Several events， visits and official meetings are scheduled in BeiJing and ShangHai. We， the Tycoons and little me， ride with a bus. Sometimes I am sitting next to Heinrich von Pierer (of Siemens)， sometimes to Jürgen Weber (then the chief executive of Lufthansa)， and we also talk about cranes. Ron Sommer (Deutsche Telekom’s Board Director at that time) is very relaxed， like everyone else on the bus， much more relaxed than you may imagine when watching the TV coverage. But the “Bahnchef ” (as he is called in German media)， the Railway Boss， Mr. Mehdorn， the CEO of Deutsche Bahn， is the generic comedian. He keeps entertaining us with small performances of stage quality. I am involved in the talks as if I had always been one of them and yet another key member of German big business.
Just by the way I learn a lot from the other fellow travellers about China through discussing my problems with the provincial government of Jilin. The Volkswagen sales director informs me that – after several clues， strange observations and systematic own investigation – they discovered one day a ghost factory where some Chinese cloned original VW parts.
The main shareholder and CEO of a large high-technology company tells me of the chief assistant and a manager who were related to each other and had secretly built up a trading company that bought valuable resources from his company for far less than the normal price， claiming these raw materials were dirty and not compliant to specifications. The family-owned trading ring then relabelled them， so that they were now clean and pure and valuable， and sold them at the best price somewhere in China.
The police did not initially want to pursue the case. Then the German director was threatened to be arrested and expelled， then for some time his business license was revoked. Meanwhile the official stamp (without which no company can legally do business in China) suddenly was possessed by that manager who had set up the trading company together with the chief assistant. Only by threatening to inform the Minister of Economy (whom the main shareholder personally knew) this affair was finally settled and the sale of company values ended.
My company (if I would ever have one in China) would never have such importance that a threat to inform the Minister of Economy might leave any impression in a similar situation.
Another delegation member tells me that they had lost a whole subsidiary because the Chinese manager one day went with the company stamp to the authorities and rewrote everything in his own name. Although it was later be proven in lengthy court proceedings that this was effectively the theft of an entire company， the only benefit was some financial compensation， but the subsidiary was gone.
All this does not give me much hope， but rather my fears grow out of hand. If I ever had the courage to set up a company in China (which I would actually do once but did not know on this trip)， I will have to take care not to drown in a mud of corruption and family clique – and especially keep an eye on the stamp！ But how？
In ShangHai， we have important appointments： The first is to celebrate the construction of the first support pillar of the magnetic levitation train system Maglev. I am impressed to see how the Chinese manage this project and even placed a factory for concrete pillars just there， only for constructing the Maglev， which will be dismantled again after completion.
Also there is a German-Chinese joint venture which has built a trade show exhibition hall that is now being officially opened in our presence. Then we help more vigorously at the opening of the first OBI store (a “do-it-yourself ” tools and consumables market) in China. In the evening I am accidentally sitting next to Manfred Maus， the founder of OBI， and he tells me and all our neighbours at the table how he was doing market research (with an interpreter) in China to find out what the Chinese are expecting. He went to young families in new housing areas and asked them himself. This leaves a great impression with me.
But something he must have done wrong， because when OBI had already 13 markets in China (including that first one to whose opening we attended)， in April 2005 they completely pulled back from the country. The year before， the chief executive of OBI Asia had departed on his own ways， together with the core of management， and also the most important trade and joint venture partner， Haier， had withdrawn.
From today’s perspective， two of the most important economic projects that we supported during this journey， the magnetic levitation train and OBI， have thus failed. For whatever reason – the Germans had drawn the short straw. And what kind of reports I collected on the bus trips was anything but motivating.
With a background like this， a few years later I am suddenly back to China – permanently.