China cuts ties with Czech President Petr Pavel over his meeting with the Dalai Lama
Pavel met with the Tibetan leader on July 27 to congratulate him on his 90th birthday during his private trip to India.
The Dalai Lama has been living in exile in the Himalayan town of Dharamshala since fleeing Chinese rule in Tibet in 1959.
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Bloomberg
5 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
China ‘Firmly Stands' With India on Trump Tariffs, Envoy Says
A Chinese official expressed solidarity with India against US tariffs on Indian exports, the latest sign of warming ties between the two Asian rivals. 'The United States has imposed tariffs of up to 50% on India and it has even threatened for more. China firmly opposes this,' China's ambassador to India, Xu Feihong, said Thursday. 'China will firmly stand with India to uphold the multilateral trading system, with the World Trade Organization at its core.'
Bloomberg
32 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
How Weijian Shan Went From Hard Labor to Private Equity Pioneer
By Mishal Husain August 21, 2025 at 8:00 PM EDT Share this article Weijian Shan's life has been one of extraordinary contrasts, from doing hard labor during China's Cultural Revolution to becoming one of Hong Kong's most prominent financiers. Shan was 4 years old when the Communists' Great Leap Forward led to famine, and 12 when Mao Zedong's crusade against the supposed frivolity of education ended his schooling. He witnessed extreme violence and was separated from his parents at 15, when he was among millions of urban teenagers sent to live in remote rural areas. By a stroke of luck, he managed to return to Beijing — and to his education — in the 1970s, later studying under Janet Yellen in the US and founding PAG, one of the largest private equity firms in Asia. Shan's 2019 book, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, made me curious to learn more about his tale of adversity and success, character and opportunity. We spoke in Hong Kong about his life past and present, and the two countries that have shaped him. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You know both China and America intimately. With months of tariff threats and uncertainty, how would you characterize this period? This is probably the worst relationship that I have seen since [before] 1972, when Richard Nixon visited Beijing. The two countries are engaged in economic war — including trade war, including technology war — which is much more intensified than in 2018, when the first trade war started. 1 It's worth noting that the intervening Biden administration also challenged China in multiple ways, especially on electric vehicles. Recently, Donald Trump has softened some of his rhetoric, speaking of fighting China 'in a very friendly fashion.' Do you feel that personally, as well as as an investor and a financier? You were one of the first Chinese students to go and study in the US. You were perfectly placed to take advantage of the free market coming to China, and to be a bridge in many ways between China and America. Yes, I was. And I felt lucky to be part of it when China first opened up after the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. I went to America in 1980, and I was very much a beneficiary of this relationship. I think we are at a point where America will try to do everything possible to contain China. The relationship was very good when China was far behind the United States in economics and science. At that time it was a honeymoon period because America didn't feel threatened by China, and America in fact helped China develop. But it became quite obvious by the first Trump term that China was gradually catching up with the United States in economic size, 2 and America is very much used to being the No. 1 economic power in the world over the past 150 years. That growth by China is perceived as a threat to the supremacy of the United States. The US economy is the biggest in the world with a GDP of $30.5 trillion, while China is No. 2 at $19.2 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. China is forecast to pull ahead in the mid-2040s, before falling behind again as factors including an aging population affect longer-term growth. So can America successfully keep China from catching up or overtaking it? I know you've said in the past that you don ' t think that America can hurt China much more than around the edges, the periphery. Yes, I did say so. In 2019 I published an article in Foreign Affairs titled 'The Unwinnable Trade War.' I said that the only country that can contain China is China itself, by making policy blunders. I don't think that any other country, including the US, will be able to do so. A trade war is not good for anyone and certainly not for China, but I think China is in need of shifting its growth model away from exports, in the direction of private consumption. Private consumption accounts for less than 40% of China's GDP compared to 68% for the United States. China has depended on exports for economic growth for too long. 3 Chinese consumers' tendency to save rather than spend has been a long-running worry for policymakers. Now, there is an understanding that the country needs to further develop its services sector, as younger consumers want to spend on experiences, travel and events rather than goods. Let's talk about your own life and the extraordinary story that you tell in your book, Out of the Gobi. It's about growing up during the Cultural Revolution. What kind of home were you born into