Elliot Wilson

Tuesday

20 Oct 2015
Elliot Wilson

China needs Britain more than Britain needs China

When King George III sent the diplomat-statesman Lord Macartney to Beijing in 1793 to meet China’s all-powerful Qianlong Emperor, history was in flux. The Celestial Empire had dominated world trade for two millennia, yet it was in a state of protracted decline. Britain in contrast was a rising superpower on whose empire (to use a term coined by Macartney) the sun ‘never set’. The mission’s task was simple: unveil the latest wares from Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh – globes, telescopes, weaponry – then wait for a dazzled and covetous audience to open trade routes through northern China. Yet despite pausing lovingly over an ornate clock, the 81-year-old Emperor declined the offer. 'Strange and costly objects' he said in a letter to the King, could not possibly interest a culture that already 'possess[ed] all things'.

China needs Britain more than Britain needs China

Tuesday

25 Aug 2015
Elliot Wilson

Even China can’t buck the market

Some years ago, I sat with an old China hand in a Beijing teahouse sipping oolong. An American director at a local education firm, his face was grey, creased by decades of pollution and office politics. But when talk turned to the country’s first spacewalk, recently completed, his brow furrowed. 'Have you ever noticed that the government is trying to do everything the United States did, but 50 years later?' He ticked off a list of the mainland’s aims and achievements, from manned space travel, to plans to place a Chinese citizen on the surface of the Moon. But the comparisons don’t end there. For all of its trumpeted exceptionalism, this is a country desperately striving to catch up with and copy the West. A network of Chinese motorways mimic Dwight D.

Even China can’t buck the market

Monday

24 Aug 2015
Elliot Wilson

China’s ‘Black Monday’ is just the start

One-party states are rarely any good at admitting to any form of blunder. It is certainly the case with China’s prickly political leaders, who love to flood domestic media with jolly tales of fashion shows and bamboo-chomping pandas – anything to divert people’s attention from a flagging economy and rising unemployment. This makes today's main headline on China Daily's website all the more arresting: 'Stocks plunge most since 2007 as state support measures fail' the state-run newspaper blared, after the Shanghai Composite share index lost 8.5 per cent in a single day. The wider world followed China’s lead: all major Asian stock indices fell on Monday, with oil tumbling to a six-year low. Even gold prices, usually a safe haven in bad times, inched down.

China’s ‘Black Monday’ is just the start

Thursday

13 Aug 2015
Elliot Wilson

Exit the dragon

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3" title="Elliot Wilson and Andrew Sentance discuss China's economic slump"] Listen [/audioplayer]I stood alongside the chairman of the board of a state-owned enterprise in eastern China. The factory floor, partially open to the elements, stretched out far in front of us, littered with towers and blades designed for some of the world’s largest wind turbines. It was an impressive sight, one to which regular visitors to mainland factories are accustomed: China as the workshop of the world. But something was missing: workers. ‘They’ve been given the day off,’ the chairman said with a slight cough, as we stared out over the vast compound.

Exit the dragon

Thursday

9 Oct 2014
Elliot Wilson

Why everyone will suffer if China cracks down on Hong Kong

With all the chaos and confusion engulfing Hong Kong in recent weeks, it’s worth reminding ourselves what an extraordinary city it is — and what a loss to investors the removal of one of the world’s great safe havens would be. Hong Kong has long operated in a culturally neutral zone somewhere between China and the world, a bridgehead between the West and the world’s rising superpower. By the time London handed it back to Beijing in 1997 after 150 years of British rule, a once barren rock had been transformed into a genuinely global city. In the 17 years since, China has adhered largely to a set of principles thrashed out in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, which allowed the city to retain its free media and independent judiciary.

Why everyone will suffer if China cracks down on Hong Kong

Thursday

3 Oct 2013
Elliot Wilson

If you think British banks are bad, you’ve never tried China’s

It’s hard to think of anything more badly run than a Chinese bank. Somalia perhaps, or the BBC’s remuneration committee. Certainly, Beijing’s embattled lenders make ours look like paragons of financial rectitude. We may dislike RBS et al for bringing our economy to its knees, but at least we’re not saddled with a cabal of banks inextricably linked to whoever resides in Downing Street. Let’s start with good old-fashioned service. We may complain about our banks, how they all look the same and bombard us with adverts that would patronise a two-year-old. But at least they pretend to care. China’s banks don’t. Service is dire wherever you go. Internet or mobile banking ranges from poor to non-existent. A few make an effort, notably China Merchants Bank, a mid-range lender from the south of the country.

