The meeting room at the steel-trading company I had been invited to visit in Shanghai in 2004 was large and quite bare, with the chairs pushed up against the walls, quite unlike the rooms typical in Japanese and South Korean companies, where the sofas tend to have anti-macassars on the backs and the walls somehow seem always to be decorated with paintings by Bernard Buffet, a postwar French artist. The art chosen by the youthful Chinese chief executive, Tang Liang, was quite different, however in a rather surprising way.
Unable to work out from the Ossen Group´s brochures and website exactly who the owners were, I began by asking Mr Tang about that issue; the firm had, until recently, been owned by the state but was now said to be private. So who now owned the shares? His answer was evasive, or perhaps just ambiguous. He couldn´t really say: the state was still involved, but it was also private. "We present ourselves as not entirely private, not entirely state-owned", he explained, just to make things clear. The Ossen Group prefers not to draw too much attention to itself, he said, producing not just one but two old Chinese sayings to illustrate the point: "When a tree grows big, it draws the wind." And "When birds are flying, the one that flies first, gets shot."
What, then, was the company going to do with its new-found freedom: stick to its traditional business or branch out with new investments? I knew what the answer was likely to be. The firm was going to stay in the steel business, but, yes, had also moved into some new and profitable areas. Could you give me some examples? Well, our new businesses include such activities as real estate, insurance, value-added software, mobile telephones and art collecting, he said.
Art collecting? My interest pricked up at this point. What sort of art? Chinese art, came the reply: It will be a good investment, and it will bring refinement to our employees. Would you like to see some of our paintings, and meet the curator I have hired to look after it? The curator, formerly a university professor, was in a nearby room so we started with him. We then went to the chief executive´s own office to see the paintings he had there. I admired a big painting he had on the wall above a sofa. "Ah, you like Chinese art," he said enthusiastically; "I will show you my special room".
We walked to the other end of what was anyway a pretty large office, even for a company boss. He opened a door that I would otherwise have assumed was a wardrobe, and which exposed a short passageway. He pushed on the wall at the back of the passageway and that opened as well, to reveal a room that one might have called secret or hidden but for the fact that it was being shown to me, a visiting stranger.
My mind jumped to the notion that inside we might find some sort of super-villain, stroking a cat and saying "So, Mr Emmott, we meet again". Instead the room was altogether more genteel, being laid out as a calligrapher´s studio, with beautiful antique furniture, brushes and scrolls. There was, though, one feature that seemed especially incongruous. In that special room, music was playing through concealed loudspeakers. The sound was of a Viennese waltz.
