By Zach Coleman
Asia Times, July 4, 2004
HONG KONG - George Herbert Walker Bush arrived in Beijing 30 years ago as the official United States representative to China with one goal above all else: expanding his buddy list.
"My hyper-adrenaline, political instincts tell me that the fun of this job is going to be to try to make more contacts," he wrote in his first diary entry. "And it is my hope that I will be able to meet the next generation of China's leaders - whomever they may be. Yet everyone tells me that that is impossible."
Bush Sr, already a champion networker, wasn't to be denied. In a final triumph at the end of his stay, Deng Xiaoping, then vice premier, threw a farewell lunch for Bush Sr and his wife.
"You are our old friends," said Deng, according to a Chinese government website. "You are welcome to come back anytime in the future."
Bush Sr and his relatives have turned that open invitation into a family franchise over the years, setting themselves up as gatekeepers between lucrative business opportunities created by the opening up of China's economy and the US corporate and political establishment. If Iraq is the place where the Bush men fight once they leave the oil fields of Texas, China is where they have made money.
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Prescott Bush Jr:
Prescott Bush only made his first visit to China after his brother Bush Sr had moved into the White House as vice president in 1981. He quickly became a regular, leaving behind his 33-year career in the insurance brokerage business in preference for Chinese deal making. A 30 percent stake in one early project, an $18 million golf club in Shanghai, gave Prescott the opportunity to strike up a friendship with then-mayor Jiang Zemin (who now heads the communist party's powerful standing committee of Central Military Commission).
Now 81, Prescott Bush still travels to China two to four times a year, according to the website of Plus Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed company focused on China, which hired Prescott as a special adviser three months after Bush Jr's inauguration. The website features Prescott's picture at the top of its home page. "He has many friends in China," the site says in its biography of the special Bush family adviser.
Prescott Bush Resources, his consulting company, has put together more than 30 joint ventures in China since 1978, according to the website of Global Access, a US consulting company active in China, which retains Prescott as chairman of its advisory board. "Mr Bush has also facilitated meetings and approvals at the highest levels of the Chinese government," the site adds in its biography.
"I don't get a lot of business because my nephew is president or my brother was president," Prescott insisted in an interview with USA Today in 2002, though he admitted, "You can meet a lot of people because of it."
Prescott capitalized explicitly on the family tie-in by forming the US-China Chamber of Commerce in 1993 after serving on its predecessor, the Hong Kong-US Business Council, during his brother's presidency.
"My brother, George, has been instrumental in the development of US and China relations since 1974," he wrote in his letter to prospective members. The chamber pitches itself as a networking hub, which "provides the business communities in both countries with direct access to leading business people and government officials who are important in their business development efforts".
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FE21Ad01.html
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