Bridge Builders:
Tim Clissold
Sometimes the absence of something can be more easily identified than its presence. And that was how Tim Clissold first noticed the potential of China after traveling through the country before passing on into Russia in the 1980s.
"The basic impression that I had in China was that people get up early in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, to be people taking vegetables to market – very, very active and striving. And I didn't see any of that in Russia at all, so that was an enormous contrast.
"When I arrived back in the UK, the newspapers were all full of perestroika and glasnost and how Russia is really opening up and very powerful and can be strong. And I thought that was the wrong way round. So that's why I decided that I would focus on China – learn the language and try to do business in China."
His timing was perfect. Clissold got into China ahead of a huge surge in interest.
"I went 70 miles up river on a ferry from Hong Kong to Guangzhou... I found it absolutely fascinating."
Having grown up in northern England, the son of a worker at one of the iconic steel mills in Sheffield, Clissold had witnessed the decline of industrial Britain by the time he won a place to study Physics at Cambridge University. The subject didn't inspire him, but what did was a boat trip he took while spending a year in the then British-administered region of Hong Kong.
"I immediately found the geographical setting of Hong Kong to be tremendously dramatic," he recalls, "because it's a very sharp mountain that overlooks a harbor. On the other side, there are nine hills – and I just had this feeling that something very big and mysterious was the other side of these nine hills. So for some reason, I was kind of drawn to China.
"I'd been there for about three weeks and I went on a ferry from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, up river about 70 miles [110 kilometers], and it felt as though I'd gone back in time at least 70 years, because China wasn't really very developed at that stage – this is in 1987. My instant impression was that there were almost no internal combustion engines, almost no street lighting, almost no kind of automation... and I found it absolutely fascinating."
Millions lost, millions found
"I've got an idea," a 28-year-old Clissold told his manager at the prestigious accountancy and consulting firm Arthur Andersen. "We should open an office in China."
On receiving a negative response, such was Clissold's conviction that China was the future that he was willing to throw in his job and vote with his feet, applying to the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. "The competition there made getting into Cambridge look easy," he observes. While he had been one of the few foreigners drawn to Beijing, for Chinese students the magnetism of the rapidly developing capital was already a powerful force.
Nevertheless, conditions at the university were tough, with seven students packed into a room of four bunk beds, the eighth bed serving as a suitcase rack. There was no other storage, so all clothing and possessions stayed in the suitcase.
It was at university that Clissold had his first taste of the arcane and impenetrable regulations that governed much of life in China. He received a dressing down for breaking the rules after having his brother over to stay in his room. Upon asking to see the rules to understand how he was in breach, he was informed that this was not possible. "How am I supposed to follow the rules without knowing what they are?" he mused, a question that would trouble him for years – with often calamitous results in his early business dealings.
But what struck him the most during his time at university in China was the gulf between his fellow students' awareness of his own culture and his understanding of theirs. Only a handful of Britons at that time would have shared Clissold's appreciation of Chinese literature and history and yet he found almost everyone he interacted with in Beijing was well-informed about the traditions of the Anglo-Saxon world.
Having intended to partner up with other students for mutual language lessons, Clissold quickly gave up on the idea. "It was when one girl observed that Pakistan was contiguous with China that I realized it wouldn't work," he recalls. "I didn't know what contiguous meant."
From study to work
After graduation, Clissold spotted an advert looking for a Mandarin speaker to help a Western firm develop a presence in China. Upon inquiring, he found it was his former employer, Arthur Andersen. Three years on, they had followed up to his idea.
That job was the beginning of a highly eventful business career for Clissold, which he recounts with gusto in his bestselling book Mr China.
From marathon drinking sessions with local officials to being held hostage by disgruntled workers and furious arguments over garlic-tainted beer, Clissold was able to visit many regions of the country as its industry staggered to its feet after decades, and perhaps even centuries on its knees.
It wouldn't be long, however, until the first unsteady steps – steps which caused enormous stress to Clissold and exasperation to the U.S. investors furnishing him with funds – would become a full-scale sprint.
"Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a sea change – and there's one particular event which is very important in that," says Clissold. "A senior analyst, a very famous man called Barton Biggs from Morgan Stanley, came out to Hong Kong and spent four or five days on the mainland. And when he came back, there was a press conference where he said 'I'm tuned in, overfed, and maximum bullish.' The news went across the wires back to all the markets in New York and in London – and the Hong Kong stock exchange went through the roof."
With more than $400 million at his disposal, Clissold traveled round up and down the country seeking partners where he could invest to supply new machinery and modernize production.
While he was in many cases surprised at what he found at remote factories hidden in rural valleys, the bigger surprises were to come as he found his attempts to transform the operations stumbled as a result of bureaucracy, corruption, fraud and even simple personal conflicts.
The collapse in value of his investments put enormous stress upon the young businessman and when a mystery virus almost killed him during a holiday in France he considered throwing in the towel. Giving up, however, turned out not to be part of his DNA and Clissold returned to China with a more pragmatic and strategic approach.
After salvaging his initial investments, Clissold worked in a number of industries, including advising the government on bad loans, founding a carbon credit-trading business and moving into dispute resolution, an area he is still involved in today.
Language across time and space
Clissold's travels showed him how China's language joins people across huge distances
Clissold's travels showed him how China's language joins people across huge distances
China's diverse landscapes have inspired poets for centuries /Tim Clissold
China's diverse landscapes have inspired poets for centuries /Tim Clissold
China's cultural unity has endured while empires grew and fell in the West /Tim Clissold
China's cultural unity has endured while empires grew and fell in the West /Tim Clissold
Clissold's three children were all educated in China, and it was one of his sons who first introduced him to the country's poetry in the early years of the new millennium.
He was instantly absorbed by the ability of writers from many centuries before to address subjects that remain relevant today.
"China's literature stretches back for well over a thousand years," he says. "There are Tang Dynasty [618-907AD] and Song Dynasty [960-1279] poets writing about issues that are of tremendous relevance to today...Du Fu (杜甫) wrote about refugees; Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元) wrote a poem about excessive logging; Bai Juyi (白居易) talks about social inequalities, poverty and tax evasion. So I basically chosen poetry as the thing to try to get people to at least have an interest in the way that Chinese traditional thought works. And there are lots and lots of parallels.”
“Like Su Shi (苏轼), who's a very important poet, writer and thinker who was alive in about 1070, he lost his son. He wrote an agonizing poem about the grief of losing a son. Same to Shakespeare. And both use the image of the child's clothing to represent their grief. Shakespeare used that as a kind of motif in King John in one of his plays.”
“Du Fu (杜甫) was a refugee from war, which is a a big problem in Europe”
“Du Fu (杜甫) was a refugee from war, which is a a big problem in Europe”
Tim Clissold's Cloud Chamber /CGTN
Tim Clissold's Cloud Chamber /CGN
“It's exactly the same as Good King Wenceslaus, very famous Christmas Carol. That's about common empathy…very directly to current issues in society”
“It's exactly the same as Good King Wenceslaus, very famous Christmas Carol. That's about common empathy…very directly to current issues in society”
“Tao Yuanming (陶渊明) was a poet writing in the fourth century and he used very specific things to describe the relationship between man and wider nature. Just like Wordsworth did when he wrote about daffodils more than a thousand years later using exactly the same techniques.”
Because China's language is based on characters, rather than being phonetic, it has changed little while empires rose and fell around it, unlike European scripts which morph and adapt to the fashions and peculiarities of speech. This means that to this day Chinese not only unites a vast landmass, in the way that Latin or Greek once did around the Mediterranean, but also that it unites the present with the deep past.
While Old Norse or Old English are completely unintelligible to speakers of their modern equivalents, Chinese scripts written more than a thousand years ago – handily preserved thanks to innovations such as printing and paper – can still be understood by schoolchildren today.
Combined with this, the Chinese tradition of using dynasties, rather than numerical years, to refer to the past means history often seems less distant and events of the past can be easily perceived as having important relevance to the modern world.
Quarks and poetry
Clissold's anthology of poems, in the original and translated, is entitled Cloud Chamber, a reference to an apparatus used in physics to track atomic particles. Clissold says this is because the names scientists in recent decades have chosen for quarks, the primary building blocks of our world – up, down, strange, charm, beauty and truth – correlate wonderfully with the themes of poems written over hundreds of generations.
