stations in developing countries that
have cultural ties with India, such as Indonesia and the Middle East. But
this is changing. Bollywood has become fashionable in the West.
Monsoon Wedding (2001) is Bollywood’s biggest commercial success
in the West to date. Filmed in New Delhi in just 30 days, it tells five inter-
secting stories that coincide at a colorful contemporary Punjabi wedding.
It cost around US$1.5 million and, outside India, earned around US$30
million. And the following year, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay
Dreams, a musical about a young Indian slum dweller who makes it big in
Bollywood, opened in London’s West End.
And so the Indian film industry is hot. But it’s also a mess. Most Indian
films, be they from Bollywood, Sollywood or anywhere else, do not make
money. Hundreds are abandoned in production, their backers having run out
of cash. There is even a significant secondary market in unfinished produc-
tions that are bought up, recut and hopefully revived into something salable.
The industry is highly fragmented. Small independent family-owned
production companies dominate. And yet Bollywood stars particularly
demand huge fees and make costly whimsical demands, all of which help
to push up costs. There are signs though of the entry of potentially bigger
players. Both the Tata and the Reliance Groups have announced film
industry investments in recent years.
218 Inside Knowledge
The other surprising aspect of India’s film industry is that despite its
size, India has one of the lowest numbers of cinemas per capita in the
world. China has at least 60,000 screens, five times more than the number
in India.18 Indian cinemas are ramshackle, overcrowded, poorly air condi-
tioned, and are notorious firetraps. High entertainment taxes and low ticket
prices deter greater investment in cinemas.
The structure of earnings is problematic too. Hollywood films generate
just 30% of their revenues from ticket sales. The rest comes from DVD
sales and ancillary media. But for Indian movies the figure is 70%. Pirated
VCDs, DVDs, and CDs abound. Legislation for intellectual property
protection in India is of a high order but enforcement is poor.
The Indian film industry’s other problem is its reputation for organized
crime links. There are claims that as much as 60% of Bollywood film
financing comes from the underworld. That figure is probably way too
high but that’s the trouble with black money. If it could be calculated with
any precision, it could also be eliminated.
One underworld figure was arrested in 2001 after having allegedly
financed 20 films in which he’d forced top stars to sign contracts to appear
in them. But the highest profile arrest was that of Bharat Shah in Mumbai in
2001. Shah was India’s top film financier and distributor and also one of the
country’s biggest exporters of cut and polished diamonds. He was arrested
for allegedly helping an organized crime syndicate to extort money from
well-known Bollywood personalities and in 2003 was jailed for a year.19
But it is in Hong Kong’s film industry that organized criminals have
made the biggest inroads.20 Hong Kong’s triad gangs are well known for
harassing film crews on location, particularly in the New Territories. The
Sun Yee On triad has been particularly active. Demands for protection
money and payoffs are made to ensure that staff are not harassed and sets
are not disturbed. Even the producers of the 1986 Hollywood movie
Shanghai Surprise, starring Madonna and filmed partly in Hong Kong,
reportedly were threatened by triad groups who had to be paid off.
A triad gang fire-bombed the Golden Harvest Film Studio in Hong
Kong in 1984. The studios belonged to Golden Harvest Entertainment, a
Hong Kong company in which Australia’s Village Roadshow built up a
35% stake that it sold in 2000. One of Village Roadshow’s reasons for
selling out was the “growing and rampant” piracy of VCDs and DVDs in
Hong Kong. Much of the piracy is in triad hands.
Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, and Chow Yun Fatt, three of the most famous
actors in Hong Kong’s film industry, have admitted to paying money to
triads in the past. And the house of Andy Lau’s personal assistant was fire-
bombed in 1993 in what appeared to be a triad-related incident.21
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 219

The triads themselves have gone into movie making themselves rather
than simply trying to extort money from the industry. Now whole movies
are believed to come from triad-owned studios. Stories circulate that actors
face pressure to take roles they don’t want. Similar stories have come out
of India.
Additionally, Hong Kong movies that once found an easy market in
other Asian countries now face heavy competition from locally made films
and Bollywood. Hong Kong movies cannot even be readily shown in
mainland China. They are regarded as “foreign” and subject to heavy
restrictions. A concession was granted in 2003 that Hong Kong-made
movies that are co-productions between mainland China and Hong Kong
production houses would be treated by China as if they were mainland
made.22 But piracy in China and elsewhere has also taken a heavy toll on
the Hong Kong industry. One recent notable success, House of Flying
Daggers (2004) starring Andy Lau, actually topped the London box office
in January 2005 for several weeks, ahead of the two more obvious candi-
dates Aviator and Shrek 2. But it could not properly be classed as a Hong
Kong movie: it was filmed largely in China by Zhang Yimou, a mainland
Chinese director.
While the Hong Kong film industry is in the doldrums, South Korea’s is
booming. Revenues in South Korea for local productions are at record
highs and foreign earnings for South Korean films were more in the first
six months of 2004 than all of 2003.23 Critical acclaim has come too. In
2004, director Park Chan Wook’s Old Boy won the Grand Prix at the 2004
Cannes Film Festival and Kim Ki Duk won best director awards at the
Venice and Berlin film festivals. A dark spot might come from the removal
of the quota of screens reserved for showing Korean-made movies. By
early 2005, the US was lobbying the Korean government for the quota
system to be abolished so that American movies would have better access
to the South Korean market, and it is likely that South Korea will have to
accede to the US’ wishes.
In Southeast Asia, there is a burgeoning movie industry too, particu-
larly in Thailand, which has also become a popular place for Hollywood
movies to be filmed on location. Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great
(2004), for example, was filmed partly in Thailand. But Southeast Asia’s
cost-competitiveness was eroded in the wake of the 2002 bombings on
the Indonesian island of Bali – insurance premiums for foreign film crews
working in Asia rose several fold.24 The December 2004 Indian Ocean
tsunami also did little to help. Phi Phi Island in Thailand’s south was
particularly hard hit by the tsunami; this being where The Beach, starring
Leonardo DiCaprio, was filmed in 2000.
220 Inside Knowledge
Singapore has a small film industry. But Singapore movies tend to pull
in audiences at home by breaking taboos and evading censorship stric-
tures. That might be a drawcard domestically but it provides little appeal
to foreign audiences. Eric Khoo is a prominent film maker in Singapore.
But then he can afford to be. His late father was billionaire Khoo Teck Put,
who owned almost 15% of the UK’s Standard Chartered Bank.

Beliefs and Business

Beliefs and superstitions tend to have a significant impact on business in

Asia perhaps more than most places. Overseas Chinese businesspeople are
important to many economies in the region so here are some examples that
relate particularly to them.
The Chinese Hungry Ghost month when the spirits of the dead visit the
earth has important implications for business. It is not an auspicious month
for big decisions. Many Chinese tend to prefer to avoid making big ticket
purchases like condominiums and other property and so it is a slow month
for real estate agents and developers. Typically, launches for new real
estate developments are delayed in Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere
until after this month. New car sales slow and nor is it a good time to hold
major art auctions or jewelry sales.
Business at the brothels of Singapore slows right down on days before a
big horse race (many Chinese men fear that visiting prostitutes just before
placing a bet will bring bad luck), but also it slows during the Hungry
Ghost Month. Chinese should be more pious if the spirits of their dead
relatives are visiting, so visits to prostitutes are precluded.
Ramadan is another slow time. Muslims are not supposed to engage in
sexual relations during the daylight hours of Ramadan and are expected to
be more pious anyway during the fasting months. Cheap hotels in
Malaysia that can be rented by the hour similarly experience marked
declines in their occupancy rates during Ramadan. But even in the
evenings business can be slow as most Muslim men are busy with buka
puasa – breaking their fast, usually with big celebratory dinners with
friends, relatives, and business colleagues. Incidentally, the fast-breaking
feasts are so large and typically elaborate that counter-intuitively food
consumption actually rises significantly in Asia’s Islamic countries during
the fasting month. Food imports rise and many food importers carry cold
storage excess capacity for the rest of the year to cope with extra demand
during Ramadan.
There is much concern among many Chinese about evil spirits and
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 221

ghosts. Screens are places across entrances and rooms because it is

believed that such spirits are unable to turn corners. That is why when you
enter many Chinese restaurants even outside Asia the first thing you are
confronted with is a screen. And when many Chinese men urinate outside,
so concerned are they that they might be urinating on an unmarked grave
that they whisper “excuse me” or words to that effect to the spirits that
might inhabit the site.
Mirrors are another device to stop evil spirits in their tracks. The spirits
are believed to be so ugly that if they see a reflection of themselves they are
likely to take fright and disappear. And so the elevator lobbies and the
elevators themselves of many Chinese-owned buildings are lined with
mirrors to discourage spirits from going upstairs and causing havoc with
the business environment. (Women like them too because they can re-apply
their lipstick.)
Chinese geomancy or feng shui can be important and nowhere more so
than in Hong Kong. Almost no buildings are built without due regard for
feng shui considerations. The entire layout of Hong Kong Disneyland for
which construction commenced around 2002 was rotated several degrees
on the advice of a feng shui expert, for example.25
But feng shui is important in many Chinese communities and not just in
Hong Kong. In Thailand, for example, Banthoom Lamsam, the Thai
Chinese head of Thai Farmers Bank and an ardent feng shui devotee, had
his bank’s head office built in the shape of a sword to negate the effects of
the Rama IX bridge in front of the site which appears to “cut” horizontally
across it. Feng shui principles were used to determine the building’s
furnishings and layout. Banthoom even changed his hairstyle on the
advice of feng shui experts.26
In Kuala Lumpur, MAA, the country’s premier private insurer, has
taken advantage of feng shui in a reverse way. The company is controlled
by businesspeople who are Muslim and Malay and so not concerned by
feng shui. The company relocated its corporate headquarters to a tower
built over cemetery land and which backs directly on to a large cemetery
in central Kuala Lumpur. Former cemetery land sells at a big discount on
account of its poor feng shui. This opens the way for attractive deals for
those not concerned by such things such as the owners of MAA. But if
building over such land is unavoidable, precautions can be taken.
The massive Ngee Ann City shopping and office complex that sits mid-
way along Singapore’s Orchard Road is built over an old Chinese ceme-
tery. It is 55% owned by a Teochiu clan group, the Ngee Ann Kongsi,
which has long owned the land on which the centre is built, hence the
cemetery. The architects had had a big job: how to negate the bad feng
222 Inside Knowledge
shui that comes from building over former cemetery land? On the advice
of feng shui experts, Ngee Ann City was built back from the road and
designed to have the appearance of a massive Chinese grave. Its façade is
surfaced with red-tinged granite. For auspicious reasons, there is a water
pond in front in the forecourt. It has large statues either side. And there are
tall flagpoles out the front to represent the joss sticks that are burnt before
Chinese graves. (Similarly, leaving chopsticks standing in one’s dish is
very poor form: it converts them from implements for food, thus symbol-
izing abundance and life, to representations of joss sticks before a grave,
thus symbolizing death.)
Each year, at the time of the Hungry Ghost Festival, Ngee Ann City’s
management sets up a massive Taoist paper kingdom in front of the shop-
ping centre which they then burn to appease the spirits of all the dead who
were buried beneath. But how many Western tourists are aware of all this
as they step around it to shop at the boutiques inside? How many hungry
ghosts lurk in the Gucci boutique or in Cartier?
Death is a serious matter for everyone but perhaps no nation is more
superstitious about it than the Chinese. I once made the grievous error of
writing in a previous book that a prominent Chinese businessman had
recently passed away. He hadn’t, it was his brother who had died. Other
Chinese pointed out my error with hushed tones and reminders about how
superstitious Chinese are. I promised to correct the error in the next edition.
But there was no need. Within three months, the said man did in fact die. I
suppose I would feel contrite if I was superstitious. But I’m not.
Also so in Singapore, the Overseas Union Bank (OUB) that sits between
Raffles Place and Boat Quay stands on the site of the original Robinson’s
department store that burned down in 1972. Several people were trapped in
the lifts during the fire and died. Accordingly, part of the exterior of OUB
comprises a waterfall that was put in place on the advice of feng shui
experts. The waterfall is supposed to have the effect of dousing the fire. For
a time, the OUB tower was the tallest in the world outside the US. It was
completed in 1986 but its official opening was delayed until August 8,
1988, or 8-8-88, symbolizing quadruple good luck (the mandarin and
Cantonese words for “eight” being homonyms for wealth.)27
Not only do Chinese in Asia believe in spirits and ghosts. The people of
East Timor have a belief system that mixes strict Catholicism with
animism. Many believe that East Timor’s President Xanana Gusmao has
the ability to turn himself into a tree which is why he evaded capture by
Indonesian forces for so long.
Officials at the June 2003 APEC trade ministers meeting that was held
in Thailand’s Khon Kaen briefly thought that a large gathering of more
 Flowerhorn Fish, Huanghuali, Zi Beads,and Bollywood 223

