China | Merrill Weingrod | Taiwan | Asia | Taipei | CEO

China is shaking off the rust from the old Iron Curtain days and moving foward with the world's most ambitious Industrial Revolution-ever.
In the 1970's Merrill Weingrod spent a lot of time in Taiwan. Then the owner of a Massachusetts-based leather-goods company, Weingrod could see that a lot of manufacturing in his industry was moving to lower-cost Asia; to stay competitive, he would trek to Taiwan to forge alliances and visit partner factories. Each time he visited Taipei, the capital, he was struck by the frenzied pace. "You'd get up at five in the morning and go out in the street, and it would be completely full of people running around," says Weingrod, who is now CEO at China Strategies, a consultancy with offices in Providence, Rhode Island, and Shanghai that advises companies looking to do business in China. "It was the most hyperkinetic, frantic, entrepreneurial­-driven place you could imagine." When he would socialize with his Taiwanese counterparts, the same question kept popping up. "If it's this insane in Taiwan with 20 million people, what is going to happen when China opens up?" says Weingrod. "The Taiwanese would just look at you and smile."

Obviously, Weingrod's colleagues in Taiwan - which China still claims as one of its provinces, despite the fact that it has operated autonomously since 1949 - knew something about the economic potential of its mammoth Communist neighbor. But they probably never could have guessed that China would become the economic behemoth it is today. Indeed, since launching major economic reforms in 1978, this country of 1.3 billion people has undergone a dramatic revolution, moving from a centrally planned, largely agrarian economy to one that is largely capitalist, industrialized, and increasingly sophisticated.