Book review: Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi

Weijian Shan is an intriguing interviewee. A well-spoken, self-confessed deal guy, he is generally willing to pick over the details of investments, past and present. It can be an intellectually rigorous experience – as might be expected from a former university professor. Yet you leave Shan’s company without a clear sense of the man. Aspects of his remarkable personal story are well known, but he offers little scope to scrape beneath the surface.

“Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America,” Shan’s recently published memoir, offers no insight into the transactions that have underpinned a distinguished career in private equity, from Korea First Bank to Yingde Gases. Indeed, the book ends before its author returns to Asia to work in investment banking for J.P. Morgan, which led to stints with Newbridge Capital, TPG Capital, and now PAG Asia Capital (though he acknowledges that might be another story worth telling).

But Shan does deliver a detailed account of his first four decades, and to those in private equity who have sat alongside or opposite him in negotiations, invested in his funds, or followed his activities, Out of the Gobi does say something about the person behind the deals. 

Strength of will

The Newbridge acquisition of Korea First Bank in the late 1990s, for example, took more than two years to go from memorandum of understanding to definitive agreement as the government agonized about selling a commercial bank to a foreign investor. Speaking to AVCJ in 2017, Dan Carroll, who served alongside Shan as co-head of Newbridge’s Asia operation, observed of the deal: “It was Shan who stayed over the Christmas holiday – when he essentially refused to leave Korea – and convinced them we were a credible counterparty.”

This dogged determination is given some context by an excerpt from a letter the author, aged 18, wrote to his parents in 1971, about a day-and-night shift spent digging a canal in the Gobi Desert: “We were still working intensely under the moonlight. I used all my strength to hold up my body, which was about to fall over, as I carried the heavy basket filled with muddy soil running up the bank of the canal. I fell several times but each time I picked myself up and persevered. You should know it was not my physical strength that kept me going. It was only my willpower, which seemed endless.”

At the same time, there are passages of the book where it is difficult to reconcile past and present. Shan recalls attending a “struggle session” in 1966 at a girls school in Beijing, one of many mass meetings during the Cultural Revolution when Red Guards publicly humiliated and assaulted authority figures as perceived counterrevolutionaries. On leaving the campus, he passes the gatekeeper’s room and sees several teenage girls beating a blood-soaked elderly woman with heavy leather belts. He later learns it was the school’s vice principal, and she succumbed to her injuries.

Nearly 50 years later, PAG invested in China Music Corporation, owner of the largest library of music broadcasting rights in the country. The company – which merged with Tencent Music Entertainment Group and listed in the US last year – operates music-streaming services. Teenage girls in top-tier cities are a key user demographic.

Such incongruities underline the extraordinary nature of China’s modern evolution. The author recounts his memories of key developments in this process, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution to the reforms of the late 1970s that enabled him to move to the US. (Each chapter is preceded by a passage explaining the political backdrop against which events played out. For those unfamiliar with China’s history, it offers context without diluting the narrative effect.)

The earlier phases in Beijing and the Gobi are the most impactful as Shan combines childhood recollections with the hindsight of adulthood. He is the tearaway youngster throwing rocks at sparrows as part of a nationwide extermination effort, camping in the park when schools are closed, and touring the country under the pretext of spreading revolution. The full weight of the famine, chaos and terror of this period sits on the periphery of Shan’s consciousness – he witnesses distressing events without seeing the big picture – and the older self gives details of the aftermath. 

Exercise in futility

Exiled to the desert with thousands of other teenagers in order to relieve the powder-keg atmosphere in the cities, Shan’s undernourished company is assigned manual labor in brutal conditions. They are told the goal is to “reform [their] ideology and become true members of the working class.” It certainly isn’t to produce food. The company sows 750,000 kilograms of seeds but the harvest of 1969 delivers only 70,000 kg of grain. Although the target for the following year is reduced 90,000 kg, they are allotted the same amount of seeds.

There are touching moments of camaraderie in the face of hardship, but it is easy to see how the teenagers become disillusioned. Perhaps the canal-digging episode represents the nadir. The group spends 31 hours straight building a channel to irrigate desert crops, hoping that each blast of the whistle will signal the end of the shift only to find that they must work on. It is all for nothing. A miscalculation in the course of the canal means the section the group built is abandoned.

Shan develops a rebellious streak, losing his position as a barefoot doctor for questioning his superiors’ exploitation of the system and incurring their wrath by co-authoring a letter to Mao Zedong complaining about the conditions. But he also finds a way out. Awarded a place at university in Beijing, Shan then outsmarts some of his professors to secure a scholarship to study in the US in 1980. An MBA in San Francisco is followed by a PhD at Berkley – where the author is harangued by a man trying to sell him a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book – and a professorship at Wharton.

In the epilogue, Shan describes returning to the Gobi in 2005 and reconnecting with several of those who worked alongside him in the fields. Unlike them, he left the desert with an opportunity and took full advantage of it. But to describe Out of the Gobi as a story of success against the odds doesn’t do it justice; the memoir also betrays a sadness no doubt shared by many of that generation.

“I came of age early, too early, as my childhood ended and my previously sheltered life became a thing of the past,” Shan remarks at one point. “I did not notice it and did not miss it until I grew much older and realized what and how much I had missed and lost.”

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• Topics
• Greater China
• People
• GPs
• China
• PAG
• Weijian Shan