Banking by the book
A CHINESE BANKER HAS BEEN INSPIRED BY WESTERN NOVELISTS — AND IS USING THEIR LESSONS TO BUILD A FINANCIAL EMPIRE I look at the literature of the US to get a sense of humanity’s adaptation to nature — conquering is a wrong term...You cannot conquer nature
s China was opening up 40 years ago, Jin Liqun was an ambitious young academic fascinated by 20th-century US literature and other Western works. In the fragile era after Mao’s death, the freedom to indulge in such texts was a heady experience.
William Faulkner’s novels in particular stuck with Jin, now the president of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a major force in the country’s rush to secure a leading role in the world’s financial architecture. An underlined copy of Absalom, Absalom! is on his office bookshelves, along with Shakespeare and the Bible. He said he found inspiration in Faulkner’s complex human relationships.
Nature and man
“I look at the literature of the US to get a sense of humanity’s adaptation to nature - conquering is a wrong term,” he said. “You cannot conquer nature; you have to come to terms with nature, you have to cohabit with nature, and you have to cohabit with other species in this world.”
The Obama administration refused to join the bank when it opened at the end of 2015 with a surprising number of members, including the European powers and the major Asian countries, except Japan.
Yet Jin seems prepared to maneouvre in the treacherous terrain between Beijing and Washington. His goal, he said, is to steer the bank toward building infrastructure across Asia in a way that is environmentally friendly and free of corruption.
Jin, 67, grey-haired and slightly rumpled, was at ease in a recent interview at the bank’s temporary headquarters in Beijing’s financial district.
In his sparsely furnished office, guests are seated at the head of a long table, with the host alongside them. That makes meetings seem more like affairs of equals, rather than a hierarchy with China at the top, as some bank members fear.
It doesn’t hurt relations with outsiders, particularly Europeans, that Jin has edited a two-volume anthology of English verse that starts with Chaucer and concludes with Seamus Heaney. Asked his favourites, he chooses T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas. Then he adds one more. “Ezra Pound is great, though he is a little bit controversial.”
At the Group of 20 meeting in Hangzhou last year, China’s president, Xi Jinping, made it clear that no one should forget the bank is led by China. He singled out Jin for praise. That was an unusual public accolade by a Chinese leader to one of his foot soldiers, a signal that Jin had the full backing of the Chinese government.
Delicately, Jin chose another interpretation. “I think he was giving me a warning: ‘You have to do your job well because all eyes are on this bank.’”
Jin has tried to persuade sceptics in Washington that the bank is not a Chinese hegemon, at least not for now. He has smoothed prickly attitudes by agreeing to cooperate with the workhorses of the 70-year-old US-dominated Bretton Woods system - the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.
Still, he seems aware that the China-led bank is likely to prosper under a Trump administration that has shown little signs of interest in the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.
US power
He pointed to an article he wrote before Donald Trump won the presidency. “The US risks forfeiting its international relevance while stuck in its domestic political quagmire,” he wrote, adding, “History has never set any precedent that an empire is capable of governing the world forever.”
Jin has none of the family lineage that counts in getting to the top in China. He is not a princeling, the rank that confers privilege on Chinese leaders by virtue of being a descendant of the revolutionary leaders of the Mao era.
But he likes to stress that he was born at a propitious moment for the Communist Party. The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek had fled China’s east coast, and the Communists were in control by the time he was born in Changsu, a river port city in Jiangsu province, in August 1949.
“I was born under the red flag,” he said with a big smile.
His father was an accountant, his mother a textile worker, and his grandfather, who lived with the family, was disabled from a work accident. The eldest child of five, he was left to handle the household while still in primary school.
“I tried to be a little leader of my siblings,” he said. “I never beat my brothers or sisters. I started to learn to cook when I was 9.”
He was still in high school when the chaos of the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, and like all students at the time, he was corralled to become a Red Guard. After a brief stint, he retreated to the countryside, a decade-long journey that left an indelible impression.
He joined the peasants in the fields during the day. At night, he studied at a makeshift desk forged from a discarded blackboard and four bamboo sticks. He devised a strict curriculum for himself and devoted himself to mastering written and spoken English, via BBC radio.
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, he enrolled in the postgraduate English literature programme at the Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1978.
There, he came under the wing of professor Wang Zuoliang, a dedicated teacher of English-language authors. When Wang returned from a trip to the Adelaide Festival in Australia in 1980, he encouraged Jin to translate
a novel about man’s battle with nature by Patrick White, the Australian Nobel laureate.
China had just joined the World Bank. Because Jin was fluent in English, the Finance Ministry plucked him out of academia to join the office of the executive director for China at the World Bank in Washington. He had translated five chapters of White’s book, but dropped everything to serve his country.
The stint in Washington led to a career at the top echelons of China’s financial machinery: he was vice minister of finance, and later chairman of the supervisory board of the China Investment Corp.
Foreign experience
All the while, he kept up his interest in things Western. In 1998, his daughter, Keyu, asked to leave home at 14 to live with a US family in New York and attend school there a revolutionary idea for a Chinese family at the time. Jin’s experience abroad prepared him for sending his only child away, Keyu Jin said.
“My father was able to let me go,” said Keyu Jin, 33, now a tenured assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a popular figure on China’s social media. He set an example, she said, by always “reading and writing and listening to classical music after work. We never watched television.”
Beneath his diplomatic finesse, Jin is fiercely patriotic. Under the bank’s rules, a Chinese does not automatically succeed him.
But his expectations clear.
“I would hope a Chinese can succeed me, and I hope we have competent Chinese people to succeed me in the future,” he said before heading off to a meeting with a delegation that was too big to fit around the table in his office. are