News

July 22, 2008

The Chinese Don’t Want Your Want Money, They Want Your Know-How

By Bo Kaap

Glancing back over the expert opinions of a random selection of UK investment gurus down the years, you’d be forgiven for having made the assumption that China was and is having an arbitrary lease of economic good fortune before likely sliding back to the hard line regimes of yesteryear. Despite 20 years of the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, and an economy that continues to exponentially strengthen year on year, many in the UK have long continued to believe that mainland China is an investment case equivalent to Africa in the 1960s or Russia in the 1990s. Attractive on the surface, but much of it mere window dressing likely to fool the unwary.

Phrases like “Chinese Growth”, “Asian Tiger”, and so forth are overused and easily jettisoned as meaningless sound bites. But the three story high Louis Vuitton shop in Beijing, while also overused, is far from meaningless for many residents. There, aspirational Chinese acquire high value luxury goods at European prices. The knock-offs are bought just a quarter of a mile away, in Silk Street, by Western tourists. These are the same tourists who generate the brisk trade in knock-off branded...