Walter Hutchens’ Blog

It’s a beautiful, sunny day in Beijing–one of those rare days where the sky is blue, not a hazy grey.

I will go back to the US on Aug. 9–only a couple of weeks away. I want to spend next week in Shanghai, so this is my final week in Beijing for this trip. I have several appointments to try to cram into my final few days here. I will see my friend Stephen Hsu (Xu Chuanxi) tomorrow. He’s now a dean at the China University of Political Science & Law (Zheng Fa Daxue), happy like me to have escaped big law firm life. Wednesday I am supposed to go to the Univ. of International Business & Economics (Duiwai Jingji Maoyi Daxue, or Jing Mao Daxue) (UIBE). Maryland has established an executive MBA program there. I will say hello to the people working with that and meet someone on their faculty studying finance. I would also like to visit the CSRC, meet with Guo Feng (editor of the PRC Securities Law Review), visit a few friends and former colleagues…Inevitably, I will run out of time to see everyone I’d like to see before I leave.

I have to work on this article on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, too. Yesterday I read something on the SOA by Joel Seligman, dean of my law school and one of the leading US securities law gurus. It was apparently prepared for his comments at a corporate law symposium at the law school, an annual affair. It provided a helpful general overview of the myriad legal implications of the Enron implosion and the SOA. Some of the content about Enron was also in the presentation he made at the CSRC when he visited Beijing. Two local alumni–John Smagula, now at Temple law school, and I–accompanied him (in fact, John and I suggested and set up his CSRC visit).

This weekend I found The Bookworm, a lovely place in the San Li Tun bar area. I have tended to avoid San Li Tun. I much prefer Hou Hai. But The Bookworm is worth finding. It has an extensive “library” of English language books. Tucked deep in an alley off the north segment of the San Li Tun bar street, it is unlikely anyone will stumble across it unintentionally. The British woman running it says she plans to launch a website but hasn’t had time yet. The phone number is (8610) 6415 1954, and the email address is books@beijingbookworm.com.

I stayed there a few hours, reading Friend of China: The Myth of Rewi Alley, a study of one of the Communist sympathizers who stayed on after the revolution as a “friend of China.” When I was a student at the Princeton in Beijing Mandarin training “boot camp” a few years ago, a young caucasian man who had grown up in Beijing (and spoke perfect Chinese) gave us a talk. He was introduced as the “son of Rewi Alley.” That was my first introduction to Rewi Alley. (The son, like his father, was an apologist for the regime and identified himself as a communist…I was impressed by his Chinese, but not his political ideology). This summer I read Helen Foster Snow’s autobiography, My China Years. She discussed Rewi Alley with respect to her work with him to support industrial cooperatives (gong he, from which apparently “Geng ho” entered the English language). She painted a picture of Rewi Alley as a rugged, can-do guy, full of love for the Chinese people. While I imagine I, too, might have been sympathetic to the Communists in the 1930s-50s, in hindsight these people were tragically wrong–and I find it repulsive that they didn’t reject their early sympathy for the CCP after the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Anyway, I was surprised to learn from this book I ran across this weekend that Rewi Alley was a mostly closeted homosexual who never married. That discovery doesn’t make me forgive Alley’s benighted political judgments and shameless sycophantry to the changing PRC political line, but it does help me understand one additional reason (besides the plight of China and the apparent idealism of the CCP in the early days) that he might have been inclined to embrace a revolutionary ideology and elected to live permanently in China. Inexplicably, though, the CCP program, according to this book, was less tolerant of homosexuality than traditional Chinese culture.

Don Clarke, one of the leading US scholars of Chinese law, told me about The Bookworm. He told me they might have copies of Privatizing China: The Stock Markets and their Role in Corporate Reform, the new book by Carl Walter and Fraser Howie. Fraser gave a reading at the Bookworm a few weeks ago. This book is a “new edition” (though with a different publisher and under and different title) of To Get Rich is Glorious: China’s Stock Markets in the ’80s and 90s. Any book about PRC stock markets naturally gets my attention. I have had a copy on order with Amazon for weeks and weeks, but apparently the new edition is not shipping in the US yet. Though I had already managed to find a copy at the Lufthansa Center (and also have seen copies in the lobby shop of the Kapinski Hotel), I am glad I sought out this little Bookworm place anyway.

Privatizing China is an indispensable resource for those interested in PRC securities markets. China’s Stockmarket : A guide to its Progress, Players and Prospects by the UK’s Stephen Green was also just published in the last few months. It also provides a wealth of information. I haven’t found anything better in English (and not in Chinese, either, come to think of it), to provide a cogent and up-to-date overview of PRC securities markets than these two books. I plan to write a review of these two books once I get back to the US. Anybody interested in this area should buy and study both of them.