I had a very smooth trip to south China where I met with various interesting people. The most wildly successful guys I met with were Brazilians who are brokering deals between China and their home country for raw materials. If you are fluent in both Chinese and Portuguese, you should be working here (rapidly getting rich) right now.

I met a number of guys from both Taiwan and Hongkong who are making quite a bit of money selling recycled copper from the US to the Mainland. Another guy has a place in Mainland China that imports crushed and cut cars from the US. His workers separate the scrap metal by hand. He is doing very well (and his employees are happy to be making $1 an hour).

A real estate speculator I talked with had horror stories about his investments in Shenzhen and in Hongkong. His Shenzhen properties have lost about 60% over the last decade and his Hongkong properties are down 25-30% over the same time. On the other hand he holds his grandfather’s apartment (bought in 1953 for HK$20,000, now valued at HK$6 million), and his parents’ apartment (bought in 1984 for HK$200,000, now valued at HK$10 million), both in Hongkong.

Our private banking person in Hongkong told me that her apartment, bought in 1992, is now valued at 25% less than what she paid for it. Of course it doubled in price before the Asian Currency Crisis hit. US investors in real estate should study the Hongkong market if they want to sober up. Yes, the property you hold that has doubled in price can quickly fall far below what you originally paid for it. Bad Things Happen and Timing Is Everything.

Inflation watch: a ticket for the TurboJet ferry between Hongkong and Shenzhen now includes a HK$14 “fuel surcharge” (about an 8.2% jump). They told me “when fuel prices fall we’ll remove the surcharge,” and I thought, yeah right.

I really like Hongkong and miss living there (as opposed to London), but it’s clear that everyone who matters has moved to Shanghai and that’s where the real dynamism is centered now.