Chinese real-estate tycoon Pan Shiyi is given to plain speaking. At a recent World Economic Forum seminar on China s rising private sector, other panelists, economists and academics used theories and formulae to explain why a market economy creates excellence while a planned one creates laziness. Pan, however, shared a simple allegory.
I recently took my son to the zoo and he asked me why all of these tigers we say sitting in the cage were so fat and lazy, he told the audience. Not that long ago, I took him on a safari and we saw how aggressive tigers were in the wild, tracking and hunting down prey day in, and day out. The answer is simple, I told my son: In the wild, the tigers must compete in order to survive. In the zoo, they re fed and they couldn t be bothered to work any more. That s why they become lazy.
Ladies and gentleman, the same can be said for China under a planned economy. People became lazy. Today, in a market economy, they have to fight to survive, and out of this process comes creativity and excellence.
Pan and his wife, Zhang Xin, are China s entrepreneurial dynamic duo. What he lacks in Western sophistication, she makes up for with her worldly charms. What she lacks in understanding of the minutiae of doing business the mainland Chinese way , he makes up for with 20 years experience. Born into a poor family in Gansu province, Pan, 41, is humble and down-to-earth. But when it comes to selling real estate, he is the king of the hill in China. On the other hand, Zhang, 37 is elegant and sophisticated and brings financial acumen and international flair to the marriage. A graduate of the UK s Sussex and Cambridge universities, she worked on Wall Street in the early 1990s and helped both Goldman Sachs and Traveler s Group enter China. As a teenager, Zhang worked for five years in factories in Hong Kong when she emigrated there in the early 1980s.
As co-CEO of Beijing-based property developer Soho China, the two are driving real estate and architectural trends across China. Their Soho New Town project in Beijing, has been hailed as a breakthrough in concept and design as the first residential and commercial complex for small office, home office entrepreneurs. Today, the couple is working on Jian wai SOHO, a 20-tower residential/commercial project that sites on a 169,000sqm area adjacent to the China World Hotel.
The project they are most proud of is he Commune by the Great Wall, located at Badaling on the outskirts of Beijing. Developed at a cost of US$24 million, it gives tourists the chance to sample the best of contemporary Chinese architecture along with a view of the best portions of the Great Wall and the mountains that surround Beijing, The idea, inspired by Zhang, was to blend modern Chinese art with modern architecture. In their private lives, they are leading a close-knit group of entrepreneurs to help make China more culturally sophisticated, transparent and global-minded.
