Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：13  发布时间：2025-07-25

1981 Cage and Bird
The path that China may choose and the channels through which various events must flow are narrower than we can easily imagine.

——Fei Zhengqing: "America and China", 1981

No one expected that the situation of reform would take a sharp turn for the worse at the beginning of the year.

Charles Abrams was the first American businessman to feel this cold wave. Just last year in Fortune magazine, he was described as a successful representative of the new American Dream of going to China to seek gold. This 57 year old New York real estate trader established a trading company in China and, after visiting China more than 40 times, concluded that China is like a huge company. He received warm receptions from many Chinese officials, from whom he obtained white papers from several state-owned enterprises, including some preliminary order contracts worth millions. Due to these contracts, he also successfully raised $25 million in funds from the New York stock market.

But in the second year of Fortune, Abrams became the unlucky one in another piece of bad news. The report stated that "Beijing has recently suspended contracts for many major industries on a large scale, which has hurt many Chinese companies and caused losses to many American companies that are trying to make money here and start operating." Abrams was among the first to suffer, as many of the orders and contracts he received turned into worthless overnight.