than a thousand local people was an anti-APEC protest. It turned out that it
was a ceremony to exorcise pee paub, a type of ghost that feeds on raw
human entrails and which was suspected of causing the deaths of several
locals. The APEC trade meeting made little progress. But the pee paub
hunt was a success. A three-hour search of the local community yielded a
total of 39 ghosts. Nine were pee paub, the officiating Buddhist monk
explained. The rest were other ghosts and stray spirits.28
Many Buddhist ceremonies were held along the beaches of the southern
Thai island of Phuket in early 2005 in the wake of the tsunami. Thousands
died and so many ghosts needed to be placated. Tuk tuk drivers reported
picking up passengers, often Westerners, who then disappeared mid-journey,
leaving only water where they’d been sitting. Ceremonies were held to catch
stray souls in paper lanterns and the souls were later released at temples.29
Astrologers in India typically are consulted as to the timing of
weddings. Most regard that a single phase of the moon around the Hindu
spring festival to be the most auspicious time. And so in New Delhi, for
example, many of the year’s weddings occur in the space of a fortnight.
This drives up the rental for things like marquees and outdoor furniture.
And the business consequences of this? It’s not a good time to stage an
event associated with the launch of a new product or service. Rental for
the necessary equipment can be astronomic.
Belief in feng shui and the auspicious arrangement and timing of things
is not restricted to Asia or Asians. Italian Australian property tycoon Bruno
Grollo is building Eureka Tower in Melbourne, billed as the world’s tallest
apartment tower. It will be 88 storeys high on completion, an apparent tilt
to the Chinese belief that eight is an auspicious number. When Grollo
faced tax evasion charges in Melbourne in November 2000, he hired teams
of people to sit in the courtroom to direct positive mental energy at him
and the jury. A team of people at an ashram in India were also paid to
meditate for him to be found not guilty. A feng shui expert advised him
how to enter the court room and on the basis of that he refused to use the
public entrance and only ever used the room’s rear door. Grollo was
acquitted of the charges. No doubt that reaffirmed his belief in feng shui
and the benefits of meditation. For good measure he did also hire
Australia’s best corporate criminal defence team to defend him.
 Chapter Making Money
and Avoiding

21 Prejudice: Asia’s
Parsis

There are probably fewer than 140,000 Parsis worldwide. About 80,000
live in Mumbai, a city of 14 million people. Like the Jews of Europe or the
Chinese of Southeast Asia, the Parsis of India and Pakistan are a distinct
but exceptionally successful commercial minority. India’s biggest
conglomerate, its biggest software company, one of its biggest construc-
tion groups, one of its biggest textile exporters, and, worldwide, the
second biggest name in tea bags, Tetley Tea, are all in Parsi hands. As
much as half the real estate in Mumbai has been in Parsi hands, and prob-
ably a similar proportion in Karachi. Wander around Mumbai’s financial
district and you will see that many of the large, older buildings have
noticeable Persian-style design features that betray the Persian heritage of
their Parsi owners. Importantly, the Parsis have achieved all this without
attracting envy and prejudice.
The Parsis come from India but they are not ethnically Indian. They are
the descendants of the followers of the Zoroastrian sect whose members
fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the eighth century.
By the nineteenth century, Bombay’s Parsi families dominated the city’s
commercial sector. Spinning and dyeing was a Parsi activity. Financing
was another. Wealth from these activities was put into property so that by
1855, it was estimated that Parsi families owned about half of the island of
Bombay. The largest single Parsi landlord was Dadabhai Pestanji Wadia.
He owned about a quarter of the island.1 Parsi landlords are still prominent
in Mumbai. Property developers today that want to move into Mumbai
must deal with Parsi landlords more often than not.
Parsis also became very important in the shipping business and the

224
 Making Money and Avoiding Prejudice:Asia’s Parsis 225

India–China trade. Family members were sent to Hong Kong and

Shanghai to help run the shipping and trade businesses from there, much
as overseas Chinese tended to fan out family members to chase business
opportunities. Descendants of these outpost Parsi entrepreneurs still live
in Hong Kong.
Today, among the Parsi names that are big in business in Mumbai are
the Tata (Tata Group), Godrej (Godrej Group), and Wadia (Bombay
Dyeing & Manufacturing Company) families. Shapoorji Pallonji & Co is
one of India’s biggest construction companies and it is owned by Pallonji
Shapoorji Mistry, a billionaire Parsi businessman.
Parsis have long dominated the Karachi business community too,
particularly in real estate, hotels, shipping, port development, and bever-
ages. The late Parsi businessman Eduljee Dinshaw owned so much land in
Karachi that the local government is believed to have placed an informal
ban on him acquiring any more. Jamshed Nusserwanjee, a former mayor
of Karachi, was a Parsi. Today, the Parsi community in Pakistan numbers
fewer than 6000 but it still wields enormous commercial clout.
The Parsi Minwalla family opened the Hotel Metropole in central
Karachi in the 1950s. As if to emphasize the family’s Parsi/Persian roots,
the Shah of Iran opened it in 1951. The hotel remains in the family’s
hands. Today, the Avari family is perhaps the most visible Parsi business
family in Karachi (see below).
The Parsis were especially prominent in business in Hong Kong.
Twelve of the 62 founding members of the Hong Kong General Chamber
of Commerce were Parsis. Most of the rest were British. (There were no
founding Chinese members, local or otherwise. They had their own
chamber.) A Parsi developed large parts of Kowloon and another Parsi
founded the Star Ferry services. The privately held Ruttonjee Estates is a
big commercial property company in Hong Kong. The Parsi Shroff and
Ruttonjee families own it. These families still maintain close links with the
Parsi community in Mumbai. Stalwart of the Ruttonjee family, Jehangir
Ruttonjee, founded Hong Kong’s Ruttonjee Hospital. Today, however,
there are thought to be just 200 Parsis left in Hong Kong.
The Parsis in Hong Kong traditionally have been involved in money
lending. The Parsi linkage with money handling is why the finance column
in the Hong Kong-based weekly magazine, the Far Eastern Economic
Review was called “Shroff;” Shroff being a common Parsi surname. Simi-
larly, offices in Hong Kong that handle small payments such as parking
fees in high-rise car parks are called “shroff offices,” or simply “shroffs” –
a term that has such widespread acceptance in Hong Kong that many
Hong Kong residents don’t realize that the term is unique to Hong Kong.
226 Inside Knowledge
In Singapore, Parsee Road is the name of the road that runs between the
Monetary Authority of Singapore building and its car park, a further allu-
sion to the historic money-handling role of the Parsis.
A group of Parsis had migrated to Singapore in 1829 and became
prominent merchants. (A Parsi burial ground even stood in Singapore at
Mount Palmer until it was cleared around 1970.) Navroji Mistri was a
well-known Singapore Parsi businessman, after whom Mistri Road is
named. He was born in Bombay in 1885 and came to Malaya in 1909, in
1925, he founded the Phoenix Aerated Water Company in Singapore. Part
of the wealth that he generated from this went to pay for the 200-bed
Mistri Children’s Wing at the Singapore General Hospital in 1954.2
Parsis have turned up in prominent finance-related roles on the world
stage too. Two examples are Homi Kharas who is the World Bank’s chief
economist for the East Asia and Pacific region, and Jim Wadia, former
worldwide managing partner of the now defunct accounting firm Arthur
Andersen.
The Parsi religion, Zoroastrianism, is one of the world’s oldest. It
teaches the importance of the elements, particularly fire. Zoroastrian
pilgrims had, for example, come from Persia from the Middle Ages
onwards to erect temples and worship the mysterious fire that shot out of
the earth in certain parts of Azerbaijan, fueled by underground wells of
natural gas.3
Each Parsi fire temple has a central, sacred flame that is never allowed
to go out. (Mumbai has around fifty fire temples.) Traditionally, the bodies
of dead Parsis are laid out in so-called “towers of silence” and crows are
then allowed to feed on them. Cremation would “pollute” fire and burial
would “pollute” the earth. In Mumbai, the principal towers of silence are
adjacent to the city’s so-called “hanging gardens” that are built over the
covered water tanks that hold the city’s water supply. The towers are not
visible either from the road that passes by or the gardens. There are plenty
of crows though.
Although they are well off as a community, the Parsis are dying out. It
has been estimated that a thousand Parsis die each year in Mumbai, but
only 300–400 are born.4 Today, one in five Mumbai Parsis is aged 65 or
more. In 1901 the figure was one in fifty. The Parsi Council in Mumbai
offers Parsi families who have a third child 1000 rupees a month until the
child turns 18 to try to promote greater fertility but to date only about a
hundred families have taken up the offer despite the scheme’s existence
for more than a decade.
In part, the Parsis’ dwindling number is due to their affluence.
Community members are marrying older if they marry at all and are
 Making Money and Avoiding Prejudice:Asia’s Parsis 227

having fewer children. But it’s also due to strict sanctions against marrying
outside the faith. Traditionally, the children of Parsi women who married
outside the religion were not considered Parsis but that was extended in
March 2003 when a group of high priests issued a resolution that declared
that marriages of Parsi Zoroastrian men or women to people of other faiths
are invalid under the religion. It also declared the children of such
marriages would not be admitted into the Zoroastrian faith. One in three
Mumbai Parsis are believed to marry outside the faith.
Parsis have been influential in areas other than business too. Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi’s husband, Feroze Ghandi, was a Parsi. At the time
of writing, Parsis held the positions of finance minister in Sri Lanka (Kersi
Choksy) and attorney general in India (Soli Sorabjee).
Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock group Queen, was another
famous Parsi. His real name was Farookh Bulsara and he was born in
Zanzibar to a local Parsi family. “The Seven Seas of Rhye,” a song penned
by Mercury for Queen, is largely unintelligible unless you know some-
thing of Zoroastrianism, which holds that seven seas were created to
divide all the land into seven regions or karshvar that are matched by
seven heavens. World-renowned conductor Zubin Mehta is another Parsi.
He was born in Bombay.
Parsis were among the first immigrants from India to make their mark in
Britain. In the period 1890 to 1935, three were elected to the House of
Commons: they were Dadabhai Naoroji (Liberal Party), Sir Muncherjee
Bhownaggree (Conservative Party), and Shapurji Saklatvala (Labour and
Communist Parties.)
Keki Dadiseth, worldwide president of Unilever’s Home and Personal
Care Division, is a Parsi. He is now based in London. He had been the
chairman of Hindustan Lever in India. Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra
Beer, the best-known Indian beer produced in the UK, is another UK-based
Parsi. Born in Hyderabad in 1961, Bilimoria’s beer is now sold in more
than 5000 Indian restaurants across the UK and is exported to 30 countries.
He was named as UK’s “Asian of the Year” in 2002. Cyrus Todiwala is
another UK Parsi. He runs the popular Café Spice Namaste restaurant in
the City of London and another, The Parsi, in London’s Highgate.
Food is one of the Parsis’ several distinctive characteristics. It’s a fusion
of Indian and Persian styles. Mumbai is where it is at its most authentic but
few restaurants there actually serve it. The small Jimmy Boy Restaurant near
the Bombay Stock Exchange is one that does. There I have enjoyed Patra ni
Macchhi (fish coated in a coconut and coriander chutney and then steamed
in a banana leaf), Margi na Farcha (chicken marinated then coated and deep
fried), Chicken Dhansak (very thick, spicy gravy with chicken), and Lagan
228 Inside Knowledge
nu Custard (baked custard with cardamom and rose water; lagan means
“wedding” in the Parsi dialect). The last with its cardamom and rose water is
particularly Persian. These are also the four dishes mentioned as particularly
Parsi dishes in Family Matters, the novel about Parsi life in Mumbai by the
writer Rohinton Mistry, a Mumbai-born Parsi who now lives in Canada.5
Another Mumbai restaurant that has Parsi influence is Leopold’s. It serves
pomegranate juice, a particularly Persian and yet Parsi beverage.
Parsis also have a passion for art and antiques. The better antique shops
in Mumbai tend to be managed by Parsis. And one of the greatest dealers
and collectors of Indian antiques is Nasli Heeramaneck, a Parsi based in
New York. He donated the bulk of his vast collection to the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. Antiques are a passion that the Parsis have with
that other successful commercial diaspora, the Jews.

