Is China Really Changing?

Investment banker Robert Lawrence Kuhn sees China moving toward democracy, a particularly Chinese form of democracy. Why devaluing the yuan makes sense. Big challenge: the largest planned migration in history.

ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN, an international investment banker, corporate strategist and author, has spent much of the past two decades trying to understand how China's leaders think.

By his reckoning, he has visited that nation more than 100 times and interviewed hundreds of its top political figures, bureaucrats and technocrats.

In the past few years, he has been on a self-financed China Odyssey to some 40 cities in 20 provinces on the mainland. The result is How China's Leaders Think, a 546-page book published this year by Wiley, that looks at reforms taking place in today's China and what they mean for the U.S. and other countries.

The 65-year-old Kuhn has written or edited more than 25 books, including a 710-page biography of China's former president—The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (Crown, 2005). It was the first biography of a living Chinese leader to be published on the mainland and a bestseller; more than 1.1 million copies of the Chinese translation were purchased.

A former investment banker and mergers and acquisitions specialist who sold his company to Citigroup in 2001 and a commentator on the government-owned China Central Television (CCTV) network, Kuhn is an advisor to BNP Paribas and counsels multinational corporations on their strategies, structures and relationships with China. A graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, Kuhn also holds a Ph.D. in brain research from UCLA.

Barron's spoke by phone with the peripatetic Kuhn while he was in Shanghai. To learn his views on the world's most populous country, read on.

Barron's: You were educated as a brain scientist and have worked as an investment banker and merger specialist. How did you suddenly end up writing about Chinese politics?

Kuhn: It wasn't sudden. In early 1989, as an investment banker and a scientist, I was invited by China's State Science and Technology Commission to advise on reform. Then came the suppression of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and I, like many foreigners, refused to return to China. But in the summer of 1990, I invited a Chinese government scientist to a conference I was co-chairing at UCLA on creativity in large organizations. During a break, several of us confronted him about Tiananmen and he said something remarkable. He agreed that China was moving backward, but he argued that it was more our fault than his, because by turning our backs on China, we in the West were abandoning domestic reformers. His appeal touched me and changed my life.

Read more at Barron's