"That struck me as a good categorization for poetry because up is euphoria; down is grief; strangeness is fear of something that's unknown; charm is that relationship between human beings and beauty, human beings and nature; and truth is the universal truth about the shape of a human life."
Every nook and cranny of Clissold's home is crammed with Chinese items, many of them carrying beautiful scripted calligraphy. In pride of place is a reproduction of an ancient painting almost two meters across, produced by an artisan whom Clissold presented with a 3cm photo from a book. A large dent in the picture is the result of a bottle thrown at a party hosted by his son, which Clissold says only adds to the picture's allure.
His bookshelves heave with works on China, and Clissold is able to quote from many of them. His dream is to make more of this heritage available to people in the West.
A knowledge imbalance
"'By reading Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Sartre, I have deepened my understanding of how progress of the mind propels progress in society. By reading Montaigne, La Fontaine, Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas, fils, Maupassant and Romain Rolland, I have better appreciated life with all its joys and sorrows.' Who do you think said that?"
This is how Clissold begins a talk he sometimes delivers in schools or to other organizations when he's asked to provide a view on China. The answer is Xi Jinping, which Clissold says many audiences find surprising. "How many western politicians could say the same," he follows up, rhetorically.
Chinese bookshops frequently stock works by Mark Twain, Dickens or even Nietzsche, he says, but how many Chinese works can you find in even a well-stocked store in a European city? (If you can find one, please send us a photo on our Facebook page.) When Clissold himself tried to find a publisher for Cloud Chamber, he came up empty-handed in Europe and instead was taken up by one of China's most prestigious companies.
To address the issue, he hopes he can use the success of the work among Chinese audiences to fund more translations and distribution across Europe.
However, his efforts to increase awareness of China stretch well beyond poetry.
"The truth is that China has spent 30 years studying the West because they needed to. So the Chinese people, particularly leadership, understand the West much better than Western leaders and ordinary people understand China. And there are clear historical reasons for that.
"So we've got tremendous catch-up to do, because the knowledge imbalance during these times gives Chinese people a competitive advantage because they know more about us than we know about them."
The absent education
Mandarin was studied by around 3,600 students at the age of 16 in the UK in 2021, a lower number than six years previously.
Furthermore, as well as being more challenging than some other subjects, a high proportion of the top grades are taken by native speakers, providing a strong disincentive for schools to offer it or pupils to take it up.
Clissold's answer? An A-level in Chinese civilization, similar to courses already offered to those who wish to study ancient Rome or Athens without having to first understand their languages.
Of course, Clissold was not content with having the idea. He wanted to prove that it could work and so canvassed the most senior academics at 10 of the UK's most celebrated universities. The responses were all positive, so he spoke to companies who organize examinations and found an established provider ready to offer his course. The next step was funding, which for an experienced money-man was simple.
Clissold's plan was firmly endorsed in a 68-page report by the Higher Education Policy Institute which in March decried the fact that "a majority of school pupils [are] not engaging with China at all during their studies."
With everything in place, Clissold approached the UK government for the essential green light.
The response he received epitomizes the shift in policy that has taken place since the "Golden Era" of engagement that occurred in the middle of the last decade. The new subject was of no interest to the British government and for all his work, he received only a polite rejection.
However, Clissold is a long-term player. When, 30 years ago, his backers' $400 million of investments had been wiped out by corruption, mismanagement, and theft, rather than walk away, he determined to earn it all back.
He has contacted his local representative at the UK parliament on a couple of occasions and received promising replies. He hopes to be in touch again soon to press the case for a greater representation for the world's most populous country in UK schools, but he just needs to give the MP a little time to adjust to a new job: it happens to be Rishi Sunak, the latest British prime minister.
Special thanks to Confucius Institute at Ulster University and Kensington Wade School.
Credits
Chief Editor Guo Chun
Editor Duncan Hooper
Producers Duncan Hooper, Yubin Du
Animation James Sandifer
Video Editor Jeong-One Park
