Hard sell of tough old hand

French has in his mind a beautifully hand-colored print of a 1930s Shanghai calendar girl, wearing gently curled hair and holding a cigarette tentatively. Today, that archetypal image of swinging Shanghai chic can be found in the city's numerous bars and restaurants.

"What do you read from it? For modern-day viewers, the answers may include party, gangster, opium but back then, it was only about one word: modern," says French.

Carl, as French would like to call his "role model," invented that image.

"He hired all the Chinese artists in the ad agency that he set up, gave them copies of Western magazines - and asked them to paint Chinese women dressed in Chinese style sitting on a piece of Western furniture or car," French says.

"By doing so, Carl tapped into the Chinese fascination with the West, instead of the other way around. And he did it in the early 1920s."

Another thing he tapped into, says French, was Chinese nationalism.

"Rather than planting Hollywood actresses in the ads, Carl used local celebrities like the movie star 'Butterfly Hu' (Hu Die). The effect was modern, but unequivocally Chinese."

French first visited Shanghai in 1987. "Shanghai was a dark city back then," he recalls. "There were old buildings everywhere."

He was to return repeatedly in the following years, as he wrote about the Chinese consumer markets for major publications in Britain. He moved to Shanghai permanently in 1997.

It was during those years that French became fascinated with Carl. "I read his book 400 Million Customers - the number refers to the Chinese population in 1937," says French, about the book that would make Crow a best-selling author around the world.

"It surprised me that in the book Carl made fun of the gauche and arrogant foreigners instead of the Chinese."

French himself was soon to recognize modern-day equivalents of those that Crow satirized. "Some expats have arrived in Shanghai with nothing else on their minds but fast money, and have done nothing but blame China for their failures," he says.