people came in, delivering messages and collecting bits of paper. I had to get up several times to clear the waves of jet lag washing over me and I wandered around the corridors outside. As Mina went through the contract, Wang seemed alternately distracted or overfocused on details. After his initially friendly manner, he quickly grew irascible and stubborn. I couldn’t tell whether it was because he was under pressure or he was just being deliberately awkward, pretending not to understand issues or dragging up old arguments that Mina thought had been settled months beforehand. He didn’t seem particularly interested in discussing price or payment terms but he wanted to increase the number of carbon credits to be covered by the contract. But that was impossible; the syndicate had been put together in London to cover the number of credits that had been fixed at the last meeting and it was far too late to change it. Mina just passed on the point without comment and moved on.
After the first few hours, there were frequent lulls in the conversation. Several times, Wang wandered over to a battered old sofa at the back of the room and stretched out, with his trousers rolled over his calves, slurping tea out of a big jam jar and fanning himself with a copy of the Hangzhou Daily. He had a bowl of roasted melon seeds on his lap and, leaning forward against the arm of the sofa, he sat cracking the seeds between his teeth and spitting the shells out into a wastepaper basket at his feet. On other occasions, he’d get up, yawn loudly, stretch, and push his hands deep into his pockets before wandering off down the corridor with a rolling, slouching gait for twenty minutes. By ten in the evening, the room was insufferably stuffy; my head was aching from the clouds of cigarette smoke from Wang’s assistant and I felt dizzy with jet lag. I moved over to the windows and tried to drag one open, but Mina yelled at me to stop. She had opened one on the first visit and been eaten alive by mosquitoes. Hot, tired, bad-tempered and hungry, we were getting nowhere so we decided to call it a day. We agreed with Wang that we’d meet up at eight the following morning, hailed a taxi to take us back to the hotel by the lake, and sat dejectedly on the lumpy seats in the back contemplating the day. We had achieved nothing, ended up with more questions than answers, and felt exhausted all at the same time.
Back at the hotel, we made straight for the bar and perched up on a couple of high stools. Through the pine trees in the hotel grounds and reflected in the lake, we could see the shapes of exploding chrysanthemums and shooting stars from an enormous firework display above the distant city skyline.
The hotel was originally built as a state-run training school for the Party cadres, so it occupied a prime position on the hill below the pagoda. It was built like an aircraft hangar, with echoing hallways and draughty corridors. I heard that a Hong Kong property group had taken over the management of the hotel just after China opened up and had tried to spruce it up with yellow wallpaper, thick carpets, and flouncy curtains. There were chandeliers in the hallways and gold fixtures in the bathrooms, but I noticed that sections of the hotel seemed cordoned off by dusty lacquer screens and lines of tired-looking rubber plants arranged in pots across the landings.
After the first beer, jet lag evaporated. I suddenly felt wide awake. Mina said she thought that the day had been hopeless but I tried to keep our spirits up. ‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘At least they agreed to meet us.’
It was true; if they’d reached an agreement with one of the other buyers, Wang wouldn’t have agreed to meet. Slowly, as we mulled over the day, the mood brightened. Halfway into the second beer, I began to take the measure of Mina. She told me that she had read law at Melbourne University, snatching the odd moment for study between her commitments to the Student Union, the women’s rowing team, and a punishing regime of daily exercise and training. On graduation, she joined one of the big law firms, before moving on to the Sydney Stock Exchange, where she worked on designing forestry credits, one of the world’s first financial instruments for environmental investing. By the time she was thirty, she had joined the World Bank. Based in Washington, DC, she travelled throughout Asia negotiating carbon deals.
She felt passionately about preserving the natural environment and her conversation often reverted to pet topics, such as water conservation, forestry management, or digging wells in Africa. Mina’s tall, athletic build, her pale blue eyes, and the distinctive chunky jewellery she wore gave her a striking presence. People remembered her. She had that knack of walking into a room and connecting – of making people she’d only just met feel individual and special. I could tell that Wang liked her even though they couldn’t communicate directly. Years later, he told me that the reason that they’d chosen IHCF as their foreign counterparty was that they felt comfortable dealing with Mina.
As I got to know her better, I began to realize that Mina’s energy levels elevated her above the normal confines of time; strictly vegetarian, she never drank alcohol and needed hardly any sleep. I’d often find out that she had spent several hours before sunrise wading through some turgid documents while doing forty klicks on an exercise bike, or that she’d run fifteen miles before breakfast. Her energy bordered on the inexhaustible; she once mentioned in passing that she’d just completed an Ironman event, which apparently involved swimming several miles before riding a bicycle uphill for about five hours and then blithely embarking on a marathon. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when she broke her hip years later while running two hundred and fifty miles across the Sahara. On top of the almost limitless physical output, she had developed ‘blue sky thinking’ into an entirely new art form; she had a thousand new ideas a minute that used to burst into the conversation unannounced from random angles.
Over the time that she’d been travelling to Asia, Mina had developed an affection for China, which I liked; she felt comfortable there and, like me, she enjoyed its eccentricities. She was easy to be with, that was for sure, and completely focused on the task at hand; but at times it was tough to keep up.
We both agreed that Wang had seemed strangely disconnected and never seemed to answer any of the questions directly. It felt as if he wasn’t telling us the real reason for wanting to change the contract; the whole day had been taken up fencing over side issues. We had to figure out his real objective but with Cordelia still impossible to contact, there wasn’t much we could go on.
‘There’s an old Chinese military saying, “Know yourself and know the other and you’ll survive a hundred battles”,’ I said. ‘Trouble is we have no idea what Wang really wants. We need to figure it out and find out who he reports to, what pressure he’s under, what other options he has.’
Mina grunted.
‘That doesn’t give us very good odds for winning this particular battle,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s all very interesting,’ said Mina impatiently, ‘but this isn’t warfare, is it? It’s a negotiation.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but the ideas are still useful. That’s why Chinese people are so good at all this. Just think, The Art of War was written more than two thousand years ago and they still use it every day. Anyway, your lot seem pretty military, too,’ I added. ‘I bet Winchester’s been reading Clausewitz at bedtime for years.’
‘Well,’ she continued, ignoring that comment, ‘if Wang won’t tell us what he wants, how do we figure it out?’
I’d seen from the company brochure that a part of the chemicals group had gone public in Shanghai a couple of years earlier. They were one of the larger manufacturing groups in China, so Wang could easily develop other options; we knew that he was already talking to some Japanese buyers, so that closed off the possibility of threatening to walk away from the deal if we didn’t get what Winchester wanted. We had to be smarter than that.
‘We can’t ask Wang directly,’ I said, ‘so we’ll have to go around him. Let’s try to find someone else to tell us what’s really going on. Sunzi always talks about the importance of using spies. That little guy – you know, Wang’s assistant, Chain-smoking Chen – he looks as though he might be converted.’
