A Wall Street Journal article titled, “A Costly Lesson in Chinese Business Practices: Patrick Jenevein wanted to work with partners on wind energy. Instead he found himself in a yearslong contract dispute,” was published in January 14, 2022.
I learned just recently that the 2007 D CEO article I wrote about Jenevein in China was the basis for the background parts of the WSJ article. The information goes as such, and is linked to the original 2007 interview:
Mr. Jenevein worked with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. on natural gas and electricity generation in Xinjiang and Gansu provinces. He also helped develop Chinese wind energy. HT Blade—his joint venture with the state-owned enterprise known as the Aviation Industry Corp. of China, or AVIC—became the world’s second-largest maker of wind-turbine blades.
In 2008 Tang teamed up with private investors and AVIC International USA, a California-based subsidiary of the Chinese state company under a joint venture, Soaring Wind Energy, to do business in wind energy.
Mr. Jenevein knew he was taking a risk doing business with a country that lacks the rule of law. “To express long-term commitments in the shadow of a totalitarian regime, which trumps all other contracts, is difficult,” he told Dallas-based D Magazine in a 2007 interview.
He added that guanxi—a Chinese word that translates roughly as “connections”—“becomes useful to express those commitments” in lieu of a binding contract. Executives often forge such bonds on nights out drinking baijiu, a sorghum liquor of up to 120 proof whose flavor reminds some Westerners of diesel fuel. Mr. Jenevein told the magazine he wanted to “make sure we’re valuable to the people of China, so they want to have guanxi with us.”
The concept of guanxi was a term I learned of when writing some of the executive summaries based on academic research about multinationals teaming up with Chinese counterparts in the mid-1990s. These were the very first and early joint ventures. A consortium of multinational pioneers commissioned this research via Personnel Decisions International, an international HR consultancy. I spent from roughly 1995 through 1999 working in this space. It was a different time under a different regime in China.
Continuing on the theme of China and energy, with the understanding and case study of Jenevein’s Chinese joint venture, editors at Far Eastern Economic Review requested a China energy story. Thus, in 2008, on the cusp of the first generation green energy revolution of the 2000s, this piece was produced.
It offered hope for cooperation and coordination through energy, given the efforts of Deng Xiaoping years earlier. The December 2008 article is a fairly comprehensive view of China’s energy mix, trends and my outlook at that time.
Fast-forward to 2022, and U.S.-China relations have deteriorated. Carbon emissions are much higher and the world energy system is changing to cope. In 2008, the U.S. twin gas and oil shale revolutions were in their takeoff stage. My attentions turned to those events as I was embedded in that story from a North Texas vantage point. Those stories are yet to be exhausted as the geopolitical ramifications of the U.S. shale revolution has led to us producing about 22% of the globe’s energy from oil and natural gas (equivalent basis), according to a foremost Houston-based energy expert and investor in a June 2022 interview. In a March 2, 2022 article, I suggested we’re “Still the One” in terms of being an energy powerhouse, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The work and analysis being produced about energy against the backdrop of this sort of epic remaking of the energy map is stellar, as in the above-cited interview.
The Journal article reminded me of the storytelling of my energy journey—decades in the making as one chronicling it—through the examples and eyes of others willing to share their poignant experiences and time.
The changing energy mix and challenges of the day require some knowledge of where we have been to look ahead and see where we are going…