If you think British banks are bad, you’ve never tried China’s

Saturday

14 May 2011
Elliot Wilson

Breaking the bank

The vendetta against Bangladesh’s Nobel Peace Prize winner‘It is all lies,’ says Muhammad Yunus, his voice quiet but firm. ‘The media in Bangladesh attacks me unceasingly and I cannot stop them, but the accusations are untrue.’I believe him absolutely. Yunus is a Nobel Peace Prize winner who has done perhaps more than any other living person to alleviate global poverty. Grameen Bank, the microfinance operation that he founded nearly 30 years ago, has (by lending to even the very poorest families) transformed the lives of millions of his fellow Bangladeshis and become a model emulated across the world. But he is now living in fear of his government, which seems bent on discrediting him. ‘My voice is not heard. They will find a way to create mud and then make it stick to me.

Breaking the bank

Saturday

13 Feb 2010
Elliot Wilson

Gallantry is a finite resource

Few individuals better personify the eccentric, combative and rarefied world of medal collecting than Michael Ashcroft, the businessman and controversially deep-pocketed Tory party eminence grise. A self-made man whose fortune is estimated by the Sunday Times at £1.1 billion — more than the entire net worth of Belize, the tiny Central American state he calls home — Lord Ashcroft has also carved out a near-monopoly of a very finite resource: the Victoria Cross. Since being introduced in 1856 at the tail end of the Crimean War, just 1,356 VCs have been awarded. Most are in public collections, notably that of London’s Imperial War Museum. Those that are not are most likely to be in the hands of Lord Ashcroft. The Tory peer owns no fewer than 160 VCs, by far the largest private collection, including one awarded to John Chard during the defence of Rorke’s Drift in 1879.

Gallantry is a finite resource

Wednesday

18 Nov 2009
Elliot Wilson

Will Kraft’s plastic cheese smother Cadbury’s heritage?

Elliot Wilson says there are synergies between the takeover protagonists — but it will be sad to see the British chocolate maker swallowed by a bloated US conglomerateWhen consumer goods giant Kraft tabled a £10.2 billion bid for Cadbury two weeks ago, the outcry was immediate and heartfelt. Here was an American monster buying an iconic British household name, one of our very last independent, home-grown, corporate crown jewels. Some of the resentment was understandable. Cadbury’s heritage is part of our national psyche. Founded 185 years ago by John Cadbury, a Quaker tea-and-coffee trader, the firm’s aims were as much to do with social improvement as with profit. Moreover, Cadbury seemed to be a great survivor.

Wednesday

28 Oct 2009
Elliot Wilson

Keep on digging: Boris’s route to recovery

Elliot Wilson says all the razzmatazz for the start of work on Crossrail highlights the construction industry’s urgent desire to soak up public funds before Tory cuts set inNo major city anywhere has achieved as much as London has with such poor public transport at its disposal. Trams that break down; bendy buses that burst into flames; an underground rail network that overheats in the summer and taxes the patience and the wallets of millions of commuters all year round. The experience has been likened by London’s own mayor, Boris Johnson, to ‘sardine-tin travel’ — doing little for its citizens’ quality of life, or its reputation as the world’s leading centre for financial services, media and communications.

Saturday

5 Sep 2009
Elliot Wilson

City Life | 5 September 2009

After 50 years of communist gristle, no wonder old Fidel’s guts are playing upThere’s a degree of natural justice in the fact that Fidel Castro had to cede power to his brother Raúl last year because of serious gastro-intestinal problems. Put bluntly, after 50 years of Castro communism, Cuban cuisine is absolutely revolting. It’s rumoured that barely a thousand head of cattle remain on the island — down from several million pre-Fidel — and that gristly offcuts of beef and mutton are imported from Venezuela, Costa Rica and even the US. Restaurants come in two grades: cheap, cheerful and awful; or pricey, miserable and awful. Roadside fare is worse: plates of malodorous rice and the occasional limp vegetable washed down with impenetrable ‘meat sauce’.

