Losing the New China

Arriving in Beijing in 1998 along with other Americans searching for the riches of the new China, Ethan Gutmann rapidly made his way into the expatriate community of American entrepreneurs. For them, Beijing was an Open City inside a controlled world. Entering this well-catered equivalent of a corporate boot camp, Gutmann was indoctrinated in the creed that China's growing strength presented untapped opportunities for profit and expansion. American entrepreneurs might say that they were bringing freedom to China, but they were actually engaged in what Gutmann calls 'climbing the Gold Mountain'. Over the next three years, as Gutmann worked his way into comfortable positions at a Chinese television documentary company and a public affairs firm conducting US politicians on carefully choreographed tours of the New China, he became an insider. What Gutmann discovered in the company meetings, cocktail parties, and after-hours expatriate haunts made him uneasy. In Beijing's expatriate fast lane, success was measured not only by market share, but also by the ability to pay off favours by building hot-swappable research centres for the PLA and lobbying for Chinese interests in Washington. Treating the New China as a combination of El Dorado and Lotus Land, American businessmen allowed themselves to be seduced by a hallucinatory Orientalist dream world of easy money, moral complicity and exotic sex. Gutmann too felt the seductive powers of the Beijing Boot Camp and at one level 'Losing the New China' is a trip log of an unexpected personal journey. But above all, this book is a carefully documented report on a commercial world without moral landmarks or boundaries, where actions have unintended consequences.