The Biggest Parsi Names in Business

Tata Group is controlled by the Mumbai-based Tata family. It comprises

around 300 companies and approximately 300,000 employees across
seven divisions: engineering, materials (such as steel), power, chemicals,
communications and IT, services, and consumer products. The group is
involved in everything from automotive components to life insurance. Its
hotels division has 54 hotels in India and overseas. It bought Tetley Tea
worldwide in 2000 for US$421 million, and in 2004 the truck division of
South Korea’s Daewoo for US$102 million and the steel and related
businesses of Singapore’s only steel company NatSteel for US$297
million.6 Annual revenues are more than US$11 billion.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the group’s crown jewel, is not just
India’s but Asia’s largest IT company.7 It has 28,000 employees, annual
revenues of more than US$1.5 billion and staff working in more than 30
countries. TCS was floated on the Bombay Stock Exchange in July 2004
with spectacular results. It was India’s biggest ever IPO and even though
just 14% of the company was offered to outside shareholders, it raised
more than US$1 billion for Tata Sons, which intend to use the funds for
more acquisitions and to buy shares in group members to strengthen the
group’s cohesion. The shares rose by almost 27% after their listing,
valuing TCS at almost US$11 billion.
Tata Group was established by Jamshedji Nasarvanji Tata. His father
sent him to Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1860s to help promote
foreign trade for his father’s firm. He dealt in cotton, opium, tea, silks,
camphor, cinnamon, copper, brass, and gold. In 1869, he returned to
 Making Money and Avoiding Prejudice:Asia’s Parsis 229

Bombay and established a cotton mill and later a steel mill which became
Tata Iron and Steel Company. This company supplied railway tracks to the
British administration.
In 1903, Tata opened the Taj Mahal Hotel, supposedly after he had been
refused entry to one of the city’s European hotels on account of being “a
native.” The majestic Taj Mahal Hotel, which overlooks the Apollo
Bunder and the Gateway of India monument, remains Mumbai’s most
luxurious hotel.
The group is headed by Ratan Tata. He stepped down as chairman in
December 2002 and now serves as group non-executive chairman. Now in
his sixties, Ratan never married and, according to Mumbai gossip, isn’t
likely to. The community’s dwindling numbers means that marriage and
children are topics of endless fascination among elderly Parsis. Ratan
apparently shies away from local Parsi parties and functions because he
has long tired of fending off questions about his lack of a wife. He is
nonetheless supportive of the international Parsi community particularly in
the area of the arts. He is said to have sponsored numerous visits to
Mumbai of the conductor Zubin Mehta and is even said to have put
Freddie Mercury’s mother up at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Bhicoo Manekshaw,
the Mumbai-born Parsi food writer, was employed at the Taj Mahal Hotel
as a food consultant and expert chef.8
Historically, many and perhaps most senior management roles in the
group have been filled by Parsis, for example, Xerxes Desai was appointed
managing director of the group’s Titan Industries and Russi Mody headed
Tata Steel until he was replaced by another Parsi, Jamshed Irani. Another,
A.H. Tobaccowala headed up Voltas, Tata’s white goods subsidiary, and,
Darbari Seth headed Tata Chemicals. One further is Fredie Mehta, a
director of Tata Sons. But the preference for Parsis is not diminishing with
the passing of the old guard. In 2001, another Parsi, Homi Khusrokhan, a
former managing director of Glaxo and Burroughs Wellcome India, was
appointed managing director of Tata Tea.
Today, Tata Sons functions as the group’s holding company. It has
stakes of around 26% in most listed Tata companies. And in turn, 11 Parsi
charitable trusts established by the Tata family control about 63% of Tata
Sons. (Each trust is named after a Tata family member or the family gener-
ally.) The Tata family’s actual holding in Tata Sons is now around 2%. The
largest individual stockholder in Tata Sons with about 18% is another Parsi
billionaire businessman, Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry. He is the father-in-law
of Ratan Tata’s half-brother Noel. And so it turns out that the ultimate
owner of Tetley Tea, be it in London, Sydney, or Hong Kong, is a series of
Parsi charitable trusts.
230 Inside Knowledge
Mumbai’s Wadia family controls Bombay Dyeing & Manufacturing
Company. The family has been in business since the 1700s. Today it is one
of India’s biggest manufacturers and exporters of textiles. The board of
directors is dominated by fellow Parsis. Nuslia Wadia, the current
chairman, is the grandson of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of
Pakistan, on account of Jinnah having married the daughter of a wealthy
Bombay Parsi industrialist. Nuslia is close to Ratan Tata, the current head
of Tata Group. His son Jehangir (or more simply, Jeh) will likely take over
management of the group from Nuslia. Jehangir announced plans in 2004
for a low-cost airline based in India.
The massive Mumbai-based Godrej Group is another prominent Parsi-
owned enterprise, owned by the Godrej family. A conglomerate built by
four generations of this close-knit business family, Godrej today is a
household name in India. The Godrej name appears on a diverse range of
products that includes locks and safe deposit lockers, soap, cosmetics and
toiletries, edible oils, packaged foods, and home appliances.
Shapoorji Pallonji & Co is one of India’s biggest construction
companies. It is owned by Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry, the single largest
individual shareholder in Tata Sons. The company has built several of Tata
Group’s biggest plants as well as the Reserve Bank of India’s 25-storey
tower in Mumbai, the Mumbai Oberoi Hotel, the State Bank of India head-
quarters in Mumbai, the Hotel Taj Intercontinental in Mumbai, the Indira
Gandhi Airport in New Delhi and the Palace Complex of the Sultan of
Oman. Pallonji Mistry owns large tracts of land in Mumbai. He also owns
a stake in Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) through his stake in Tata Sons.
Shortly after TCS was listed in 2004, it was calculated that his effective
stake in TCS was worth US$1.7 billion alone.9
In Pakistan, the Avari family owns the Avari Plaza commercial complex
in central Karachi, next to its Avari Towers Hotel. It controls Spencer &
Co. listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange, and has pharmaceutical inter-
ests, the Beach Brewery company, and travel agency interests. Other
hotels owned by the family are the Ramada Hotel Toronto, the Avari Hotel
Dubai, the Avari Hotel Lahore and the Beach Luxury Karachi.

Rich,Yes, but not Targets

The Parsis have not been the targets for violence and prejudice, unlike the
Jews and Southeast Asia’s Chinese. And yet the Parsis are a community
built on excluding others. As mentioned, Parsis are forbidden to marry
outside their faith and the children of those who do are not considered
 Making Money and Avoiding Prejudice:Asia’s Parsis 231

Parsis. Non-Parsis are not permitted to enter Parsi fire temples. They are
noticeably distinct on account of their fair skin and European features.
And they are notorious for preferring to employ other Parsis as senior
managers in their companies, to the exclusion of others.
Attributes like these ought to attract suspicion and antagonism but they
haven’t. Early on, the Parsis were careful to make concessions to assimi-
late and ensure that their demeanor was not one of arrogance.
Legend has it that when, in the eighth century, boatloads of the first
Parsis to come to India waited offshore for permission to land, the local
Hindu ruler sent them a full glass of milk to suggest that there was no
room for them. They sent the milk back with a gold ring in it. The impli-
cation was that they would enrich the local population without disturbing
it. (A less charitable interpretation is that it was a bribe or at least it
symbolized what the ruler might earn if he allowed them to stay.)
Another local ruler only permitted Parsis to settle in his area if they
agreed that the women would adopt local dress, learn the local Gujarati
language and hold their wedding ceremonies only at night to conform with
Hindu practice. The Parsis also methodically sought to emphasize in their
own religion those customs most similar to Hindu practices and to de-
emphasize those that were not.10 Zoroastrian codes were rewritten to take
account of this.
But perhaps the most crucial element of their acceptance among local
Hindus and Muslims is their philanthropy, which by any measure is extra-
ordinary. The Zoroastrian injunction that “happiness to him that brings
happiness to others” provides a clue. Parsis, wherever they are, are well
known as big donors to good works. Hospitals, medical centers, schools,
housing colonies, universities, libraries, nursing homes, hospices, and
other institutions for the public good have all been established by local
Parsis communities. Sensibly, they nearly always carry the (Parsi) name of
their principal benefactor. This serves as a constant reminder of the Parsis’
generosity. India’s first cancer hospital was built and paid for by Parsis, for
example. Mumbai is dotted with these institutions, each one a reminder of
the Parsis’ massive contribution not just to themselves but to the well-
being of non-Parsis. And Tata Group, India’s biggest conglomerate and
managed by Tata family members, is actually owned by a series of Parsi
charitable trusts.
Mumbai’s highly regarded Prince of Wales Museum (now known as
the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya) was founded in
1905, largely from donations from local Parsi businessmen.11 They
provided the funds for the building as well as artifacts from their private
collections. Sir Ratan Tata bequeathed his art collection to the museum in
232 Inside Knowledge
1921. Later a part of the collection of his brother Sir Dorab Tata was also
given to the museum. One of the museum’s most beautiful pieces is an
extremely rare late nineteenth-century small ivory sculpture of a Parsi girl
in traditional costume.
A retired law professor who is a Hindu said to me in Mumbai: “No one
in India would see the Parsis now as anything but Indian.” This is the real
success of the Parsis: not their riches but their acceptance.
And so the Parsis have managed to achieve something that few
commercial minorities have managed anywhere. They have managed to
remain a distinct, separate, and prosperous community and yet one that is
liked and respected by the general population. Their mixture of humility,
some concessions on culture and language, and their good works that
extend beyond the confines of their own community have seen them
undergo the conversion from aliens to “family.” The Parsis provide a
lesson for those in business everywhere.
 Chapter The Far East

22 and other
Nonsense

What’s the best way to think about Asia? Not as a discrete mass but as a
continuum. It makes little sense for outsiders to view Asia in terms of
“them” and “us” in this fluid, dynamic world. As the late Edward Said
wrote:

Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on

the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other,
and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic
mode of understanding can allow.1

Yes, Asia is different for many non-Asians but it need not be alien. There
are signs everywhere of the overlap that Said writes about. Look at
Worcestershire sauce, a nineteenth-century English concoction. It was
known in the Straits settlements of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang as ang
moh tau yu (white man’s sauce, in Hokkien).2 But look at its ingredients:
vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, molasses, tamarind, shallots, anchovies, ginger,
chillies, cloves, nutmeg, and cardamom. This most English of sauces is
decidedly Asian.
The converse is also true: those in Asia should not see those outside as
particularly difficult or foreign. Of course cultures, and nationalities even,
have tendencies that are specific to them (just as racism nearly always
starts with a kernel of truth) but they blur at the margins; the tendencies
are approximations. So Chapter 18 on five-star hotels and their guests can
only ever be a rough guide to be taken with a pinch of salt – instructive
perhaps but not prescriptive. There is no black or white, “us” and “other.”

