Thread by @PekingMike

This has all the look and feel of a real Washington Post opinion piece. But look closer. The Berggruen Institute strikes again. washingtonpost.com/news/theworldp…

The author, Song Bing, is a former top executive at Goldman’s Chinese joint-venture brokerage is married to Daniel Bell, the Canadian scholar known for his praise of authoritarian China as a meritocracy.

And Bell is himself director of a Berggruen program at Tsinghua. See: berggruen.org/people/daniel-…

How senior was Song Bing in the Goldman firmament? Very senior. She was the legal representative (法定代表）of Gaohua Securities until Sept. last year. This is the firm led by Wang Qishan protege Fang Fenglei. See：

But who is Song Bing? This 2012 article on Bell/Song by @markmackinnon offers a clue... her father fought on the winning side in the Communist revolution... and in 1988 she was at Oxford on a merit-based scholarship from the Swire Corporation ...
theglobeandmail.com/news/world/can…

@markmackinnon That made me think of General Song Renqiong, but Bloomberg took a close look at his family in 2012 and I don't recall her popping up in our reporting. Song is a very common surname. Could be anyone.....but it is intriguing. @markmackinnon did she tell you?
bloomberg.com/graphics/2012-…

@markmackinnon To a princeling-focused reporter, a Chinese national getting a merit based scholarship from the SWIRE CORPORATION way back in 1988 is like throwing chum into a pool full of sharks. The antennae pop up. It is worth more digging....

@markmackinnon After the obvious google and baidu searches, the next stop is Hong Kong company records. They are the world's gold standard. So let's have a look.

@markmackinnon Find the "director" page, plug in the name in Chinese (traditional characters only), pay a very small fee and out comes the results.

@markmackinnon I can't display them because there is ID information on them (both HK IDs and Chinese 身份证 numbers. There are eight hits. Let's have a look to see if any are likely to be our Song Bing.

@markmackinnon The HK search results are inconclusive. The amazing @kuriko_c dug this English-language interview up. 宋冰 is from Changsha, in Hunan, she said in this interview. She went abroad in 1988. She said she came back to mainland China in 2004.

rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/38…

@markmackinnon @kuriko_c Everyone should follow @kuriko_c , by the way.
So we know Song Bing joined Goldman in 2005 from her Aspen profile. This was right when Gaohua was getting set up under Cai Jinyong. She became a managing director in 2007. Impressively fast advancement.
agln.aspeninstitute.org/profile/2024

@markmackinnon @kuriko_c Here is the Goldman announcement from 2007 on her becoming a managing director. This is the elite of the elite in the banking world. The masters of the universe. After only 2 years at Goldman, mind you.
goldmansachs.com/media-relation…

@markmackinnon @kuriko_c So. Song Bing, author of the WPost/Berggruen article went to Peking U in the mid-1980s, then Oxford on Swire's dime. Wife of Daniel Bell. Joined Goldman in 2005, became managing director there in 2007 and a few years later was general manager of Goldman's onshore China brokerage.

I'm gonna have to end my thread there. But there's much more to learn. Hope all of you found it informative. I don't do this too much anymore.