In late 2008, Wang summed up the rules he had learnt for doing business as an entrepreneur in China. From the moment he established his private business, he said, he had been careful to take on a government shareholder, to give his company a ‘red hat’. ‘You take too much, the state is unhappy, and you take too little, you get upset with yourself,’ he said. When this first state shareholder was replaced a few years later, he made sure his new partner was state-owned as well. The first rule, he said, was that you will not develop quickly without a ‘red hat’, or a state partner. And second, you
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