When I speak about China, the questions always fall into three categories.

First, everyone is curious how to draw the line from my Pittsburgh upbringing, through my education at Yale and Harvard and my experience on Wall Street, to Asia and China. The line follows a fairly logical pattern until I moved to Hong Kong in December 1991.

Secondly, audiences want me to distill a dozen years of experience into a few sentences of wisdom. They want me to tell them the single most important thing that I have learned.

And finally, once the basics are covered, there is a veritable litany of questions which deal with how China works on a daily basis.

Every company, every individual needs to develop their own strategy for China. Other books on China have been written, but this is the first that attempts to put in one place all of the lessons learned by someone who has experienced it first hand. If it helps the reader in some small way to develop his or her strategy, then I will consider the book to have been a great success.

Jack Perkowski