“I think it’s very difficult to keep them separate,” said Weijian Shan, a Hong Kong-based private equity investor and author of “Out of the Gobi,” a memoir that depicts China’s modern history. “To the extent that China feels that this is a major issue with America, they will bring it up.”
Weijian Shan discusses his new memoir, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, with Carol Massar on Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend. (The interview begins at 11:37.)
Tom Nagorski reviews Weijian Shan’s new memoir, Out of the Gobi, in The Wall Street Journal:
“Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America” is Weijian Shan’s deeply affecting memoir. It is also a story that mirrors China’s dizzying recent history: the Cultural Revolution, with all its madness; the opening to the United States, with all the promise it held; and Deng Xiaoping’s decision to unleash a market-based system, with all the changes it wrought. Mr. Shan has lived this history, suffered from its excesses and thrived thanks to the opening. Today he is one of the more respected and successful financiers in the “new China.”
Weijian Shan talks about the trade war between the U.S. and China, the growth of China’s economy, and his new book, ‘Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America,’ with David Westin and Alix Steel on Bloomberg TV’s flagship morning show, “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas.”
This essay in Foreign Affairs is adapted from Weijian Shan’s new memoir, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America (Wiley, 2019).
Though he lives and works in Hong Kong, Shan was in town to promote his new book, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America. It chronicles the nightmare of being torn from his family in Beijing as a teenager in 1969 and sent to the Gobi Desert, where he toiled as a laborer for six years. Shan relates how China’s liberalization under Deng Xiaoping enabled him to join the first generation dispatched by the government to study in the U.S.
Weijian Shan discusses his new memoir, “Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America,” on BBC’s World News America with Jane O’Brien.
Weijian Shan went from childhood hunger in Mao’s famished China to running Asia’s biggest private equity fund. China’s economy has exploded in size in the 30 years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. He discusses the opportunities and perils of the country’s unprecedented trajectory.
“Trump takes extreme measures, but we would have come to this point naturally,” says Chinese private equity investor Weijian Shan, whose new book, Out of the Gobi, is a memoir of growing up in Mao’s China but also a study in why markets have worked better than state control for the country.
