Chasing China: How I Went to China in Search of a Fortune and Found a Life

by Mark Kitto

Overview

An astonishing, cautionary tale of how Westerner Mark Kitto built a successful media empire in China, creating and running 3 magazines, only to have the state take his business, and his livelihood, away.

“I had fought off attacks from jealous rivals and been investigated by every bureau with the slightest connection to publishing, and by many who did not: nine in total. I had paid over 1 million Yuan in fines, and who knows how much more in administration fees to government 'agencies.' I had been accused of being a pimp, a China 'splittist,' a Falun Gong supporter, a pornographer and a spy. My staff had been extradited, my office computers confiscated, and my magazines impounded at the printers. I had got them all back. I had been through eight government publishing partners before China Intercontinental Press, and half a dozen advertising agencies.” —Mark Kitto on his experience as a business owner in China

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781510720145
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	04/22/2009
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	902 KB

About the Author

Mark Kitto is a businessman and entrepreneur. His business have included a string of English language magazines published in China and a restaurant. He currently lives in China.

Editorial Reviews

In this memoir, entrepreneur Kitto describes his complex relationship with modern China, including the spectacular rise and fall of his magazine publishing business and his love affair with Moganshan, a small mountain village outside of Shanghai where he made his home. While he touches on the Chinese government's seizure of his media company in a few rancorous chapters, the business story takes a back seat to his personal journey and discovery of Moganshan, where he sought refuge from the harried pace and summer heat of Shanghai. During the rapid success of his business and through the ensuing legal and business roadblocks he encounters, Moganshan and the dilapidated villa he leases and renovates become a haven for Kitto, his family and his expat friends. Kitto's descriptive prose, although frequently uneven, sometimes self-indulgently therapeutic and marked by a self-conscious struggle to avoid imperialistic tones, shows clear affection for the country and draws the reader into Chinese culture, politics, history, marriage, business interactions and folklore through the lens of his daily life and relationships with the people of Moganshan. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

An amusing, helter-skelter memoir by a Welsh publishing entrepreneur who found a quiet niche in China..After traveling there in 1998, Kitto created the popular, short-lived that's Shanghai series of magazines, modeled on London's Timeout and inspired by H.E. Morriss's North-China Daily News, which was closed by the Communists in 1951. His success rankled the Chinese bureaucracy, and after seven years in business he was shut down, marked a "Muslim separatist sympathizer" and forced into a long lawsuit over trademarks and a new career as a writer and cook. The first half of this disjointed work barely mentions the publishing business, instead dwelling on his discovery of a mountaintop retreat in Moganshan, a Victorian-era resort several hours outside of Shanghai where Europeans flocked in the summer and Communist leaders used as a haven for secret liaisons. Eventually Kitto, married to a Cantonese woman, leased and fixed up a secluded, terraced house in the town, cajoling and greasing the palms of contractors, workers and bureaucrats whose MO was routinely the response, Mei banfa ("there is no way" or "You'll just have to live with it"). Between putting out fires (literally), throwing an obsequious banquet and digging up hairy bamboo (maozhu), the town's specialty, Kitto offers an ample history of Moganshan from colonial heyday to Communist debilitation. He records the startling changes that took place in Shanghai and witnessed the tourist surge in his wake; he and his wife even opened a coffee shop in town. Kitto obviously enjoys playing the comfortable expat Englishman, congratulating himself on his bargain smarts and hardly contrite about leaving his home country ("Shanghai is anotorious refuge for runaways," he notes)..Affable but often self-aggrandizing.

Kirkus Reviews

[R]eveals the frustrations and contradictions that are just part of the impediments to any foreign-run business concerns in China. (Booklist)

From the Publisher