in Beijing in 1954? My parents were clerks in the Chinese bureaucracy. My father was a customs officer and my mother a secretary. Would you call it middle class? I know that you lived initially in a one-room home. There was no such a concept as middle class in China at the time. China was an egalitarian society when I was a child, which meant that everybody was equally poor. I was struck by reading that even as a small child, about 4 years old, you became aware that there was not enough food to eat at home. Your mother was always the last to eat, and you could see the difference in her face and her body. She was seriously malnourished. She would be the last one to eat at the dinner table, just eating whatever was left over, because there was a food shortage all across the country. It was the so-called Great Leap Forward of 1958, a disastrous policy failure. 4 Many people starved to death. Estimates vary from 20 million to 36 million. Even in Beijing, people didn't have enough to eat, including my family. In his book, Shan describes his mother's skin becoming puffy and translucent in this period, her flesh dough-like. 'Every little bit of food helped,' he writes, so he collected seeds from elm trees for her to mix with flour and cook. You also describe the collective effort around you, where everyone is collecting scrap metal – anything they can find – and throwing it into furnaces to make steel. Yes. It was a drive to increase steel production all across the country, so the entire population was mobilized to do so. I was 4 or 5 years old, and I remember many things related to that campaign, including knocking [off] steel accessories from your stove and your door, and throwing them into backyard furnaces. In the end you make waste, because none of this 'steel' was useful. But it was a national fever to catch up with more advanced countries. 'China was an egalitarian society when I was a child, which meant that everybody was equally poor.' And were your parents fully signed up to that? Were they true believers in Chairman Mao? I have no way of knowing, because I was too small, but everybody was involved. 5 Another detail that stayed with me from Shan's book was the killing of sparrows, which the Communist Party identified in 1958 as one of the 'Four Pests' (along with rats, flies and mosquitoes). 'The alleged crime of sparrows was the theft of grain,' Shan writes. He saw them driven from perches across Beijing, through the banging of drums and clanging of pots. Sparrows can't fly far — exhausted, they began falling from the sky. Later on, I think you realized that they were not fully signed up. They saw you being sent away into the countryside. This is the only time I detected some unhappiness. My father said, We joined the revolution for the purpose of getting a better life for our children. We didn't realize our children would not have an education either. That was when I was just about to be sent to the Gobi Desert at the age of 15, to do hard labor. But your education had already stopped at the age of 12? Correct. In 1966. That was a key year, a very chaotic period of time in Chinese history. And honestly, this is the reason I wrote my memoir. That period, horrific as it was, should be remembered — or else we forget and repeat that history. My schooling ended when I was 12, just about to graduate from elementary school, and then the entire school system was shut down. Initially we were very happy because we thought, This is going to be a vacation. But I didn't know this so-called vacation would last 10 years. The Cultural Revolution was really [about] going backwards. I was able to pick up my education after 10 years, but for most of my peers, it was forever. If you lose your schooling, it's exceedingly difficult if you have not kept up studying by yourself. We'll come to how you did that, including reading in the Gobi Desert. But take us back to being in Beijing as the Cultural Revolution is setting in. You seem to have been caught up in the fervor of it with your friends. Yes. 6 Shan was studying for his middle school entrance exam when the Cultural Revolution began in the summer of 1966. Ostensibly about class struggle and ridding China of 'old thought,' it was in reality Mao's attempt to entrench his position, which had been weakened by the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Shan witnessed the frenzied violence of the Red Guards, who were at the forefront of the campaign, and writes of being 'filled with revolutionary energy and zeal.' You do record a moment that makes you sick to your stomach, when you see an elderly woman, the vice principal of a school, being beaten to death. That was the most horrific scene I had ever seen in my life by that stage. It was repulsive to see somebody so brutally beaten by a group of teenage girls. 7 As I recorded in the book, we saw it and then we quickly left because we couldn't bear it. 'I knew the girls were Red Guards,' Shan writes. 'They were supposed to be the good guys. I also knew the old woman was a 'class enemy.' But somehow, the whole thing looked to me so grotesque that I felt sick to my stomach.' There was so much violence during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. It was just horrible. Many people died in August 1966, as students rebelled against their teachers, or anybody of authority, and many students resorted to violence against their teachers. And when you were sent to Inner Mongolia in 1969, this was alongside about 16 million other Chinese teenagers. About 10% of China's urban population. It was the most massive de-urbanization in human history, I think. 