Beijing, Day One: A Senseless Murder in the Midst of Celebration, by Junling Cui

Editor’s Note: Meet Junling Cui, our exclusive wOw Woman on the scene in Beijing. For the Olympics, wowOwow goes right to the source for an insider’s perspective on the news coming out of Beijing. Joyce will be reporting from both the women’s perspective and from the point of view of a Chinese national, on all things Olympics — from the athletes’ stories to the social impact of the games.

Day One

The first full day of the Olympics is now over, and it was a day, sadly, overshadowed by the death of an American — the father-in-law of a volleyball coach, stabbed to death by a knife-wielding nut at the famous Gulou, or Drum Tower, built during the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, and originally used to keep time: A drummer would literally stand and bang out the hours of the day. Even at what was THE social event of the Games’ first week, held tonight in the shadow of the Great Wall, it dominated the conversation. Everyone was stunned — the Chinese more so than the foreigners.

The party was tonight, held out at the SOHO Commune at the Great Wall, "which was China´s first high-end luxury resort — a showcase of villas beautifully designed by two well-known Chinese architects. Our hosts were Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, the husband and wife team that founded and run SOHO — a property development — typically referred to in the foreign press as China’s most flamboyant and high-profile property tycoons. More than 1,000 of their closest friends were there on the grounds of the Commune, drinking champagne and listening to a variety of live bands — rockers and rappers and a Hong Kong pop idol thrown in for good measure. 

This was China’s emerging business establishment in formation — as well as lots and lots of their foreign friends. Pan and Zhang are both young — Pan is 45, his wife Zhang, 43 — and have close ties to both Europe and the United States. (Zhang was educated at Oxford, then worked for Goldman Sachs and Travelers Insurance before she and her husband teamed up to become central Beijing’s largest private developers.) Among those at the party were Robin Li, Chairman of CEO of Baidu, the Google of China; Li Yifei, one of the most capable young women executives in China. For years she ran Viacom here for Sumner Redstone, and told me tonight that just two months ago she quit there in order to join a hedge fund. We chatted with Yifei and her husband, Chaoyong Wang, the chairman and CEO of China Equity International, a sweet, soft-spoken guy who is also one of the smartest young bankers in town. (If you are an investment banker doing business in China and don’t know Chao Wang, you’re WAY overpaid.) Wendi Deng was said to be there somewhere, though I didn’t catch up to her. Saw her husband, though, a foreign guy by the name of Murdoch; he was holding court upstairs, in the dining room of the resort’s lovely main building.
Pan and Zhang are smart, charming and funny — and for that reason they have tons of friends from show business, sports and the media from all over the world. Actress Maggie Cheung and actor David Wu (a Chinese American popular in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) were there; among the many American media types hanging out were Rick Stengel, the top editor of Time Magazine, and Marcus Brauchli, an old friend of my husband’s who’s about to take over at the Washington Post.

Anyway, you get the drift. The point of this post is not to name drop. There are two points: one, the difference between the emerging Chinese business establishment — particularly in finance, the Internet and emerging media — and the mostly conservative, inward-looking generation of older CEOS could not be bigger. Most of the guys in their 60s who run China’s biggest companies usually suffer through anything that involves foreigners. The new establishment couldn’t care less. They ‘ll want to beat your brains in if you’re a competitor, but many will try to have some fun along the way; they’re open and engaging and – critically — comfortable in a chic, international environments. (Indeed, as Pan and Zhang showed tonight, they are among those creating those kinds of environments.)