233
234 Inside Knowledge
We differ only by degree. Approximations are useful but they are only
ever that.
And of course ignorance is not a one-way street. Singaporean news-
papers are notorious for overplaying small news reports to portray the
US, Europe or Australia as crime ridden, with licentious attitudes to sex
(this from a country with a huge government-organized commercial sex
industry) and narcotic drugs, and prone to racist attacks against Asians.
It helps to make Singaporeans feel happy to be Singaporean and to
discourage emigration. Similarly, Chinese have absolutely insisted to
me that Western television stations show hard core pornography each
night, that Westerners never eat rice (never mind the rice pudding of the
English, the paella of the Spanish and the risotto of the Italians or that
the US and Australia are two of the biggest rice-growing countries in
the world), and that Westerners never drink water because it is too
“plain” for their tastes and so they almost invariably drink beer with
their meals. And aren’t those who opine that Australians are racist racist
themselves? Or that Americans are ignorant are at once showing them-
selves to be?
But old habits die hard. In this age of globalization, the English and
their imitators still insist on calling Asia the Far East, usually with
emphasis on the word “Far” as if those who live there are somehow
unfortunate to be living so “far” from Europe. But how ridiculous, say,
for an Australian to have to call the Near North the Far East, or indeed
for anyone. In any event, the world isn’t flat. It’s round, in which case if
you keep travelling east you’ll eventually end up where you started, so
how east is east? And what if China becomes as ascendant as some
people say, and becomes the world’s largest economy? Will we then call
Europe the Far West, to reflect its place in the new order of things? Will
Tibet or India become the Near West? Isn’t it time for modern multina-
tionals to shed the flat earth nomenclature of the past and replace their
Far East strategies and their Far East managers with Asia strategies and
Asia managers?
Asia has variably been described as exotic, “far,” mysterious or
inscrutable. But all these are ways of describing just one condition: a
dearth of quality information. They are confessions of ignorance. And
more than that. Label Asia as the “mysterious East” and it becomes both
an admission and an excuse: an admission of ignorance and an excuse not
to do anything about it. Mystery invokes the unknowable, the impene-
trable: why try to understand what we cannot even hope to? But there is no
mystery. Just research to be done.
Information is the lifeblood of business. It is the single most essential
 The Far East and other Nonsense 235

business input. And it’s the one input that should not be economized on.
But what counts as business information? The answer is everything,
particularly in Asia. For business does not proceed in isolation, particu-
larly in Asia. Businesspeople are more than what they do in their places of
employment. And in Asia, where personal connections count for so much,
the scope of what constitutes business information is very much wider.
Know that and you will be on your way to being streetwise in Asia.
 Notes

Chapter 2
1 Wall Street Journal, “Filipinos pick strange names, trying to stand out in crowd,” April 18,
2000.
2 Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2000, ibid.
3 Breen, M., Kim Jong-Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader, John Wiley & Sons, 2004, p. xv.
4 The Economist, “What’s in a name?,” September 25, 2004.
5 As reported in the International Herald Tribune, September 19, 2003.
6 Bangkok Post, “Thousands go for new surnames,” February 18, 2002.
7 The Nation, “All in the name of feng shui,” March 28, 2003.
8 Tan,T.,Your Chinese roots:The overseas Chinese story, Times, 1986.
9 Backman, M. and C. Butler, Big in Asia: 25 Strategies for Business Success, revised and
updated edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 29.

Chapter 3
1 The Economist, “World economic survey,” October 2, 2004.
2 The Star, “China reports record tax takings in 2004”, January 11, 2005.
3 Backman, M., The Asian Insider: Unconventional Wisdom for Asian Business, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004, p. 185.
4 The Economist, “China business survey,” March 20, 2004.
5 Hale, D., “Will China need a blue water navy to protect commodity markets?,” back-
ground paper published by Hale Advisors LLC, Chicago, January 7, 2004.
6 International Herald Tribune, “End of quotas wears on US textile industry,” November 3,
2004.
7 Hale, D., January 7, 2004, op. cit.
8 Hale, D., January 7, 2004, op. cit.
9 Wall Street Journal, “Nissan to halt some operations due to shortage in steel supply,”
November 25, 2004.
10 Business Times, “Ship scrap prices hit record in Bangladesh,” January 27, 2005.

236
 Notes 237

11 West Australian, “Resource-rich region digs deeper for WA economy,” August 18, 2004.
12 International Herald Tribune, “Australian oil giant expanding its global reach,” August 12,
2004.
13 The Age, “Australia’s biggest gas deal sealed,” October 24, 2003.
14 West Australian, “Strong China drives BHP to $4.9b record,” August 19, 2004.
15 Business Times, “China’s Saudi crude imports seen up 25% next year,” November 4, 2004.
16 Lam, W., “China’s energy paranoia,” Asian Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2004.
17 The Straits Times, “China pipeline plan to secure oil supplies,” July 31, 2004.
18 Business Times, “China offers loans for overseas mining buys,” November 4, 2004.
19 Business Times, November 4, 2004, ibid.
20 Business Times, November 4, 2004, op. cit.
21 Business Times, “China in talks to buy Canadian oil giant,” November 29, 2004.
22 Speech by Hu Jintao to the Australian parliament, October 23, 2003.
23 The Economist, “Easy money,” April 10, 2004.
24 Kleveman, L., The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, Atlantic Books, 2003,
p. 113.
25 Hale, D., January 7, 2004, op. cit.
26 International Herald Tribune, “China builds a port in Pakistan,” September 9, 2004.
27 Business Times, “Myanmar, Sino-S’pore group sign oil pact,” October 25, 2004.
28 Business Times, “China firms muscle in on Indon energy industries,” July 7, 2003.
29 The Economist, “A new scramble,” November 27, 2004.
30 The Economist, November 27, 2004, ibid.
31 The Economist, November 27, 2004, op. cit.
32 The Economist, November 27, 2004, op. cit.
33 The Economist, November 27, 2004, op. cit.
34 The Economist, November 27, 2004, op. cit.
35 Hale, D., “Will China need a blue water navy to protect commodity markets?,” back-
ground paper published by Hale Advisors LLC, Chicago, January 7, 2004.
36 Financial Times, “Chinese workers killed in attack on Afghan camp,” June 11, 2004.
37 Hale, D., January 7, 2004, op. cit.

Chapter 4
1 Goldman Sachs, “Global Economics Paper no. 99: Dreaming with BRICS: The path to
2050,” October 2003.
2 The Economist, “World economic survey,” October 2, 2004.
3 Backman, M., Asian Eclipse: Exposing the Dark Side of Business in Asia, 2nd edn, John Wiley
& Sons, 2001, p. 293.
4 The Star, “Michelin suspends production at Shanghai plant,” January 14, 2005.
5 The Economist, “China business survey,” March 20, 2004.
6 International Herald Tribune, “Regulator considers bailout of China banks,” May 30, 2003.
7 International Herald Tribune, “China uses $45 billion to prop up 2 banks,” January 7, 2004.
8 Business Times, “Six big China state firms to have board of directors,” May 31, 2004.
9 Financial Times, “CNOOC questioned on fund transfer,” April 22, 2004.
10 Business Times, “Cash injection is conditional: CAO’s parent,” January 26, 2005.
11 International Herald Tribune, “Too big to fail: Beijing plans rescue of a private company,”
August 25, 2004.
12 West Australian, “Officials in China flee with millions,” August 21, 2004.
13 Business Times, “China’s most expensive home,” December 8, 2004.
14 The Economist, March 20, 2004, op. cit.
238 Notes
15 International Herald Tribune, “The new Chinese counterfeit game,” November 11, 2004.
16 The Guardian, “BAT breaks China barrier,” July 17, 2004; Wall Street Journal, “China closes
door to tobacco market to foreign ventures,” November 22, 2004.
17 The Age, “Land of smokers bans new cigarette factories,” January 13, 2005.
18 South China Morning Post, “Probe finds bribes rife at tobacco monopoly,” April 14, 2003.
19 The Economist, March 20, 2004, op. cit.
20 Levy, A. and C. Scott-Clark, The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade,
Phoenix, 2002, p. 252.
21 The Economist, “Grudge match,” August 14, 2004.
22 Hale, D., “Will China need a blue water navy to protect commodity markets?,” back-
ground paper published by Hale Advisors LLC, Chicago, January 7, 2004.
23 The Economist, March 20, 2004, op. cit.
24 Business Times, “EU won’t accept China as market economy,” June 29, 2004.
25 International Herald Tribune, “China acts to protect firms in trade battles,” June 18, 2004.
26 Boston Globe, “IBM sells PC stake to China’s Lenovo,” December 8, 2004.
27 Business Times, “IBM-Lenovo deal faces US security hurdles,” January 25, 2005.
28 The Star, “Chinese firm buying Philips monitor ops,” December 17, 2004.
29 International Herald Tribune, “China capitalists seek a beachhead in US,” October 28, 2004.

Chapter 5
1 According to Transparency International’s 2004 Corruption Perception Index for all five
countries.The higher the figure, the more corrupt.
2 Sumner, C., Beyond the Silk Road: Arts of Central Asia from the Powerhouse Museum Collec-
tion (Sydney), Powerhouse Publishing, 1999, ibid., p. 19.
3 Sumner, C., 1999, ibid., p. 13.
4 Kleveman, L., The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, Atlantic Books, 2003,
pp. 3, 74–5.
5 International Herald Tribune, “A $29 billion deal for Kazakh oil field,” February 26, 2004.
6 See www.caspiandevelopmentand export.com.
7 Wall Street Journal, “Kazakhstan balancing act gives China a key oil role,” November 21,
2003.
8 The Economist, “An embarrassing friend,” July 17, 2004.
9 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 186.
10 International Herald Tribune, “Russia opens permanent Tajikistan base,” November 18,
2004.
11 Times of India, “IAF’s base will be ready by ‘04’,” September 30, 2004.
12 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 101.
13 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 101.
14 International Herald Tribune, “Ethnic riots left 7 dead, China says, as unrest seethes,”
November 2, 2004.
15 Boeckmann, S. and N. Rebeiz-Nielsen, Caviar: The Definitive Guide, Mitchell Beazley, 1999.

Chapter 6
1 The Economist, “Dynastic blues,” September 25, 2004.
2 International Herald Tribune, “Kazakhstan votes for new Parliament,” September 21, 2004.
3 Kleveman, L., The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, Atlantic Books, 2003,
p. 85.
 Notes 239

4 Kleveman, L., 2003, ibid., p. 89.

5 Business Times, “ST Engineering to set up jv in Kazakhstan,” November 17, 2004.
6 Details on the business interests of Nazarbayev’s sons-in-law principally come from Wall
Street Journal, “Caspian intrigue: odd family drama in Kazakhstan dims democratic hopes,”
September 12, 2002.
7 The Economist, “Rise and fall,” February 28, 2004.
8 Turkmen State News Service report, April 10, 2004.
9 International Crisis Group, “Cracks in the marble: Turkmenistan’s failing dictatorship,”
January 17, 2003.
10 From a transcript of a broadcast on Turkmen Television, aired June 22, 2004.
11 International Crisis Group, January 17, 2003, op. cit.
12 Far Eastern Economic Review, “Water of strife,” July 15, 2004.
13 International Crisis Group, “Repression and regression in Turkmenistan: A new internat-
ional strategy,” November 4, 2004.
14 International Crisis Group, January 17, 2003, op. cit.
15 International Crisis Group, January 17, 2003, op. cit.
16 International Crisis Group, November 4, 2004, op. cit.
17 The Star, “Petronas well off Turkmen coast starts production,” January 21, 2005.
18 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 163.
19 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 225.
20 International Crisis Group, November 4, 2004, op. cit.
21 From a transcript of a broadcast on Turkmen Television, aired August 17, 2004.
22 International Crisis Group, January 17, 2003, op. cit.
23 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 149.
24 International Crisis Group, November 4, 2004, op cit.
25 Stroehlein, A., “The West is far too kind to Uzbekistan’s tyrant,” International Herald
Tribune, March 16, 2004.
26 www.eurasianet.org, “American attitude on bases threatens central Asian peace,”
October 23, 2003.
27 www.eurasianet.org, “Divorce case opens windows on Karimov family wealth,” 21 March
2003; Interview with Gulnara Karimova, published in The Independent, January 7, 2004.
28 International Crisis Group, “Political transition in Kyrgyzstan: Problems and prospects,”
August 11, 2004.
29 International Crisis Group, August 11, 2004, ibid.
30 Eurasianet.org, “Gold mine reorganization in Kyrgyzstan spurs political controversy,” July
20, 2004.
31 Kleveman, L., 2003, op. cit., p. 188.
32 www.eurasianet.org,“Media mysteries come and go in Kyrgyzstan,” August 24, 2004; Inter-
national Crisis Group, “Political transition in Kyrgyzstan: Problems and prospects,” August
11, 2004.
33 www.eurasianet.org, “Tajikistan’s capital amnesty barely dents shadow economy,” 23 June,
2003.
34 International Herald Tribune, “Fears of irregularities mar vote in Tajikistan,” February 28,
2005.