8 Shan was assigned to the 'Construction Army Corps,' ostensibly part of an effort to reduce differences between urban and rural China. Shan's group were told they would build a boulevard in Inner Mongolia; they were promised helicopters for transport, and abundant bread, meat and fish. In reality, even water was scarce and Shan sometimes drank out of puddles containing mosquito larvae. But despite having seen the violence, you write in the book that you are full of life, energy, ambition and hope. That you saw it as a new adventure. Yes. I was a teenager and to leave my parents and to do something all on my own, it was exciting, initially. What was the reality in the Gobi? It was very harsh. We had to do hard labor. The living conditions were horrible. The weather was very cold, and there was never enough to eat. So very quickly we became disillusioned, but we couldn't get out of that place. There was no freedom to leave. I ended up spending many years in the Gobi Desert. What was the conversation amongst you and the other boys? Did people talk about rebelling? No. We spent every day talking about food, what kind of good food you could get if you got back to a restaurant in Beijing — even though restaurants were very basic and there were very few in Beijing. At that time, I had a strong desire for somebody to invent a drug that made you not feel hungry anymore. I had no idea that many years later people would actually develop such a drug, when food became too plentiful. There was very little time to read after a day of hard work, but I was very curious and thought that, someday, knowledge will be useful. Mind you, there were no books. So I read whatever I could lay my hands on, and therefore my self-study was totally chaotic and random. At one point, the only thing available was the insecticide manual, so I read it for probably two weeks. I became very familiar with insecticides, and even to this day, I would have some knowledge about how to use insecticides. You finally came back to Beijing in 1975. What did you find? The city was the same, but my family was largely dispersed. When I went to the Gobi, my sister was sent to another remote part of China. My mother, yet another. My father and my younger brother stayed in the city. So in 1975, when I went back to Beijing, we finally became reunited after six long years. And the reason you managed to get out of the Gobi, and become one of the lucky few to go to college? It was a strange system. We were elected — voted for — to take that opportunity. I was lucky that my friends and peers gave me votes, so I was able to eventually get out. Get the Bloomberg Weekend newsletter. Big ideas and open questions in the fascinating places where finance, life and culture meet. Sign Up By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. And then Chairman Mao died in 1976. Do you think that a younger generation in China today is aware of the extent of the cruelties of that time? For those who really want to learn about that period, they should be able to get a very good picture of what happened. But it's not taught in school, so it's not in the general awareness of the younger generation. I'll give you an example. I was invited to be an independent director of a bank in Shenzhen, and such a position had to be approved by regulators. So I had to fill out some forms. After we submitted the documents, a question came. Why did you not fill out middle school? I asked my secretary to respond by saying, I have never been to middle school, or high school. And then the question came. Why not? And I thought, this person must know nothing about the Cultural Revolution. I answered by email, You will have to ask the great leader, Chairman Mao. 'I was able to pick up my education after 10 years, but for most of my peers, it was forever.' Does this lack of teaching about basic facts disappoint you? Because the Communist Party has officially repudiated the Cultural Revolution, right? I don't think it's necessary for the entire population to dwell in the past, but of course this should not be removed from our consciousness, and that's the reason I wrote the book. It turns out most of my readers are young people who say, My parents went through the same thing, but they never told us much. They have strong curiosity to learn what their parents experienced, which I think is very good. When you came to the US, where you were then taught by Janet Yellen in California, what made the biggest impression? I was honestly quite dazzled by America when I first arrived. It was so developed in a way I read about, but never saw with my own eyes. It was extremely impressive. The infrastructure was first-rate, especially the highway system. And UC Berkeley, where I studied for my PhD, what impressed me was how liberal it was. There's a nickname for Berkeley, the 'People's Republic of Berkeley.' And it was true to that. 9 Shan arrived in San Francisco in 1980, and soon found he was missing some 'ordinary' knowledge. When a professor asked why McDonald's was so popular, Shan thought it was a reference to a person. There were times in America when the Gobi Desert experiences came back to you. The moment when you heard people using the word bullshit, for example. Correct. In the Gobi in winter time, there was no heating. And the only source of fuel was dried cow manure. So we would spend hours trying to collect dried cow manure, and then we burned it right before bedtime to give us enough heat to remove our clothes for the night. So when I heard 'bullshit' I thought, That used to