The British businessman and writer, perhaps best known for his best-selling book Mr China, believes Chinese civilization is “tremendously useful, pragmatic and undogmatic.”
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00:00Tim Clissold is a British businessman and writer who developed a fascination with China
00:12after travelling through the country in the 1980s. He ended up living and working there
00:16for more than 20 years, co-founding a private equity group that invested more than 400 million
00:22dollars. His first book, Mr China, told the story of a Wall Street banker who learned
00:27how not to do business there. Enormously successful, it was translated into 12 languages.
00:34Our correspondent Ray Addison went to meet him.
00:38In celebration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China,
00:43what do you feel there is to celebrate about China today?
00:46What's to celebrate in 75 years? Well how about 800 million people being lifted out
00:51of absolute poverty? Isn't that worth celebrating? The fact that a country with 2,000 years
00:59of philosophy, political thought and art is starting to feel more comfortable about its
01:04own civilizational background, more confident about talking about it. Because I personally
01:10regard the Chinese civilization as hopefully, obviously, it belongs to the Chinese people.
01:15It should be seen as the common property of the whole of mankind, or humankind, to
01:22be used. Because it is tremendously useful, it's tremendously pragmatic, it's undogmatic.
01:29And partly perhaps an under-tapped resource. Totally under-tapped resource. But I mean
01:34they've tapped it, that's why they've been so incredibly successful so quickly.
01:38As Chinese businesses have developed and taken on all those new modern practices, are those
01:46ideas influencing Western companies?
01:49So there are two important parts there. So the first one is on an operating level. Western
01:55companies are now learning from Chinese companies. So one example is that the biggest battery
02:04producer in the world is in Fujian, and it's called CATL. And Tesla is using CATL batteries
02:11in its plant in, I think it's Nevada. But anyway, they're using CATL batteries and they
02:16now have Chinese technicians over there helping them install them and make sure they work
02:20properly. So that's an example of, you know, that would never have happened 20 years ago.
02:26But there's something deeper going on. There are plenty of arguments about why China has
02:35developed such a lead in renewables and in the energy transition. Whether it's due to
02:41tariffs, whether it's due to the fact that there was a huge industrial base there anyway,
02:49clustering, which is companies making the same, you know, suppliers and so on being
02:53in the same district, all sorts of different things going on. But there are several academic
02:59studies that said one of the most important things is consistency of policy. So China
03:04started on this road in 2008 and then fleshed it out in 2012, and it's had consistent policy
03:14for that time. So people can invest, both state-owned businesses and private capital
03:20can invest against that policy, confident knowing that it won't change.