Chapter 7
1 Stewart, I., The Mahathir Legacy: A Nation Divided, A Region at Risk, Allen & Unwin, 2003,
p. 116.
240 Notes
2 International Herald Tribune, “Malaysia court refuses to hear Anwar appeal,” September 16,
2004.
3 That Anwar did this is recounted by the writer V.S. Naipaul who met up with Anwar in
Kuala Lumpur in the latter’s early days with ABIM. See Naipaul,V.S., Among the Believers: An
Islamic Journey, Penguin, 1982, pp. 218–9.
4 Cheong, S. and A. Amin, Daim: The Man Behind the Enigma, Pelanduk Publications, 1995.
5 Far Eastern Economic Review, “Intelligence,” April 27, 2000.
6 Stewart, I., 2003, op. cit., p. 123.
7 Asian Wall Street Journal, “Singapore’s Lee, on Malaysia visit, criticizes blunders in Anwar
case,” August 18, 2000.
8 Stewart, I., 2003, op. cit., p. 138.

Chapter 8
1 The Age, “Still more Australians call overseas home,” May 31, 2003.
2 See crikey.com.au, “Top 50 Aussies in overseas business,” for a more extensive list.
3 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Australian Social Trends – Population Composition: Asian-
Born Australians,” mimeo, 2001.
4 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001, ibid.
5 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001, op. cit.
6 I am indebted to Michael Warby for making this point.

Chapter 9
1 Naipaul,V.S., India: A Wounded Civilisation, Picador, 2002, p. 63.
2 Ram M. “Economic dimension of conflicts in South Asia: A case of Nepal II,” Spotlight,
November 28–December 4, 2003.
3 Lawoti, M., “Defining minorities in Nepal,” Nepali Journal of Contemporary Studies, II(1)
March 2002.
4 Business Times, “Former Nepal airline chief jailed,” January 24, 2005.
5 Ram M., 2003, op. cit.
6 International Crisis Group, “Nepal: Back to the gun,” October 22, 2003.
7 Ram M. “Economic dimension of conflicts in South Asia: A case of Nepal III,” Spotlight,
December 5–11, 2003.
8 Gregson, J. Blood Against the Snows, Fourth Estate, 2003.
9 Gregson, J. 2003, ibid., p. 214.
10 International Crisis Group, “Nepal: Obstacles to peace,” June 17, 2003.
11 Sujeev Shakya, “Exploring Public–Private Partnerships for Service Delivery: The Case of
Karve, Nepal,” seminar given at World Bank, Washington, 10 June 2003.
12 Nepali Times, “All the King’s businesses,” June 15, 2001.
13 Rana, P., P. Rana and G. Rana, The Ranas of Nepal,Timeless Books, 2003.
14 Rana, G., “The Rana Palaces of Nepal,” Arts of Asia, July–August 1986.
15 International Crisis Group, October 22, 2003, op. cit.

Chapter 10
1 Business Times, “Outsourcing market to hit US$1t,” November 4, 2003.
2 The Economist, “A world of work: A survey of outsourcing,” November 13, 2004.
 Notes 241

3 The Economist, November 13, 2004, ibid.

4 Associated Press, “India’s software exports reach $12.5 billion,” June 3, 2004.
5 IndiaExpress.com, “India to earn $5 billion from software exports: Wipro chief,” June 27,
2002.
6 The Economist, November 13, 2004, op. cit.
7 Business Times, “Reuters outsources financial reporting to India,” October 8, 2004.
8 International Herald Tribune, “Where do Indian firms go to outsource? China,” November
3, 2004.
9 Financial Times, “IT industry in plea to Delhi over power supply,” June 4, 2004.
10 International Herald Tribune,“Amazon buys Web site for foothold in China,” August 20, 2004.
11 International Herald Tribune, November 3, 2004, op. cit.
12 Business Times, “Tata unit to double China staff, open more offices,” October 16, 2004.
13 International Herald Tribune, November 3, 2004, op. cit.
14 Pers. com. with Cyril Eltschinger, and CIA Factbook, 2005.
15 Australian Trade Community, “100 English language centres to China,” October 2003.
16 Business Times, “Manila guns for bigger slice of outsourcing pie,” June 16, 2003.
17 Business Times, June 16, 2003, ibid.
18 Business Today, “Backlash,” April 13, 2003.
19 The Contact, “US outsourcer takes accent off India,” January 25, 2005.
20 Business Times, June 16, 2003, op. cit.
21 Bernama wire report, “Shell owes huge success in Malaysia to local talents,” April 4, 204.
22 The Star, “M’sia gains from HSBC jobs shift,” October 18, 2003.
23 New Straits Times, “Carlson to set up RM7.6m regional call centre in Malaysia,” April 3,
2004.
24 Business Times, “Maybank awards CSC RM1.3b IT outsourcing deal,” August 29, 2003.
25 Financial Times, “Japan’s jobs spin out of Tokyo,” July 5, 2004.
26 Financial Times, July 5, 2004, ibid.
27 Business Times, “S’pore gains from Japan outsourcing,” October 13, 2004.
28 Business Times, “US biomed research firm sets up S’pore ops,” January 19, 2005.
29 Business Times, “Infosys opens disaster recovery unit in Mauritius,” May 5, 2004.

Chapter 11
1 Australian Financial Review, “A royal Australian fire sale,” December 1, 1995.
2 International Herald Tribune, “Qing vase sets record in Asia,” November 2, 2004.
3 West Australian, “Officials in China flee with millions,” August 21, 2004.
4 Orientations, “Paris Report – Autumn 2004,” January/February, 2005.
5 Arts of Asia, editorial, January-February 2005.
6 Orientations, October 2004, op. cit.
7 The Art Newspaper, “Islamic sales week, London: market cools after spring frenzy,”
November 2004.
8 The rumors are reported in The Art Newspaper, November 2004, ibid.
9 The Art Newspaper, “Qatar is third largest exporter of art from UK,” November 2004.
10 The Independent, “Healing the world with art,” April 16, 2004.
11 Each is published by Times in Singapore.
12 Asian Wall Street Journal,“Since Bhutan’s textiles are so in demand, country’s own museum
can’t get enough,” August 10, 2001.
13 Asian Wall Street Journal, “Japanese concern plans sale of art trove,” September 21, 1998.
14 The Art Newspaper, “Samsung puts its vast collection on public display,” November 2004.
15 Far Eastern Economic Review, “Stand and deliver,” September 12, 1996.
242 Notes
Chapter 12
1 The following account is based on an undated article prepared by Singapore’s National
Education Branch at the Ministry of Education.
2 Information on ST Engineering is drawn largely from its annual reports in respect of the
financial years 2001 and 2002
3 Jane’s International Defence Review, “Singapore is rearing SAR-21 bullpup rifle for home
and export requirement,” May 31, 2000.
4 Cobham plc, Annual Report, 2001.
5 Today, “ST Engineering’s US unit in $83m deal,” April 4, 2003.
6 Business Times, “ST Engg’s defensive qualities hard to ignore,” July 15, 2004.
7 Business Times, “Keppel unit wins US$73m contract from Boeing,” October 22, 2003.
8 Alvis plc, Annual Report, 2001.
9 Ashton, W., “Burma receives advances from its silent suitors in Singapore,” Jane’s Intelli-
gence Review, March 1, 1998; Hawke, B., “Exposed: Burma’s weapons industry,” Jane’s Intel-
ligence Review, December 1, 1998.
10 Far Eastern Economic Review, “Intelligence: US pension fund chided over Burma,”
November 28, 2002.
11 International Campaign to Ban Landmines,“Landmine Monitor: Singapore 2004,” October
2004.
12 International Campaign to Ban Landmines, “Killers in the Commonwealth: Antipersonnel
Landmine Policies of the Commonwealth Nations,” October 1997.
13 Alvis plc, 2001, op. cit.
14 Business Times, “Malaysia eyes missile technology from Brazil, Bosnia,” June 12, 2003.
15 The Star, “To the defence of tank deal,” April 20, 2003.
16 Business Times, “Syed Mokhtar plans to turn DRB into big defence player,” January 12,
2005.
17 Business Times, “Ipco seeks tie-up with Malaysia’s Amin Shah,” February 25, 2002.
18 Business Times, “Amin Shah sues Affin Bank for RM416m,” January 18, 2005.
19 Business Times, “ST Engg to set up jv in Kazakhstan,” November 17, 2004.

Chapter 13
1 Business Times, “Gambling firms bet on China,” February 21, 2005.
2 Business Times, “Govt invites plans for resort – with or without a casino,” December 30,
2004.
3 Jakarta Post, “Batam mayor orders closure of all casinos,” March 5, 2003.
4 The Himalayan Times, “First casino in Sikkim,” February 3, 2004.
5 Business Times, “Philippines’ online cockfight betting plan,” June 3, 2004.
6 The Age, “Repco casino deal,” April 26, 2002.
7 The Age, “Rise and rise of Shanghai Eddie,” June 9, 2000.
8 Business Times, “Chinese gamblers blow millions in North Korea,” January 7, 2005.
9 Far Eastern Economic Review, “Emperor’s new clothes,” May 4, 1995; Australian Financial
Review, “Hawke Inc: the silver bodgie’s Midas touch,” March 30, 1994; South China Morning
Post, “Emperor chief ’s hearing delayed,” April 16, 1998; and “Yeung admits insider trading,”
April 21, 1998.
10 Reuters report, “Hong Kong entertainment mogul arrested,” July 17, 2003.
11 Time Asia, “Bad boys abound in ‘Vegas East’,” July 24, 2000.
12 The New Light of Myanmar, “Tourism services inspected in Tachilek, Kengtung and Mongla,”
January 16, 2002.
 Notes 243

13 International Herald Tribune, “Tough odds for casinos in Russia,” May 27, 2003.
14 Lintner, B., Blood Brothers: Crime, Business and Politics in Asia, Allen & Unwin, 2002,
p. 103.
15 Lintner, 2002, ibid., p. 106.
16 Business Times, “22 vie for 3 Macau casino licences,” October 24, 2001.
17 Business Times, “Macau’s one-man show to end as new casinos come up,” May 7, 2004
18 The Economist, “All bets are on,” October 2, 2004.
19 Wall Street Journal, “Macau distributes gambling licenses hoping spending will boost
economy,” February 11, 2002.
20 Business Times, “Gamblers rush to new Vegas casino in Macau,” May 19, 2004.
21 The Star, “Macau Venetian Casino to cost US$1.8b,” November 26, 2004.
22 Business Times, May 7, 2004, op. cit.
23 The Age, “Packer takes a punt on Macau,” November 17, 2004.
24 Business Times, May 7, 2004, op. cit.; “Macao’s economy up 25% in ‘04,” January 18, 2005.
25 Business Times, “Rich Thais flock to border casinos,” February 18, 2002.
26 Business Times, February 18, 2002, ibid.
27 Bangkok Post, “Gamblers will gamble,” November 10, 2002.
28 The Star, “Ho Wah Genting banks on Cambodia ops,” May 28, 2003.
29 Bangkok Post, “The chips are up,” November 3, 2002.
30 New Straits Times, “Report: Casino tycoons paid Thai riot compensation,” March 19, 2003.
31 Business Times, “Ho Wah Genting to run casino in Cambodia,” January 13, 2003.
32 Bangkok Post, “PM vows Las Vegas style,” March 26, 2003.
33 Bangkok Post, “Gamblers will gamble,” November 10, 2002.
34 Time Asia, “Bad boys abound in ‘Vegas East’,” July 24, 2000.
35 Time Asia, July 24, 2000, ibid.
36 Bangkok Post, November 10, 2002, op. cit.
37 Business Times, “Genting buys London casino for £10.5m,” September 24, 2004.
38 The Star, “Genting ups London clubs stake,” February 18, 2004.
39 The Star, “Genting unit in joint venture with British casino operator,” November 24, 2004.
40 Lim Goh Tong, My Story, Pelanduk Publications, 2004, p. 147.

