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The seventh annual Future China conference just concluded in Singapore. I was invited to speak on a panel about financial markets reform in China. As the conference got underway, CNBC interviewed me live about Chinese cross-border M&A. You can watch the interview by clicking here.
My thanks and congratulations to the conference organizer, Singapore’s Business China, and the two ravishing ladies who run it, CEO Sun Xueling and Executive Director, Josephine Gan. They and their staff put on the best China conference I’ve ever been to. Reform, innovation, corruption, military strategy were all on the agenda. But, so too were discussions about how to improve the lives of the 600 million Chinese still living in peasant villages. One comparison hit home: the average farm size in China is 6,000 square meters. Even in India, with less than one-quarter China’s per capita GDP, farms are almost twice the size, at 13,000 square meters. What about the US? Farms are on average 300 times larger than China’s, or about 1.8mn square meters.
Business China was started nine years ago by Lee Kuan Yew to foster greater business and cultural ties between Singapore and the People’s Republic. I’m among the many who view Mr. Lee as one of the outstanding political leaders of the last century and among those who sincerely mourn his passing last year at age 91.
  
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