前天和company study group的另外3个dudes一起去吃brunch的时候聊到asher什么时候结婚的问题，然后突然聊起来结婚之前要不要办preemption。andrew说: you'll be nuts not to do it，然后说可以preempt如果离婚什么都不给老婆，或者给一个fixed amount，比如说1 million，或者给25% total asset，或者结婚之后各自挣的归各自，等等。。。反正variation好多。

 

orion似乎比较同意andrew的观点，我觉得也不错。asher比较保守。

 

不过后来又说起来，那么怎么开口和fiancee说呢。难道第一天晚上说: oh, my god, I love you. I wanna spend the rest of my life with you. I'll be the happiest man on earth if I can be with you。。。等等的bullshit。然后别人答应了，第二天一早说: dear, you know what, we have some business to take care of here, why not we both sit down and talk. I don't think I should give you a dime if we get divorced down the road. let's get our lawyers in and get the preemption signed. 然后mm显然不同意，然后两个人开始negotiate，最后谈好一个价，然后sign the papers。

 

preemption别的都好，保护了各自的权益，不过总觉得有点pathetic。虽然我还没有到谈婚论嫁的时候，但是有些朋友快了。到底要不要做preemption呢？

today's WSJ frontpage is on China. but nothing good, it's about China's health crisis. Is the public health system that bad in China now?

 

Health Crisis
Chinese Doctors Tell Patients
To Pay Upfront, or No Treatment

leaving california in one month...

here're some pictures of exchange square.

Played Golf on the gorgeous Stanford Golf Course today. Met with my team for eBay company strategy research at 3:00, and then headed off to the golf course. Andrew first thought we were kidding until Orion took his club sets out.

 

It was a sunny and fresh Sunday afternoon. Practiced on the 19^th hole for almost 2 hours. Andrew and I are both beginners so we sucked. Orion is the best of us, Asher is okay. In the beginning, I could barely hit the ball from a full swing. Then I decided to do half or even quarter swings. Did better this way. But still couldn’t hit the ball into the air with a desirable beautiful curve. Orion had several great swings when he sent the ball right onto the green. Practiced with Andrew’s Callaway putter in the second half but didn’t feel that much difference. Guess until I become better, I won’t be able to tell a good club from a not so good one. But definitely, I can tell Callaway looks nice.

 

We planned to discuss about the company study while playing golf. But in the end, discussion totaled less than 5 minutes. Then we went for dinner and did some solid work there. Except Asher, we voted to go to a stripper club where we could talk more “business”. Asher insisted we should be more serious about work. All right, man….

 

Hopefully we can do this again this weekend. As Asher quoted it: Basketball is a passion, but Golf is an addiction.

SEVERAL mysteries surrounded the career of Rong Yiren. One was how he could have been vice-chairman of the 5th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, vice-chairman of the standing committee of the 6th and 7th National People's Congress, and vice-president of the People's Republic, without ever (to anyone's certain knowledge) joining the Communist Party. Another was how, despite ceding many of his family's business holdings after the 1949 revolution, and losing the rest during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, he emerged within a decade as one of the 50 most charismatic businessmen in the world, by Fortune's reckoning, and by 1999, by Forbes's, as China's richest.

The answer to both these mysteries is that he played a very clever and very Chinese game. First, when most of his family, including his brothers, fled from China to Taiwan or the United States after 1949, Mr Rong stayed. He had 24 flour mills to run, besides dyeing, printing and textile factories, employing in all some 80,000 people; his family's business empire, started in 1902, had been among the biggest in the country.The decision not to flee was brave, and made him nervous: he was “like an ant on a hot pan”, he said later, but stayed calm in front of the workforce. He also presented himself, from the first, as one of those “national” or “patriotic” capitalists who had remained not to enrich himself (far from it!) but to help China end its poverty. His dogged conviction that his country would eventually find capitalism necessary was to be proved right in spades.

Mr Rong's communism, if official at all, was subtle. He supported the Communists, he admitted, with only “one hand” at first. But when he realised this would not do, he raised two, with implicit conditions. If he gave the party what it wanted, he would try to make sure the favour was returned. After 1956, when he handed over large stakes in his family's businesses to the government, he was given 30m yuan ($12m) compensation, as well as the posts of vice-mayor of Shanghai and, in 1959, vice-minister for the textile industry.

Having gained political ties from canny surrenders, Mr Rong made sure he used them. Guanxi, or personal connections, the grease of all commerce and politics in China, helped him survive the Cultural Revolution, more or less. Though his companies were confiscated, his mansions ransacked and he himself reduced to menial work, top members of the party shielded him from further terrors. As a patriotic capitalist, he then confirmed the official account that he had spent the years of Mao Zedong's brutal re-education of “capitalist-roaders” quietly at home, studying and planting flowers.

Capitalism's ambassador

In 1978, all the years of careful positioning bore fruit. Deng Xiaoping decided that China would experiment with capitalism, opening windows to the world, and brought in Mr Rong to find “boldly creative” ways of doing so. He could have picked no one better: urbane, beautifully turned out, educated under the British system at St John's University in Shanghai, a man impeccably loyal to China and to Deng, but also a raging capitalist to his very marrow. (Mr Rong preferred “entrepreneur” to the “red capitalist” tag Deng gave him, but “entrepreneur” hardly caught the force of it.)

Mr Rong, now in his dream job, did not have to look far to find versions of capitalism he liked. In 1979, at the party's behest, he founded CITIC, ostensibly as the investment arm of the Chinese state but also, in effect, his own company. From its very beginnings it was in clover, a state-licensed predator in a land empty of private rivals. Telecoms, utilities and highways were swept up. When Deng in the 1980s set up the Special Economic Zones in southern China, where capitalist forays were permitted, CITIC was first there to exploit the property boom. Mr Rong, roving extensively, found foreign concerns for China to invest in, and foreign investors were in turn lured back to China. Mr Rong's conglomerate now boasts global assets of more than 51 billion yuan ($6.3 billion) and 200 affiliated enterprises, including airlines, Hong Kong banks, timber operations and Australian aluminium smelting.

He himself did nicely, too, as far as anyone could tell. In its 2001 listing Forbes backtracked a bit, saying that his wealth ($1.9 billion in 2000) should really be attributed to his son, Larry Yung, head of CITIC-Pacific in Hong Kong. But there was still his mansion in Beijing, his spread in Shanghai and his semi-palace beside a lake in Jiangsu province, near where he was born. Cadillacs were mentioned. Mr Rong even had enough to give $180,000, just before the knife-edge election of 1992, to Britain's Conservative Party.

To what extent public assets leached into private income was something the Chinese government could never quite find out. Certainly it had no system of rules to stop it. Once the dragon of capitalism, even in the safe and suave form of Mr Rong, was let in through the door, government and markets mingled. Some observers outside China wondered why he stayed, but there was no puzzle about it: in China he could not only be rich as Croesus, but vice-president too.