Chapter 14
1 My description of Jewish dietary laws borrows from Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish
Food,Viking, 1997.
2 New York Times, “Is the water truly kosher in New York?,” June 10, 2004.
3 Bangkok Post, “India poses threat to Thailand’s market share,” July 31, 2002.
4 Sunday Times of India, “Hot new hubs,” April 13, 2003.
5 The Economist, “The cartel isn’t for ever,” July 17, 2004.
6 The Economist, July 17, 2004, ibid.
7 Business Times, “Hour Glass, John Glajz sell 80% stake in Mondial revamp,” May 19, 2004.

Chapter 15
1 International Herald Tribune, “In a tepid market, poor farmers suffer most,” November 26,
2003.
2 Wall Street Journal, “Starbucks Japan plans changes as it struggles for profitability,” February
19, 2003.
244 Notes
3 Wall Street Journal, “Starbucks expands in China, in talks to tap India market,” December
16, 2002.
4 Reuters, “Imitation coffee,” August 12, 2003.
5 Business Times, “Bonvests divests Starbucks for $13.4m,” June 22, 2004.
6 Bangkok Post, “Starbucks opens new outlet inside Khao San Road icon,” May 3, 2004.
7 Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2002, op. cit.
8 The Star,“TT Resources unit signs 2 franchise pacts with Gloria Jean’s,” September 14, 2002.
9 The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, “Kosher boom,” November 17, 2000.
10 The Sunday Times, “Meet Mr (Coffee) Bean,” September 5, 1999.
11 Streats, “Pizza Hut expands into café market,” April 2, 2003.
12 The Star, “Delifrance to invest RM13mil in 42 outlets,” August 8, 2003.
13 Business Times, “Coffee Club’s new owner eyes pole position,” January 13, 2003.
14 The Star, “Shalala decides to expand via franchising,” November 17, 2004.
15 The Star, “Taiwan coffee chains tempting China tea drinkers,” March 13, 2004.
16 Business Times, “Viet coffee chain fights for its brand in US,” September 30, 2002.
17 Wall Street Journal,“Entrepreneur tries to bring coffee to India’s tea lovers,” November 16,
2001.
18 Hindustan Times, “Tatas plan to exit from Barista Coffee,” December 6, 2004.

Chapter 16
1 Asian Wall Street Journal, “Indonesian scion forages for revenue in bird nests,” February
20–1, 1998.
2 Bangkok Post, “House panel seeks to scrap bidding contest,” May 12, 2003.
3 Bangkok Post, “Prices soar in bid to harvest birds’ nests,” May 28, 2003.
4 Financial Times, “Gangsters bag top gun in Thailand’s bird nest war,” December 29, 1994.

Chapter 17
1 Financial Times, “Asia’s bad debts have been Wall Street’s good fortune. Now deals are
drying up,” September 30, 2004.
2 Far Eastern Economic Review, “Surface measures,” April 10, 1997.
3 Financial Times, September 30, 2004, op. cit.
4 International Herald Tribune, “Overseas investors see opportunity in China debt,”
November 30, 2004.
5 Business Times, “China invites bids for bad loans worth US$18.1b,” November 26, 2004.
6 Business Times, “India plans to open bad loan market to foreign investors,” October 7,
2004.
7 Business Times, “India plans to allow greater FDI in real estate,” January 25, 2005.

Chapter 19
1 Bangkok Post, “Accent now on nipples and genitals,” August 28, 2003.
2 See for example the backcover of Orientations, December 1973.
3 TTG Asia, “Thai spas hit with ‘sex’ tax,” April 10, 2003.
4 Details on Udom’s life come from Bangkok Post, “Founder at Patpong dies at 79,”
October 2, 1996.
5 Bangkok Post, “Real estate pioneer leaves historic path,” October 4, 1996.
 Notes 245

6 Bangkok Post, October 4, 1996, ibid.

7 Bangkok Post, October 4, 1996, op. cit.
8 Bangkok Post, “H’ precinct chief too 80,000/mth – Chuwit,” July 17, 2003, and International
Herald Tribune, “Thai sex king sees staid new world,” July 31, 2003.
9 Bangkok Post, “Probe ordered into prison bribery claim,” July 11, 2003.
10 International Herald Tribune, “Thai sex king sees staid new world,” July 31, 2003.
11 The Nation, “Have sex, flash your badge and skip the bill,” September 5, 2003.

Chapter 20
1 The Star, “High level of security to protect prized fishes at Xian Leng farms,” January 6,
2003.
2 The Star, “Xian Leng taps higher margins,” January 8, 2005.
3 AFP, “Craze for ornamental fish unleashes ‘killer’ in Malaysian waters,” February 14, 2003.
4 From various auction reports published in Arts of Asia.
5 Arts of Asia, “Christie’s New York report,” November–December 1997.
6 Arts of Asia, “Saleroom news: Christie’s New York,” January–February, 2005.
7 The Economist, “Veerappan,” October 30, 2004.
8 Wall Street Journal, “India’s sandalwood industry falters as monopoly fumbles,” September
17, 2000.
9 Information on the sandalwood industry in Australia comes from the program notes for
the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Television’s Landline program, “Sandalwood
brings sweet smell of success,” November 5, 2000.
10 Business Times, “One crappuccino, please,” January 29, 2003.
11 International Herald Tribune, “No nuts to you, they’re protected,” November 11, 2002. First
published in the Joong Ang Daily.
12 International Herald Tribune, “In Taiwan, everything’s coming up orchids,” August 25, 2004.
13 Levy, A. and C. Scott-Clark, The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade,
Phoenix, 2002, p. 182.
14 Asian Wall Street Journal, “The great shell game,” December 1, 2000.
15 See Allen, J., “Tibetan Zi beads,” Arts of Asia, July-August 2002.
16 Lim’s photo with Zi bead appeared in The Star, “Limahsoon makes soft debut on 2nd
board,” July 23, 2004.
17 See Hello! issue January 4, 2005.
18 Financial Times, “Bollywood seeks a happy ending,” December 31, 2002.
19 BBC News, BBC.co.uk, “Jail sentence for Bollywood mogul,” October 1, 2003.
20 Liu, B.T.M., The Hong Kong Triad Societies: Before and After the 1997 Change-over, Net
e-Publishing Ltd, 2001, Chapter 5.
21 Liu, B.T.M., 2001, Chapter 5, ibid.
22 Business Times, “HK films to gain from China trade deal,” June 27, 2003.
23 International Herald Tribune, “At the movies: South Korea’s battle with Hollywood,”
November 15, 2004.
24 Bangkok Post, “Reaching for the stars, or dreaming?,” January 13, 2003.
25 International Herald Tribune, “Disney tailors Hong Kong park for cultural differences,”
October 13, 2004.
26 The Nation, “All in the name of feng shui,” March 28, 2003.
27 Dunlop, P., Street Names of Singapore, Who’s Who Publishing Singapore, 2000, pp. 232–3.
28 Bangkok Post, “Ghost busters hunt entrail-eating bogies,” June 4, 2003.
29 The Age, “Ghosts upset superstitious Thais,” January 20, 2005.
246 Notes
Chapter 21
1 Dobbin, C., Asian Entrepreneurial Minorities: Conjoint Communities in the Making of the
World-Economy, 1570–1940, Curzon, 1996, pp. 90–1.
2 Dunlop, P., Street Names of Singapore, Who’s Who Publishing Singapore, 2000, p. 212.
3 Kleveman, L., The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, Atlantic Books, 2003,
p. 15.
4 International Herald Tribune, “A distinctive minority dwindles in India,” April 24, 2003.
5 Mistry, R., Family Matters, Faber and Faber, 2002, p. 415.
6 Business Times, “NatSteel gets nod to exit steel business,” December 16, 2004.
7 The Economist, “Tata for now,” July 24, 2004.
8 Manekshaw, B., Parsi Food and Customs, Penguin, 1996.
9 Business Times, “India’s 5th richest man gets US$1.7b IPO boost,” August 26, 204.
10 Dobbin, C.,1996, op cit.
11 Desai, K., Jewels on the Crescent: Masterpieces of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu
Sangrahalaya, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, 2002.

Chapter 22
1 Said, E., Orientalism, Penguin, 2003, p. xxii.
2 Tan, S., Singapore Heritage Food, Landmark Books, 2003, p. 45.
 Bibliography

Allen, J., “Tibetan Zi beads,” Arts of Asia, July–August 2002.

Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Australian Social Trends – Population Composi-
tion: Asian-Born Australians,” mimeo, 2001.
Backman, M. and C. Butler, Big in Asia: 25 Strategies for Business Success,
revised and updated edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Backman, M., Asian Eclipse: Exposing the Dark Side of Business in Asia, John
Wiley & Sons, 1999.
Backman, M., The Asian Insider: Unconventional Wisdom for Asian Business,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Boeckmann, S. and N. Rebeiz-Nielsen, Caviar: The Definitive Guide, Mitchell
Beazley, 1999.
Breen, M., Kim Jong-Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader, John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
Chang, I., The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,
Penguin, 1997.
Cheong, S. and A. Amin, Daim: The Man Behind the Enigma, Pelanduk Publica-
tions, 1995.
Desai, K., Jewels on the Crescent: Masterpieces of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj
Vastu Sangrahalaya, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, 2002.
Dobbin, C., Asian Entrepreneurial Minorities: Conjoint Communities in the
Making of the World-Economy, 1570–1940, Curzon, 1996.
Dunlop, P., Street Names of Singapore, Who’s Who Publishing, Singapore, 2000.
Gregson, J. Blood Against the Snows, Fourth Estate, 2003.
Hale, D., “Will China need a blue water navy to protect commodity markets?,”
background paper published by Hale Advisors LLC, Chicago, January 7, 2004.
International Campaign to Ban Landmines, “Killers in the Commonwealth: Antiper-
sonnel Landmine Policies of the Commonwealth Nations” October 1997.
International Campaign to Ban Landmines, “Landmine Monitor: Singapore
2004,” October 2004.

