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this question is for charlie it comes from stephen tedder in atlanta he's been a berkshire shareholder for 10 years and says you and your your friend lee liu have been very optimistic with respect to investing opportunities in china byd has performed spectacularly for berkshire since its initial purchase in 2008 it is currently valued at 5.8 billion dollars the daily journal recently bought a large position in alibaba after founder jack ma had been reprimanded by the chinese communist party and ma's other company and was not allowed to proceed with its ipo what are your current thoughts on china and whether the communist leaders will allow businesses with strong leadership to flourish in decades to come well i think that the chinese government will allow businesses to flourish it was a one of the most remarkable things that ever happened in the history of the world when a bunch of committed communists just looked at the prosperity of places like singapore and said the hell with this we're not going to stay here in poverty we're going to copy what works and they changed communism they just accepted adam smith and added it to their communism and that now we have communism with chinese characteristics which is china with a free market with a bunch of billionaires and so forth and they made that shift they deserve a lot of credit warren and i are not quite as good at that as changing our minds in many cases and and that was a remarkable change coming from such a place and of course it's worked like gangbusters it had this enormous growth in the average income of the average chinese they've lifted 800 million people out of poverty fast and it there's never anything like the history of the world so my hat is off to the chinese and i think they will continue to allow people to make money they've learned it works the chinese i love what the guy said in the first place i don't care whether the cat is black and white as long as it catches mice that's my kind of talk in that list of the 20 most valuable companies that just three are chinese now if you if you're looking out 30 years you know mama do you think it'll be chinese my guess is more but uh but i don't think i don't think it'll top the united states uh uh but who knows it's it's amazing what what has been accomplished and yeah really amazing and they found what works i mean there's nothing like finding something works in order to sort of reinforce ideas over time and we'll see what happens but i would bet there will be more than three but i will bet the united states has more than china still gavin smith from berkshire england he asked mr munger is a champion of chinese stocks how concerned is he about chinese government interference as seen recently with ant financial alibaba and mr jack ma what for example is to stop the chinese government from simply deciding one day to nationalize byd well i consider that very unlikely and i think jack mau was very arrogant to be telling the chinese government how dumb they were and how stupid their policies were and so forth considering their system that is not what he should have been doing and no i don't i don't i don't think that i i think the chinese have behaved very very shrewdly in managing their economy and they've gotten better results than we have in managing our economy and and i think that that will probably continue and sure we all love the kind of civilization we have i'm not saying i want to live in in in china i prefer the united states but i do admire what the chinese have done how can you not do it nobody else has ever taken a big country out of poverty so fast and so long and what i see in china now just staggers me there are factories in china that are just absolutely full of robots and are working beautifully they're no longer using peasant girls to beat the brains out of our little shoe companies in america they are joining the modern world very rapidly and they're getting very skillful at at operating the other thing that's really remarkable the last 30 years of china they have had real economic growth at a rate for 30 years that no big country has ever had before in the history of the world and who did that a bunch of communist chinese now that is really remarkable so so if you're studying finance you've got a lot of strange things to account for so bob regenthow who has a phd in 1979 from aeronautical engineering asked so how would you rate investing in china with the current political tensions or are you invested in china through the ownership of american companies that do business in china well i'm of course i'm invested partly in american companies that do business in china including coca-cola but i'm also invested very significantly in china through the uh the uh management of lilu whom the monger family backed heavily when he formed a little private equity firm to invest in china and he has had a very successful record and that's made me follow very closely the leading companies in china and of course i've had very successful experience there and i think it's likely to continue china the chinese story is the damnedest thing that it's a damn decision that ever happened to a big country in terms of economics no other big country ever got ahead this fast for that long and does that say that sort of the politics don't matter so much or yeah that's a very interesting observation what that shows is exactly right who would have guessed that a bunch of communist chinese run by one party would have the best economic record the world has ever seen of course it's extreme and i think it proves that you know it does we americans would like to think that our free expression and allowing all kinds of opinion and all kinds of criticism of the government is totally essential part of the economy and what the chinese have proved is you can have a screamingly successful economy with a fairly controlling government all the government has to do is is a is created a lot of smithy and smithy and capitalism if you do that having a sort of a controlling one-party government doesn't matter that's not a fashionable thing to say but i think it's true in 1860 gdp per capita in china was 600 in 1978 the year deng xiaoping took over it was 300.
today it hovers around 9 500. never before in the history of mankind have we seen such a rapid eradication of poverty pulling approximately 800 million people out of destitution you are on record as a zealous fan of the chinese work ethic and confucian values system as we can see from the deteriorating u.s relationship with china the western world does not understand china what can we do to increase knowledge understanding and appreciation of the chinese civilization well it's natural for people to think their own civilization and their own nation is better than everybody else but everybody can't be better than everybody else you're right the china's economic record among the big nations is the best that ever existed in the history of the world and that's very interesting a lot of people assume that since england led the industrial revolution and always and had free speech early that that free speech is required to have a booming economy as prescribed by adam smith but the chinese have proved you don't need free speech to have a wonderful economy they just copied adam smith and left out the free speech and it worked fine for them as a matter of fact it's not clear to me that china would have done better if they'd copied every aspect of english civilization i think they would have come out worse because their position was so dire and the poverty was so extreme they needed very extreme methods totalitarian methods if you will to get out of the fix they they were in so i think what china has done was probably right for china and that we shouldn't be so pompous is to be telling the chinese they ought to behave like us because they like ourselves because we like ourselves and our system it's entirely possible that our system is right for us and their system is right for them
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