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Weijian Shan’s memoir “Out of the Gobi”
has taken the United States by storm. Highly praised by
both major media like the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and USA Today, and general readers alike, Dr.
Shan’s autobiographical
saga of his life as an exile in the Gobi Desert and
subsequent rise to become one of the
most successful financiers in China has been called
“the book that will change your view on China.”
After
an intensive round of media interviews and book talks in
London and then New York, Dr. Shan ended his whirlwind tour
with a crowded event sponsored by the highly regarded
National Committee on US-China Relations. The event at
the CBS Television headquarters in mid-town Manhattan was
co-hosted by Dorsey & Whitney, a prestigious global law
firm. Dr. Shan was introduced by Stephen Orlins, the
National Committee’s president and a close friend of
the author’s. Mr. Orlins,
who used to be
also managing director of Carlyle Asia, described Shan’s
book as “a history of the last 60 years of
China, personalized.”
Shan began his talk commenting on the very unexpected, but
overwhelming response his book has created,i n the
U.S., topping Amazon’s best seller list for four consecutive
weeks and continuing as one of the biggest selling books of
the this year.
Dr.Shan, Chairman and CEO of PAG, one of
Asia’s largest independent alternative investment management
groups, then kept his audience rapt with attention for more
than another hour and a half, recounting the horrific
experiences he endured during his six years of hard labor in
the Gobi desert as a one of 16 million teenagers, including
the infamous Red Guards, who were sent to the remote and
poorest provinces to be ‘re-educated by peasants”. [Please
note I wasn’t a Red Guard myself]. The trauma inflicted on
Shan and his contemporaries was often unspeakable. Their
education was cut short and their lives disrupted, if not
destroyed. Most were consigned to poverty and menial jobs
ever after the Cultural Revolution had ended. Shan works on
a state farm in the Gobi, where he dug ditches, harvested
potatoes, practiced medicine as a barefoot doctor with not
much training whatsoever, and made bricks out of with mud
and ox dung, taking his audience through a world remarkably
suggestive of the harsh conditions Charles Dickens described
in his classic novel, Great Expectations. Like a Dickens
character, Weijian Shan’s suffering proved only to make
him stronger. With his natural ability as a
storyteller, Shan spoke with the clarity of the world
renowned investment banker he has become, articulating his
every word with feeling, evoking powerful images through
minute details. His delivery was that of a pleasant cross
between passion and presentation and he kept his audience
hanging on to his every word, engaged, awed, and
overwhelmed.
Shan recounted
much of his early life, when he was a young 12-year old city
scamp living in old Beijing, running around with local gangs
and getting into mischief, as the full impact of Chairman
Mao’s Cultural Revolution began to unfold. Shan was at first
an enthusiastic volunteer and longed to be part of this
great cultural awakening. He was assigned to the Gobi Desert
and with a few friends he relished the importance of his new
job, planting crops in the frozen sands of the tundra
where temperatures often dropped to minus 10 degrees
Fahrenheit at night and the only available source of
water was solid ice. For more than seven years, Shan
was “stationed” in the Gobi, but he felt as though he had
been banished. His family back in Beijing had been torn
apart during the Cultural Revolution. His mother and
sister were sent to two different provinces, although his
aging father and much younger brother were allowed to remain
in sadly reduced circumstances in Beijing. Shan himself,
however, gained strength and innovation as an ill-fed,
overworked teenager but was reduced to taking serious risks
to find food—chickens he and his confederates occasionally
had to steal from local peasants to keep from starving to
death. He recounted thinking on one such outing that if he
were to drop dead right there and then, it was more than
likely no one would ever find his body and he would have
been turned into a speck of dust and become part of the sand
under his feet. It was there, in that barren and desolate
landscape in the middle of nowhere, that Shan was fortunate
enough to meet a pilot from the China Aviation Service
who had been exiled to the Gobi and told to raise
pigs. Meeting this older individual, who had flown around the
world, became Shan’s close friend and mentor, but also
planted the seeds of Shan’s dream of someday going abroad.