247
248 Bibliography
International Crisis Group, “Cracks in the marble: Turkmenistan’s failing dictator-
ship,” January 17, 2003.
International Crisis Group, “Nepal: Back to the gun,” October 22, 2003.
International Crisis Group, “Nepal: Obstacles to peace,” June 17, 2003.
International Crisis Group, “Political transition in Kyrgyzstan: Problems and
prospects,” August 11, 2004.
International Crisis Group, “Repression and regression in Turkmenistan: A new
international strategy,” November 4, 2004.
Kleveman, L., The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, Atlantic
Books, 2003.
Lawoti, M., “Defining minorities in Nepal,” Nepali Journal of Contemporary
Studies, 2(1) March 2002.
Levy, A. and C. Scott-Clark, The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial
Green Jade, Phoenix, 2002.
Lim Goh Tong, My Story, Pelanduk Publications, 2004.
Lintner, B., Blood Brothers: Crime, Business and Politics in Asia, Allen & Unwin,
2002.
Liu, B.T.M., The Hong Kong Triad Societies: Before and After the 1997 Change-
over, Net e-Publishing, 2001.
Manekshaw, B., Parsi Food and Customs, Penguin, 1996.
Mistry, R., Family Matters, Faber and Faber, 2002.
Muni, S.D., Maoist Insurgency in Nepal: The Challenge and the Response, Rupa
& Co, 2003.
Naipaul, V.S., Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, Penguin, 1982.
Naipaul, V.S., India: A Wounded Civilisation, Picador, 2002.
Ram M., “Economic dimension of conflicts in South Asia: A case of Nepal II,”
Spotlight, November 28–December 4, 2003.
Ram M., “Economic dimension of conflicts in South Asia: A case of Nepal III,”
Spotlight, December 5–11, 2003.
Rana, G., “The Rana palaces of Nepal,” Arts of Asia, July–August 1986.
Rana, P., P. Rana and G. Rana, The Ranas of Nepal, Timeless Books, 2003.
Richter, A., The Jewelry of Southeast Asia, Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Roden, C., The Book of Jewish Food, Viking, 1997.
Said, E., Orientalism, Penguin, 2003.
Schick, J., The Gods are Leaving the Country: Art Theft from Nepal, Orchid Press,
1998.
Stewart, I., The Mahathir Legacy: A Nation Divided, A Region at Risk, Allen &
Unwin, 2003.
Stroehlein, A., “The West is far too kind to Uzbekistan’s tyrant,” International
Herald Tribune, March 16, 2004.
Sumner, C., Beyond the Silk Road: Arts of Central Asia from the Powerhouse
Museum Collection (Sydney), Powerhouse Publishing, 1999.
Tan, S., Singapore Heritage Food, Landmark Books, 2003.
Tan, T., Your Chinese Roots: The Overseas Chinese Story, Times, 1986.
 Bibliography 249

Periodicals and Journals

Arts of Asia (Hong Kong) Streats (Singapore)

Asian Wall Street Journal Sunday Times of India
Australian Financial Review The Age (Melbourne)
Australian Trade Community The Art Newspaper (London)
Bangkok Post The Economist (London)
Boston Globe The Guardian (London)
Business Times (Singapore) The Himalayan Times (Nepal)
Business Today (India) The Independent (London)
Far Eastern Economic Review The Jewish Journal of Greater
(Hong Kong) Los Angeles
Financial Times (London) The Nation (Bangkok)
Hindustan Times (India) The New Light of Myanmar
International Herald Tribune The Star (Malaysia)
Jakarta Post The Sunday Times (Singapore)
Jane’s Intelligence Review Time Asia
Nepali Times (Nepal) Times of India
New Straits Times (Malaysia) Today (Singapore)
New York Times Wall Street Journal
Orientations (Hong Kong) West Australian
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
 Index

A as Malaysian finance minister 80–1,

81–2, 83–4
Abdullah Badawi 79, 79–80 property transactions 82–3
Abdul Taib Mahmud 136 relationship with business sector 78
Adams, Barbara 134 release from jail 77–80
ADP 113 sentence 87
Afghanistan trial of 87
gas pipeline through 68–9 Argyle diamond mine (Australia) 165–6
opium 69 Ari Sigit 180
Africa, Chinese trade with 28–9 arms industry 138–46
age of population 6 arowanas 207, 208
Akayev, Askar 74, 75 Arsenal Malaysia 145
Albukhary, Syed Mokhtar 71, 131, 145, art
172 auctions 126, 129
Aliyev, Rahat 61–2 as business 135–7
Amin Shah 145–6 Chinese 126–7, 135
Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) forgery 134
80 as investment 127–9
Angola, trade with China 29 Islamic 129–31
animism 222 magazines 137
antiques 124–5 market trend 132–3
Chinese 125–6 quick resales 128
market creation 132 see also antiques
Tibetan 132 Asian-born population in other countries
see also art 93
Antwerp, diamond processing 163, 165 Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) (Singapore)
Anwar Ibrahim 186
appeals 77–8, 79 Australia 4
dismissed from government 77, 85–6 Aborigines 95–6
government mishandling 85–6

250
 Index 251

Argyle diamond mine 165–6 purpose-built houses 178–9

Asian-born population 93 theft and bribery 179–81
casinos in 149 Black Canyon 172
closeness to Asia 92–3 Bollywood 217–18
dual citizenship 90–1 Bombay Dyeing and Manufacturing
expatriates, see expatriates Company 230
food in 94 books, creating market for
internationally prominent individuals antiques/textiles 132, 134
91–2 Bouygues Batiment International 69
racism 95–7 brewing industry, in China 34
relationships with Asia 94–5 bribery
sandalwood production 210, 211–12 in China 38
statistical comparisons 6 see also corruption
trade with China 24–5 British American Tobacco (BAT), in China
White Australia policy 95 39–40
Avari family (Pakistan) 230 Brunei
Avimo 143 art collection 131
Azerbaijan 51 coffee shops in 170, 171
statistical comparisons 6
B Burke’s Coffee 172
Burma, see Myanmar
bad debts
business processing outsourcing (BPO)
China 189–90
113–14, 122–3
Japan 188–9
Bakrie Group 72
C
Bangkok, office/residential towers 183,
184–5 call centers
Bangkok Land (Thailand) 184, 185–6 in India 114
Bangladesh, statistical comparisons 6 in Japan 121
Bank Bumiputera (Malaysia) 84 in Malaysia 120–1
bankruptcy law, China 35–6 in Philippines 118
banks Cambodia
China 34–7, 47 casinos in 149, 153–4
Nepal 101 coffee shops in 173
outsourcing 119 statistical comparisons 6
Barista Coffee 173 Canada, Asian-born population 93
Bartholomew, Marko 133–4 car industry, in China 33
beads, Tibetan Zi 215–17 Carlson Marketing Group, in Malaysia
fakes 216 120
beer industry, in China 34 Carrefour, in China 40–1
beliefs 220–3 casinos 147–59
Bhutan illegal 147–8, 148–9, 153
statistical comparisons 6 see also under individual countries
textiles 133–4 Caspian Sea
Binladen Group, contracts in Malaysia 80 caviar trade 55–6
biomedicine oil/gas reserves 50–1
in Japan 121–2 sea or lake? 51
in Singapore 122 sturgeon fishing 55–6
birds’ nests 176–81 cassava 213
252 Index
caste system, in Nepal 100 Kazakhstan, oil supply deal 52–3
caviar trade 55–6 labour resources reallocation 47
Chang Fee Ming 136 law enforcement in 37–9
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu laws in 37–9
Sangrahalaya 231–2 literacy 117
China loans, non-performing 34–5, 47
absconding officials 127 manufacturing specializations 23
anti-dumping measures 44–5 military bases/exercises abroad 30, 54
antiques 125–6 mineral reserves/imports 24
arms supply to Myanmar 143–4 mobile phones 117
art 126–7, 135 Muslim minorities 54–5
art auctions in 129 nationalism in 21
bad debts 189–90 offshore accounts 127
bad loans 34–5, 47 oil/gas imports 24–6, 52–3
bankruptcy law 35–6 oil supply routes 25–6, 52–3
banks 34–7, 47 outsourcing in 115–17
brewing industry 34 overseas investments 26–7, 28–9
bribery 38 pearl production in 215
car industry 33 personal names 12, 13–16
casinos around 150–1 processor economy 24, 32
clothing 23 relationship with Japan 41–3
coffee shops in 169, 170–1, 171, 172, resource gap 23–7
174–5 risks of investing in 31–4
consumer goods 22–3 savings rates 44
convergence 46 Shanghai 22
corruption in 47 software companies 117
counterfeiting 39 state-owned enterprises 35–6, 36, 47
in crisis 31–47 statistical comparisons 6
diversification 37 stock markets 36–7
domestic market 21 tax revenues 22
economic outlook 45–7 telecommunications infrastructure 117
electrical goods 23 telephone lines 117
engineering in higher education 116 textiles 23
English language in 5, 117 time zone 52
excess capacity 44 trade with Australia 24–5
footwear 22, 23 world trade share 21
foreign companies’ profits in 33 Xinjiang province 54, 55
foreign direct investment (FDI) 22, 44, see also Hong Kong
116 Chinese restaurants, in London 212
foreign policy objectives 27 Chuwit Kamolvisit 204–6
gambling in 147, 148, 150 clothing, Chinese-made 23
GDP 117 coffee
government levels/structure 39–41 civet dropping coffee 212–13
graduates 116 growing 168
information, lack of 33, 36 varied ways of serving 173–5
internet users 116, 117 Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf 170–1
investment in developing countries Coffee Club 172
27–9 Coffee Partners 172
 Index 253

coffee shops 167–75 Philippines 115, 118

prices in 174–5 expatriates, Australian 89–97
religion as factor in success of 175 cost-effectiveness 90
Coffee World 172 as troubleshooters 89–90
corruption
in developing countries 27–9 F
perceived 6, 48 family names, see surnames
see also under individual countries feng shui 221–2, 223
counterfeiting, in China 39 film industry 217–20
cruise lines 158 organized crime links 218–19
cyanide, in food 213 First Data Corporation 113
fish, ornamental 207–8
D flowerhorn fish 207–8
Daim Zainuddin 81–2 Fok, Henry 151
art collection 136 food 212–14
property transactions 82–3 in Australia 94
Dante Coffee 172 cyanide content 213
Davis Group 204–6 kosher 161, 162, 171
De Beers 162, 164–5 medicinal properties 213, 214
debt, defaulted 182–90 Parsi 227–8
market for 187–8 footwear, Chinese-made 22, 23
Defence Technologies (Malaysia) 145 France, Asian-born population 93
Delifrance 171 furniture, Huanghuali 208–9
diamond processing 160, 162–6
G
in India 162–3, 165, 166
Jains in 160, 162–4, 165–6 gambling 147–9
labour-intensive small diamonds 166 see also casinos
trade centres 162 gas, see oil/natural gas
disposable income (GDP per capita) 6, 48 GDP per capita (disposable income) 6, 48
diversification, in China 37 Gembel Group (Belgium) 165
Dome Cafés 171 Genting Highlands 155–9
Dotours 169 involvement in UK casinos 158–9
drugs geomancy, see feng shui
Afghanistan 69 gingko tree/nuts 213–14
Nepal 101 Gloria Jeans Coffees 170
Tajikistan 76 Godrej Group 230
Dubai, coffee shops in 173 government
China 39–41
E Nepal 102
Turkmenistan 66–7
East Timor, statistical comparisons 6
Uzbekistan 71–2
Ecuador, foreign investment in 28
graduates
education, graduate 115, 116
Chinese 116
electrical goods, Chinese-made 23
Indian 115
English language
Great Wall Asset Management 190
China 5, 117
gross domestic product, see GDP
India 115
Gyanendra, King of Nepal 107, 109, 110
Malaysia 120
business interests 108
254 Index
H mobile phones 117
outsourcing in 113–15
Haier 46 Parsis in 224–5, 226
Hanson, Pauline 97 software companies 117
Hock Hua Bank (Sabah) 82 statistical comparisons 6
Ho Hung-sun (Ho, Stanley) 151–3 telephone lines 117
Hong Kong Indonesia
coffee shops in 171, 172 birds’ nests industry 178, 179–80
film industry 217, 218–19 casinos in 148–9
Parsis in 225 Chinese in, personal names 14–16
personal names 14 Chinese investments in 28
statistical comparisons 6 coffee shops in 170, 171, 172
triad gangs 218–19 crisis indications in 1996 31–2
Hong Leong Group (Malaysia) 82 personal names 10–11, 14–16
Hong Reng Tang Imperial Herbal statistical comparisons 6
Restaurant (Singapore) 213 Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency
hotels, five-star 191–200 (IBRA) 189
ghosts in 196 information
guests in 192–5 gleaning 1–3
guests’ cash 192 lack of, in China 33, 36
prominent guests in 199–200 lifeblood of business 234–5
sex in 196–7 Infosys 122
staff in 191–2 intellectual property protection, India 218
theft from 197–9 Inter Diam (India) 165
HSBC Bank, data processing centers 119 International Monetary Fund (IMF),
Huanghuali furniture 208–9 Malaysia and 83–4
Hui Chinese 55 Israel, coffee shops in 171
Hungry Ghost Month 220, 222 Italy, Asian-born population 93
Hyderabad, Nizam of 124–5 IT services, outsourcing 113–23
IT United Corporation (China) 116–17
I
India J
bad loans 190 jade 215
call centers in 114 Jainism 160–2
casinos in 149 dietary rules 160, 161–2
coffee shops in 173 munis 162
cost advantages 115 Jains, diamond processing 160, 162–4,
diamond processing 162–3, 165, 166 165–6
engineering graduates 115 Japan
English-speaking 115 back office work 121
film industry 217–18 bad debts 188–9
foreign direct investment (FDI) 116 biomedicine 121–2
GDP 117 call centers in 121
graduates 115 centers in Malaysia’s MSC 120
intellectual property protection 218 coffee shops in 168–9, 170, 173
internet users 117 gambling ban 149
literacy 117 keigo language 121
military bases in Central Asia 54 outsourcing in 121–2
 Index 255

