Even Native Chinese Speakers Aren’t Sure What The Government Said About Market Reform

November 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Even Native Chinese Speakers Aren’t Sure What The Government Said About Market Reform

SAM RO NOV. 12, 2013, 4:50 PM 700 1

China’s ruling Communist Party wrapped up its so-called “3rd Plenum” meetings today. And there wasn’t anything too exciting that came out of it. Early media reports suggested that the China’s leaders wanted the markets to play a bigger role in the economy. But Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Ting Lu warned that it was extremely unclear if they actually said anything new. From Lu’s note: Not so meaningful semantic change on the role of “market”

The communique changes the role of “Market Economy” from “基础性 (Jichuxing)” (used in the past 20 years) to “决定性 (juedingxing)”. For native Chinese speakers like us with years of intensive training in Chinese (and we did well on the grueling GRE too), we found it very difficult to tell the real difference. Bloomberg translated “ 基础性 (Jichuxing)” to “basic”, but we think it could be translated to “fundamental (foundational)” or “essential” as well. Regarding “决定性 (juedingxing)”, it could be translated to “deciding”, “determining” or “decisive”. We suspect the Chinese people won’t interpret too much from this change. No matter how you interpret it, it’s clearly not a game-changer.

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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