Saturday

25 Jul 2009
Elliot Wilson

The nuclear power-dresser

Barbara Judge is an extraordinary human being, particularly for those of us who struggle to iron a shirt. Apart from her flawless grooming — in a power suit with a starched ruff, she resembles a cross between Marie Antoinette and Jessica Tandy — she has more titles than most monarchs. Lady Judge, a British-American dual citizen married to philanthropist Sir Paul Judge, sits on boards on both sides of the Atlantic, chairs the School of Oriental and African Studies, and is a trustee of the Royal Academy. Her past is no less impressive. In 1980, the then Barbara Thomas became the youngest-ever head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. By 2007, she was reported to hold no fewer than 30 directorships. And for the past five years, she has chaired the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the state-owned body vested with dismantling our ageing nuclear plants and, since 2006, providing expertise on building new ones.

Wednesday

3 Jun 2009
Elliot Wilson

One day, the kharbouza will be mightier than the Kalashnikov

Afghan farmers can prosper by producing the world’s finest melons, pomegranates and grapes, says Elliot Wilson, but first they must be weaned off growing the opium poppyModern-day Afghanistan conjures up many fearsome images, from rocket-launchers and retreating Soviet tanks to mujahedin warriors and Taleban zealots. Yet this war-ravaged central Asian state, which has to date repelled every barbarian invader foolish enough to set foot on its dusty red soil, has another, much gentler aspect to its national character. When no one is looking and the men have hung up their Kalashnikovs for the day, many of them attend to their second career: growing melons. And not just any melons. Afghanistan has been producing the world’s finest kharbouza for at least 4,500 years.

Saturday

3 Jan 2009
Elliot Wilson

Let India 2.0 rise from the ashes of Bombay

Elliot Wilson says that an energetic form of political activism — principally on the internet — is needed in India and there are encouraging signs on Facebook, MySpace and other sitesIf there is any good to come out of November’s bloody terror attacks in Bombay, it can be found not on the city’s angry streets, nor in the Lok Sabha, New Delhi’s lethargic lower house, but in a more nebulous place, dismissed by both Hillary Clinton and John McCain but embraced by US President-elect Barack Obama: the internet. The Bombay bombings have galvanised urban professionals — traditionally the least-motivated bloc of Indian voters — forcing them to come out of the closet and admit to their political apathy just in time for watershed parliamentary elections in the spring.

Wednesday

26 Nov 2008
Elliot Wilson

A new job for the IMF: as global policeman

In early November the head of the world’s leading multilateral agency made a remarkable public bid for survival. Speaking in São Paulo, addressing the world’s most powerful finance ministers, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, announced that his institution was the right one to lead us out of our financial and economic malaise. Conveniently overlooking some uncomfortable facts — that the IMF must at least share responsibility for getting parts of the world into this soup, and that it failed to predict the coming financial storm — Strauss-Kahn told his audience that the world needed ‘a stronger IMF, particularly as far as early warnings are concerned’. In this the Frenchman was at least half correct.

Saturday

15 Nov 2008
Elliot Wilson

Britain cannot afford a failed Pakistan

Pakistan is a failing state, and barring a mammoth bail-out few can now afford, it will become the world’s first bankrupt nuclear power. Bowed down by our own financial crisis and an economy teetering on the edge of recession, should we care? In sovereign terms the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which last year celebrated its 60th birthday, is into its adolescent years, now something of a cross between a prodigal son and the family’s black sheep. A major exporter of fertiliser, potash and terrorists, it is also the world’s only Muslim nuclear power. The country’s ruling authorities, supported and undermined in equal measures by a raft of millionaire military officers, landed gentry, feudal landlords, industrialists, extremists and religious zealots, are forced to recognise their roots as an Islamic nation while tipping a nod toward a constitutionally secular legislature.

Britain cannot afford a failed Pakistan

Saturday

1 Nov 2008
Elliot Wilson

Chasing dragons: the Chinese army takes up art collecting | 1 November 2008

In 2003, during a long night of swilling fine French wines in Beijing, talk turned to China’s rising economic fortunes. Old China hands at the table reminisced about camel trains clattering through the capital’s dim 1970s streets. Then a mysterious American chipped in with an extraordinary tale. Back in 1983, he said, China’s coffers were so low that starving officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were reduced to selling off the country’s heirlooms. One chilly winter evening he had backed a truck into the Forbidden City and quietly loaded it with priceless antiques. Ten minutes later he was on Chang’an Avenue, weighed down with art worth more than the average bank bail-out.Having hawked its heirlooms to the capitalist running dogs, however, a newly enriched and empowered China now wants them back.