be so dear to us! You did go back to the Gobi in 2005. What was left that you remembered? Most of the shelters we built were washed away by weather and rain because it was all clay, mud and straw. Very few people of my generation were still there. Our farm had about 300 people, and now only a couple were there. Their life was better because they were raising pigs and selling the piglets to other farmers. A great improvement from my Gobi days, but still very poor. And the difference between your life and theirs, how do you reconcile yourself to that? Yours is almost a different planet, with all your successes in business. Yes. But you find common roots. My best friends are from the Gobi Desert. We suffered together, we survived together. We took care of each other. And most of my friends live in the bottom of society in China today, because without education, you couldn't make much of your life, even after the Cultural Revolution. Let ' s talk about Hong Kong, the city that you've made your home. What would you say has been the impact of the National Security Law brought in five years ago? I think that it restored calm. In 2019, the city was as chaotic [as] I saw during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. There was violence, there was chaos. Traffic was stopped, and my wife and I were somewhat fearful of going out [and] speaking Mandarin, because some Mandarin speakers were beaten up on the streets. There was a very strong anti-mainland tone among the protestors. We actually considered moving somewhere else, because we didn't feel that Hong Kong was very safe. I compare Hong Kong's National Security Law with that of the UK. I don't see it to be any more draconian, and most people would not be affected by it. 10 The law has inarguably curtailed civic society, but Hong Kong retains substantially more freedom than mainland China. 'Hong Kong has undeniably changed,' Richard Frost wrote in a recent Weekend Essay, 'but it's not the case that the former British colony is now just another Chinese city.' But someone like Jimmy Lai — who has called you a friend, someone you knew over many years in business in this city, you are almost the same age — it's had a terrible impact on him. He's under trial and he could face very serious consequences, even a life sentence. Is that fair? 11 Jimmy Lai, 77, is a former Hong Kong media tycoon, founder of the newspaper Apple Daily and a longtime critic of the Chinese government. He has been jailed since 2020 and closing arguments are currently underway in his trial. President Trump has said he's keen to help Lai and has spoken to the Chinese leadership about him. You know, in the trial one thing was brought up and that is in 2019 I wrote an article, which I sent to Jimmy for publication in his newspaper. The title was 'Democracy Hijacked in Hong Kong.' Because in 2014, China proposed universal suffrage for Hong Kong. Pan-dems — and Jimmy was a leader or part of that camp — [were] opposed and eventually vetoed this measure. I spoke with some of them and I said, Nothing is perfect, you need to let the door open. 12 Pan-dems, or pan-democrats, is a term for Hong Kong's pro-democracy campaigners. Many objected to a proposal that the city's chief executive and legislature be elected by the people, arguing that it fell short of universal suffrage because Beijing would vet candidates through a nomination committee. In any case, I sent this article and he wouldn't take it. He told me that he didn't agree with me. I sent it to the Financial Times, which published it. Then the chief editor of Apple Daily called me and said, We are very surprised that the FT took your article. And I said, Welcome to democracy. In a democracy, I may disagree with you, but I defend your right to speak. I think that's very important. That's true democracy. But Jimmy Lai doesn't have a right to speak anymore because of this law. Wasn't there a middle way? I think that for legal matters [it] is not for you and I to opine what is the right thing. [It is for] the judges. I truly think that the rule of law in Hong Kong is very much alive and that's very important because that's the essence of the so-called One Country, Two Systems. Finally, I wonder what aspects of your Gobi Desert years are still with you today. Does the experience come back to you in your sleep? Is it there in your habits, in how you see the world? Yes. For many years, even decades, after I came back from the Gobi, I would have a dream that letting me out was a mistake, a bureaucratic error, and I had to go back. I would wake up frightened, very fearful. Nothing is tougher than those years, and therefore, everything else I do, any difficulties that I encounter don't seem so hard. Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend. More On Bloomberg Terms of Service Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information Trademarks Privacy Policy Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
Bloomberg
35 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Navarro Slams India's Russian Oil Purchases as 50% Tariffs Loom
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro blasted India for continuing to buy Russian oil and said he expects punitive tariffs of 50% on imports from the South Asian nation to kick in as planned next week. 'I see that taking place,' Navarro told reporters in front of the White House when asked about the tariffs on India that are set to double on Aug. 27. 'India doesn't appear to want to recognize its role in the bloodshed. It simply doesn't. It's cozying up to Xi Jinping, is what it's doing.'
