Activity in China

Buffett once told investors, "The 19th century belonged to England, the 20th century belonged to the US and the 21st century belongs to China. Invest accordingly." However his own business activity in China has been limited, so far, and many investors are waiting for him to take his own advice.

Buffett has previously invested in the oil and gas producer PetroChina, and Berkshire Hathaway currently has a 10 percent interest in the aforementioned BYD, whose name stands for "Build Your Dreams".

In March this year, he announced plans to invest in a corporate aircraft joint venture in Zhuhai, Guangdong province, but that seems to be the limit of his involvement in the world's second-largest economy.

Despite this, the famously unostentatious Buffett is a familiar figure to many Chinese, partly through his visits to the country that have raised his profile with the general public and investors alike, and partly because of his, some would say bizarre, prerecorded appearance on China Central Television's New Year Gala, where he played the ukulele and sang a song about railroads.

However, apart from financial gain and a possible career boost — Ted Weschler, a 50-year-old former hedge-fund managing partner from Charlottesville, Virginia, who won the lunch auction in both 2010 and 2011, joined Berkshire Hathaway this year to help oversee the company's investment portfolio — most investors who expressed an interest in joining Buffett's table see it as an opportunity to learn from a world-class master of investment.

"It would definitely be good for me, if I ever get the chance to listen to Buffett's opinions face-to-face," according to Lu Wei, president of Mingyuan Investment Consulting Corp, who said that Buffett's investment strategy is not complicated, but few people really understand it.

Liu Jialei, a private investor who followed this year's lunch auction avidly, said few of the bidders in the initial auction 13 years ago would have guessed that the price would skyrocket. "I don't think that there is any real secret to Buffett's success. He just is able to stick to his simple investment principles," opined Liu.

Not every observer is convinced by Buffett, though. Wu Xiaobo, a Chinese finance writer, said the auction was like a show. "To understand Buffett's investing wisdom, reading a couple of books carefully is a better choice than a lunch. Very few substantial changes have happened after the bid winners had lunch with Buffett," he commented.

Meanwhile, Zhou Yixing, a Chinese observer whose blog is published on the website of the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV, wrote that the true focus of Buffett's lunch auction should not be on the price, but on its nature that perfectly combines a commercial auction with social charity.

That view was amplified by the US investment legend Michael Steinhardt, who in April bashed Buffett and his hedge fund on a program on the US business TV channel, CNBC. "[Buffett's] reality is he is the greatest PR person of recent times and he has managed to achieve a snow job that has conned virtually everyone in the press to my knowledge," said Steinhardt.