Saturday

30 Aug 2008
Elliot Wilson

City Life | 30 August 2008

The credit crunch reaches the home of the rotten apple and the ‘Rolexo’ watchJames Gregory Pool III is an elderly, stooping Canadian with a most un-usual job. Every month he boards a plane from Canada with 200 sedated heifers and flies with them to Almaty to beef up and variegate Kazakhstan’s breeding livestock. He’s the archetypal eccentric foreign entrepreneur one finds in this eccentric Central Asian city. A recent trip threw up several such oddities: a German wine trader trying — and largely failing — to interest the Kazakhs in £100-a-bottle claret; a Norwegian flogging confessedly second-rate salmon to hotels and restaurants; a 19-year-old British geologist so driven to succeed in the mining industry that she carried a glass construct of the element molybdenum in her pocket.

Saturday

19 Jul 2008
Elliot Wilson

Who’s in charge? It’s hapless Hank

It’s becoming harder and harder to believe that anyone is really in charge of the world’s largest economy. Each day brings a new catalogue of woes, miscues and missteps, each of which should have been foreseen long ago. And at the centre of each fresh foul-up stands one man: Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, ‘Hammerin’ Hank’, once boss of mighty Goldman Sachs, now reduced to a sort of Frank Spencer figure, constantly bemused by domestic disaster. Only in Hank’s world it’s the American mortgage industry that’s falling apart, not just the kitchen table. The latest stress test for America’s embattled economy is the sudden, alarming decline in the shares of Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association), institutions that together guarantee and fund $6 trillion worth of mortgage debt.

Wednesday

18 Jun 2008
Elliot Wilson

Business as usual with the Burmese generals

Elliot Wilson explains why international condemnation of Burma’s brutal military leaders is so ineffectual: because many other countries are eager to do deals with themThe satirist P.J. O’Rourke once noted that the more references to democracy a country has in its official title, the greater the chance it is run by a grubby totalitarian regime. Hence the People’s Republic of China and the Kim dynasty’s heroically misleading ‘Democratic People’s Republic’ of North Korea. Burma — or Myanmar, as its leaders prefer — has its equivalent in the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). This is essentially a rebadged version of the less fluffy-sounding State Law and Order Restoration Council, a name that was dropped in 1997 perhaps due to its unappealingly Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque acronym: SLORC.

Wednesday

12 Mar 2008
Elliot Wilson

Funding a path out of poverty

Elliot Wilson explores how investors can back ventures that lend to the world’s poorest entrepreneursPrathminda Kaur is the modern version of the Little Match Girl, only with a twist: instead of perishing in a Victorian winter, she’s making a nice living for herself selling red onions and bell peppers in a Mumbai market. Kaur arrived in the Indian coastal city eight years ago. To start with she slept on the street, borrowing money from a loan shark at dawn, handing him more than 90 per cent of her profits at dusk. On an average day, the interest on her loans worked out to an annual rate of 10,000 per cent. But two years ago a friend introduced her to SKS Microfinance, an Indian lender that makes millions of tiny loans to local entrepreneurs like Kaur.

Wednesday

16 Jan 2008
Elliot Wilson

The military millionaires who control Pakistan Inc

Elliot Wilson says Pakistan’s economy is dominated by a ruthless business conglomerate that owns everything from factories and bakeries to farmland and golf courses: the armySometime in late 2004, Pakistan's all-powerful army made a curious decision. Under mounting pressure from London and Washington to capture Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Baluchistan, Islamabad's fighting forces instead turned their attention to a far more profitable venture: building golf courses.In itself this wasn’t particularly unusual. With 620,000 soldiers, Pakistan boasts the world’s seventh-largest standing army, but its senior officers long ago realised the perks to be gained from commercial ventures. Since independence in 1947, the army has steadily intertwined itself into Pakistan’s economy: so much so that it’s hard to tell where the military stops and any semblance of free-market capitalism begins.

Saturday

15 Dec 2007
Elliot Wilson

In Tianjin

The Wangdingdi market on the outskirts of this fast-growing port city in north-east China is an extraordinary sight. It might be the world’s largest bicycle market; it’s certainly the loudest. In the roiling heat of a Chinese summer, touts at the market gather in a liquid throng, moving like mercury, urging — sometimes almost rugby-tackling — you into their stalls.Each shop is virtually identical, smelling in equal measures of garlic, vinegar and armpits, and packed to the gills with every type of bicycle: some designed for the town; some for mountain trails; some, to judge by their battered appearance, for the scrapheap. But the star of the market is the Flying Pigeon, the grande dame of Chinese bicycles, based on a 1936 Raleigh and built solidly enough to withstand a charging hippopotamus.