Another friend possessed a crude a camera which they used to
record conditions in the Gobi. Upon Mao’s death, Shan was
able to learn English and become one of the first Chinese
ever to come to America where he would receive a formal
education (despite the fact that he had, essentially, no
secondary education and had taught himself mathematics by
candlelight while in the Gobi, as noted by Janet Yellen, the
former chair of the Fed and his doctorate advisor who wrote
a touching foreword for the book. Coming to
America had abruptly changed the course of Shan’s life and
provided him with a stunning Hollywood persona: a Chinese
crusader out of Gobi, chasing his dream and determined to
make that dream come true, at any cost!
Over
the next forty years, Shan never dared to stop, or even slow
down. Enrolled at UC Berkeley, he obtained both his Master
of Arts and also, amazingly, his Doctor
of Philosophy degrees and then in the 1980’s,
became a management professor at the famous Wharton
School where President Donald Trump learned
finance. The economic boom of the 1990soffered Shan the
opportunity to become a legendary financier in the making.
He was recruited by the legendary David Bonderman’s Texas
Pacific Group (TPG) where Shan helped make billions of
dollars for TPG’s clients. His finance career
then took him to first to Asia and
eventually back to China, this time not to plant crops,
but to harvest gold. Shan became one of the first private
equity investors in China, the first to buy control of a
state-owned bank (which is now worth US$30billion) and one
of the first to acquire other SOEs which strengthened his
relationships with Beijing and made Shan and his investors
immense returns.
Among
the crowd present at this last event for Shan in the United
States were many members of the media, artists who were
interested in the theme of China and Gobi, fellow Chinese
writers, and many young American and Chinese investment
bankers who dream of become the
next Weijian Shan one day soon.
Just
for the record, however, Shan ended his talk with a brief
overview of market trends in China’s historic economic
revolution. Just 50 years ago, he pointed out, the
average yearly salary in China was less than $150. Shan
himself made $10 a year during his time in Gobi. China’s
growth was largely driven by investments and exports to
mainly western markets. Even just 10 years ago, consumption
represented only about 35% of GDP, compared with more than
70% for the United States. By 2018, however, these
statistics have seen a radical reverse, with consumption
representing more than50% of China’s GDP
while export accounts for only19%, down from 36% from its
peak. Over the past three decades, China has been gradually
shifting to a more liberal market with private sectors today
accounting for more than60% of China’s GDP.
Shan believes this trajectory isn’t changing and that
China’s future lies in a market economy, similar to most
western countries.
Shan ended his talk by recounting the significant and very
different life coming to the U.S. and then returning to
China has given him. His life today could not be more
removed from the lives his old friends he lived and worked
with in the Gobi. His entire generation, Shan says, is a
lost generation, youths forced into the countryside to grow
crops in impossible conditions and robbed not only of any
education, but in so many cases, of any hope of ever
improving their lot in life. Many of his friends today live
in poverty and are unable to find work or earn a living
.. Ashe spoke these words, however, Shan’s tone softened,
not of a world renowned investment banker, but an individual
who has no fake sympathy, no judgement, just the matter of
fact recounting of his own miraculous good fortune.
For
Shan, the Cultural Revolution was an example of what happens
when a government has absolute control. It is a time of chaos
where everyone, from peasants to the highest government
officials, can suffer and an entire generation can not
only become “lost”, but can also turn against one another.
To survive such a period can and was a daily struggle. For
Shan, the Cultural Revolution serves as a cautionary tale
against government owning everything and mandating all
aspects of a person’s life, including who should live and
who should die.
When asked Shan if he had a specific group of people, a
target audience, he wanted his book’s message to reach? His
response suggests his book is not just a vanity project
written for his own benefit. Shan said he started writing
this book when his children were young, that in his
household, instead of telling his children fairytales, he
would tell them about his time in the Gobi and his kids were
more enthralled than they would ever be since this was the
life their father had actually led. Shan began writing this
book 27 years ago but it wasn’t until 2017 that he decided
to make finishing this book his New Year’s resolution. He
wrote this book, Shan says, for his children, and other
children of the “lost generation” to know of this most
horrific period in Chinese history and appreciate what they
have, and even more importantly, appreciate the world
they now live in. Shan has passed the torch of
a dreamer on to the next generation of crusaders, which
includes me, a millennium member whose parents shared Shan’s
experience out of China to America and who, like Shan,
have made their own lives another Hollywood story. |