Hard sell of tough old hand

"By thinking that Western products are always better than the Chinese ones, they are repeating the mistakes made by their grandfather."

Mistakes that had been rightly pointed out by Crow.

"When Carl wrote the book, what he was trying to say was that these were 400 million people, not necessarily customers," says French. "Take the pharmaceutical industry for example, a foreign businessman in 1937 would argue that all those 400 million people would get sick at one time or another, but back then Chinese generally didn't believe in Western medicine."

These days, French routinely reprises his culturally-attuned protagonist's daily lunchtime walk along the Bund.

"Carl once said that he learned something by just going onto the street," says French.

And just like Crow, French is extremely wary of the so-called "Shanghai Mind".

"The term was first coined in the 1920s by a British newspaperman in Shanghai. It referred to the mindset of the 'hermetically sealed glass case' that was the privileged life inside the city's foreign concessions," says French. "Of course there are no more foreign concessions today, but wealthy expats still get caught up in the bubble atmosphere of Shanghai."

"I regularly go to second and third-tier Chinese cities," he says. "It's crucial to keep an open attitude and to learn that not everywhere else in China is like Nanjing Road."

While researching for his books, French encountered a letter written by the then American consulate in Shanghai to Crow in March 1937. "The consulate was basically saying: please stop telling journalists that Japan is an enemy, and that America and China should do something," says French. "Carl saw Japan as an imminent threat that should be stopped at a time when nobody else did. And of course only a few months later, the Japanese army was busy bombing Shanghai and raping Nanjing."

But even Crow couldn't see everything. "In early 1937, when the Peace Hotel in Shanghai was just being finished, Carl couldn't have evinced himself fleeing the county at the end of that same year. His pro-China stance had put him on the top of Japan's most-wanted-foreigners' list," says French.

"For any one of us, to leave China at any point would be like throwing a book away before finishing it - the real China is always up on the road.

"When Carl first came, in 1911, Shanghai was a backwater town, but money and wild life was to arrive," he says. "Then you look at what has happened to Shanghai over the past two decades. I came at a right time (just) as Carl did."

However, French may not have the chance to win himself the much-coveted title of "Old China Hand".

"I guess in Carl's time, any foreigner who had stayed in China for 20 or 30 years and was still alive would qualify as an Old China Hand," says French. "But it certainly helped if you had ever talked to Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Madam Chiang, Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai, all of which Carl did except for (talking to) Mao."

French, for his part, has been widely consulted on financial matters regarding China and is called at various Shanghai government functions as "lao peng you", or "old friend", a term he roughly interprets as "China Hand".

So, any word from a China Hand?

"My biggest piece of advice, which is also Carl's biggest piece of advice, is that you don't change China, China changes you."