In Tianjin

Saturday

3 Nov 2007
Elliot Wilson

Slums for the masses, fortunes for the few

Hu Bin is your archetypal Chinese real-estate entrepre­neur. Built like a bull, with a huge, moon-shaped head, a permanent grin and tiny, nicotine-blackened teeth, he is also the embodiment of Beijing’s sudden determination to use its huge capital reserves to buy the world. Despite an estimated £5 billion fortune, Hu Bin would normally have remained a low-key figure, even in China. His company, Shanghai Zhongzhou International Holding, is the unlisted owner of isolated packets of high-end residential property dotted around Shanghai. But on 17 October he did something guaranteed to attract the attention of the world’s press, splashing out £15 million on a 40,000 square metre artificial island off Dubai and promising to spend £100 million turning it into a miniature Shanghai.

Saturday

6 Oct 2007
Elliot Wilson

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil‘Biofuels?’ Ricardo Leiman gives an imperious snort, his eyebrows wobbling. ‘Bio­fuels?’ he repeats in an offended tone, as if asked to perform a lewd act. ‘There’s about 20 million tonnes of processed edible oil on the planet right now — not enough to fulfil 5 per cent of Europe’s energy needs, let alone any of the huge demand in the US, China, India or anywhere else.’ If Leiman doesn’t believe that biofuels are a viable solution to our energy needs, one wonders why anybody does. As chief operating officer of Noble Group, a Hong Kong-listed trading giant that crushes and refines close to 2.5 million tonnes of soybean and vegetable oil each year — much of it destined to fuel hybrid cars and buses — Leiman has much to gain from the budding industry.

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Saturday

23 Jun 2007
Elliot Wilson

The scourge of Hong Kong

Every city needs a David Webb. Hong Kong, a heaving, sweating shrine to capitalism, cronyism and cartels, is lucky it has the real thing. Shareholder rights and corporate governance remain largely alien concepts in this former British colony, which is about to mark the tenth anniversary of its return to China. It sometimes feels that Webb, a former London investment banker who moved to Hong Kong for Barclays, is the only person who cares about the rights of small shareholders, or about checking the corrosive influence of the city’s all-powerful tycoons.Lean and acerbic, Webb resembles a thin David Shayler, the former MI5 officer. He doesn’t do small talk, and stares at you with disturbing concentration. By his own admission, he’s a geek — in the early 1980s he co-authored instruction manuals for early Sinclair Spectrum computers.

Saturday

2 Jun 2007
Elliot Wilson

What if it rains on Beijing’s Olympic parade?

No official visit to China’s capital is complete these days without paying homage at a large and rather shabby building in the sprawling northern suburb of Haidian. The Beijing Olympic Tower is the nerve-centre of a seven-year, $48 billion project that has the potential to define China’s rapid ascent to economic superpowerdom — or to turn into the greatest public relations disaster the world has ever seen. Dignitaries and politicians fly in from all over the world to be welcomed, and lectured, by mid-ranking Chinese officials. The chief executive of UK Sport popped in for a pot of green tea in May, as did minor dignitaries from Canada, Australia and Greece. In April, Prince Albert II of Monaco graced the building’s corridors, while this summer a more post-millennial royal visitor is expected in the person of David Beckham.

Saturday

28 Apr 2007
Elliot Wilson

Why come to Kazakhstan?

Russia may have set the bar pretty high, but Kazakhstan still has to be one of the most extraordinarily business-unfriendly places on the planet. A visit to this vast Central Asian state is like a modern reworking of Malcolm Bradbury’s satire Why Come to Slaka?, which catalogued the dubious attractions of a fictional East European state in the Cold War.On the surface, this giant, underpopulated nation is doing remarkably well. From being virtually bankrupt a decade ago, the two main cities — Almaty in the south, and the northerly capital of Astana — now brim with confidence and cash. Mercedes and Bentleys jostle for road space with Ladas and Moskvitches; octogenarian babushkas take out loans with HSBC and Citibank to refurbish their plush inner-city apartments.

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