racism in 96 L
relationship with China 41–3
statistical comparisons 6 landmines 144
Javanese, personal names 10–11, 12 language
Jews English, see English language
dietary laws 160–1 outsourcing and 122–3
mezuzah 162 Laos
casinos in 149, 155
K personal names 10
statistical comparisons 6
Kali, sacrifices to, in Nepal 98–9 Las Vegas Sands 152
Kanjanapas family (Thailand) 183, 184, Lenovo Group 45–6
185–6 lima beans 213
Karimov, Islam 71–2 Lim Goh Tong 155–9
Karimova, Gulnara 73 literacy, adult 6
Kashagan oil field 50, 52 loans, non-performing 182, 188–9, 190
Kazakhgate 61 China 34–5, 47
Kazakhstan 48–50, 57–62
accounting standards 59 M
corruption 60–2
economic management 59 Macau
foreign investment in 59–60 casinos in 147, 151–3, 157
Future Generations Fund (oil fund) 60 statistical comparisons 6
navy 60 Mahathir Mohamad 78, 79, 80, 81, 83
nepotism 60–2 considering state of emergency 84–5
oil production 58–9 maidenhair fern tree 214
oil supply deal with China 52–3 Makarov, Igor 69
politics 57–8 Malaysia
statistical comparisons 48 arms imports 145
tax police 62 arms industry 144–6
Kazakhstan Engineering 146 birds’ nests industry 179
keigo 121 call centers 120–1
Keppel Corp 142 casinos in 148, 155–9
Khalili, David 131 coffee shops in 169, 170, 171, 172,
koi 207 175
Korea election of king 1–2
personal names 9–10, 14 English language in 120
see also North Korea; South Korea International Monetary Fund (IMF)
kosher food and drink 161, 162, 171 prescriptions 83–4
Kulibayev, Timur 61 Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia 131
Kuwait National Museum Al-Sabah judiciary 79
collection 131 languages in 120–1
Kyrgyzstan 48–50, 70–1, 73–5 Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC)
corruption 74 119–20
exports 73 National Economic Action
military bases in 53, 53–4 Plan/Committee 85
position buying 74 outsourcing in 119–21
statistical comparisons 48 personal names 12
statistical comparisons 6
256 Index
see also Anwar Ibrahim casinos in 108, 149
Maoist (Naxalite) insurgents, in Nepal caste system 100
102, 102–4, 104–6 corruption 101
Mauritius 122 drugs 101
medical transcription, Philippines 118 economy 99–101, 110
medicine the future 110
medical transcription, Philippines 118 government in 102
see also biomedicine human rights abuses 103
Melium Group 171 infrastructure 101
military bases, in Central Asia 53–5, 72, international investor confidence 104
76 Maoist (Naxalite) insurgents 102,
mineral reserves, China 24 102–4, 104–6
Mittal Steel 60 population diversity 100
MMC Defence 145 Rana family 108–9
Mongolia Royal Family 99, 106–8
personal names 10 Royal Nepal Airlines 101
statistical comparisons 6 statistical comparisons 6
Muang Thong Thani 184, 185 nepotism, in Kazakhstan 60–2
Multimedia Development Corporation New Zealand
(MDC), Malaysia 119 Asian-born population 93
Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), casinos in 149
Malaysia 119–20 Ngee Ann City (Singapore) 165, 221–2
Myanmar nicknames 9
arms supplies to 143–4 North Korea
casinos in 149, 150, 154–5 casinos in 149, 150
foreign trade with 28 statistical comparisons 6
personal names 13 Nyazov, Saparmurat 63, 63–6
statistical comparisons 6 monuments/portraits of 64

N O
names (personal) 4, 8–17 oil/natural gas
changing 11–13 Caspian Sea reserves 50–1
gender and 16–17 Chinese imports 24–6, 52–3
nicknames 9 see also under individual countries
pronunciation 17 OPEC 51–2
surnames 8, 9–11 orchids 214
see also under individual countries outsourcing 113–23
National Association of Software and banks 119
Services Companies (Nasscom) (India) in China 115–17
114–15, 115 competing countries 114
natural gas, see oil/natural gas in India 113–15
Naxalites (Maoists) 102, 102–4, 104–6 IT services 113–23
Nazarbaev, Nursultan 57–8, 59 in Japan 121–2
family appointments 61–2 language and 122–3
Nepal 98–110 in Malaysia 119–21
administrative incompetence 101 medical transcription 118
bandhs 107 in the Philippines 118
banks 101 software programming 113–14
 Index 257

P Q
Pacific Coffee 172 Qatar
Packer, Kerry 152 art and antiques buying 129–31
Pakistan oil/gas deals 129
Chinese investment in 28 plans for cultural tourism 129–31
Parsis in 225
statistical comparisons 6 R
Paras, Prince of Nepal 107
racism
Parsis 224–32
in Asia 96
acceptance of 231–2
in Australia 95–7
food 227–8
in Japan 96
in Hong Kong 225
Rahmonov, Imomali 76
in India 224–5, 226
Ramadan 220
marriage 230–1
Rana family, Nepal 108–9
in Pakistan 225
Reliance Group 217
philanthropy 7, 226, 231–2
Reuters, in India 114
in Singapore 226
Riady, James 135–6
success in business 224–32
rifles, automatic 140–1
success in other areas 227
rosewood
in the UK 227
as substitute for sandalwood 210
Zoroastrianism 226
yellow, see Huanghuali furniture
Patpong 202–6
Royal Nepal Airlines 101
Patpongpanich family 202–4
Ruhnama 65–6
pearls 214–15
Russia
Petronas 68
casinos in 150–1
Philippines
Chinese loan to 29
back office work 118
military bases in Central Asia 53–4, 76
call centers in 118
casinos in 149
S
coffee shops in 169, 170, 171
customer service culture 118 Samsung, art collection 135
English language in 115, 118 sandalwood 209–12
gambling in 149 Australian 210, 211–12
literacy 118 demand for 211–12
medical transcription 118 poaching 210
outsourcing 118 San Francisco Coffee 172
personal names 9 San Gimignamo 182–3
statistical comparisons 6 Say’s Law 184
telecommunications infrastructure 118 Sazaby (Japan) 168
Pizza Hut 171 scrap metal 24, 52
Poipet, casinos 153–4 sex industry, Thailand 201–6
population 6, 48 Shah family, Nepal 99
Prince of Wales Museum (Mumbai) Shalala Coffee 172
231–2 Shanghai 22
PSC Industries (Malaysia) 145–6 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 55
Putrajaya (Malaysia) 83, 119 Shapoorji Pallonji & Co 230
Shell Information Technology
International 119
258 Index
ship building, Singapore 142 Surat, diamond processing 163
Sikhs, personal names 16–17 surnames 4, 8, 9–11
Singapore Surya Tobacco (Nepal) 108
aircraft hijacking 138–9 Sweden, Asian-born population 93
Armed Forces 139
arms industry 138–44 T
arms supply to Myanmar 143
Taiwan
biomedicine 122
casinos in 149
casinos in 147
China and 27
Chinese in, personal names 14
coffee shops in 169, 172
coffee shops in 169–70, 170, 171, 172,
National Palace Museum 135
173
statistical comparisons 6
film industry 220
Tajikistan 48–50, 70–1, 75–6
landmines 144
corruption 75–6
Parsis in 226
heroin 76
ship building 142
military bases in 54, 76
statistical comparisons 6
Russian influence 76
Soaltee Group (Nepal) 108, 109
statistical comparisons 48
Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de
Taj Mahal Hotel (Mumbai) 229
Macau (STDM) 151–2
Tata Coffee 173
Sollywood 217
Tata Group 217, 228–9
South Korea
tcc (the coffee connoisseur) 172
casinos in 149
Tengiz oil field 58, 59
coffee shops in 169, 170
textiles
film industry 219
Bhutan 133–4
Leeum Samsung Museum of Art 135
Chinese-made 23
statistical comparisons 6
Thailand
Spinelli Coffee 171
casinos around 153–5
SPR Coffee 172
coffee shops in 169, 170, 171, 172,
Sri Lanka
173
coffee shops in 171, 173
film industry 219
statistical comparisons 6
personal names 11–12, 12, 15
Standard Chartered Bank 119
sex industry 201–6
Starbucks 168–70
statistical comparisons 6
state ownership
Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET)
SOEs in China 35–6, 36, 47
148
in Turkmenistan 72
see also Bangkok
in Uzbekistan 72
Thani, Sheikh Saud al- 129, 130–1
steel, in China 24
Tibet
ST Engineering (Singapore) 140–2, 144,
antiques 132
146
art forgery 134
Sterling Group 173
Zi beads 215–17
Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) 148
TPV Technology 46
stock markets, China 36–7
triad gangs, Hong Kong 218–19
sturgeon fishing 55–6
Trung Nguyen 172–3
Sudan, oil exports to China 29
Tsui, Tsin Tong 136
sulfur 59
Turkmenbashi, see Nyazov, Saparmurat
superstitions 220–3
 Index 259

Turkmenistan 48–50, 53, 62–70 government 71–2

corruption 62, 67 human rights abuses 72
currency non-convertibility 69 military bases in 53, 72
economy 68–70 state ownership 72
exports 63, 68 statistical comparisons 48
foreign investment in 62
government 66–7 V
oil/gas pipelines 68–9
Veerappan, Koose Muniswamy 210
oil/gas reserves 62
Vietnam
pricing system 70
casinos in 149
state ownership 72
coffee shops in 172–3
statistical comparisons 48
personal names 16
subsidies 70
statistical comparisons 6
tribal affiliations in 66
Vijaykumar, B, & Co (India) 165
Tuyet Nguyet 137
W
U
Wee Cho Yaw 137
Uighers 54
wines, Chinese 22
United Arab Emirates, coffee shops in
Wynn Resorts 152
171
United Kingdom
X
Asian-born population 93
casinos in 158–9 Xian Leng Holdings 207–8
Parsis in 227 Xinjiang province (China) 54, 55
statistical comparisons 6
United States Y
Asian-born population 93
Yeung, Albert 150
military bases in Central Asia 53, 72
statistical comparisons 6
Z
uranium 59
Uzbekistan 48–50, 70–3 Zecha, Adrian 137
army 72 Zimbabwe, trade with China 29
corruption 71, 72 Zoroastrianism 226