FIVE months after settling down in Shenzhen, Charles T. Kimball, from the United States, described it as a good choice "personally and professionally." Working as chief research consultant with Bosera Asset Management, Kimball said his major task here is to train Chinese investment researchers.

A Wall Street veteran, Kimball began his career with Morgan Guaranty Trust in the 1970s after graduating with a MBA from Stanford. "I have witnessed money being badly invested in the past," he said, referring to the financial crises in the Middle East in the 1970s, in Japan in the 1980s, and in Southeast Asian nations in the 1990s. "Therefore, I am most concerned with the logical and rational way of investment."

Kimball said he felt reassured after seeing the efforts of the Chinese Government in cooling down the property market and energy sectors, though he thought more needed to be done. He also said it was understandable that the government took a step-by-step strategy in the appreciation of the yuan.

Praising Shenzhen as a unique example of quick economic growth, Kimball said the city's great strength lay in the fact that it could attract a high-quality workforce from around the world. Meanwhile, he said he hoped there would be more cultural events and quality movies - rather than Hollywood blockbusters all the time - catering to the tastes of a growing number of international professionals in the city.

Kimball will spend the next two years in Shenzhen, and he is looking forward to trips around China. "I'd been to Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin and other must-dos for foreign travelers back in 1998, in the gap of business trips," he said, "but now I will take this chance to travel to more remote areas in China."

"We do a lot of outdoors," Kimball said, who met his Japanese wife while hiking up a mountain with Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, near Tokyo in the late 1980s.

He and his wife - married for 17 years - once traveled to Huangshan Mountain and the scenery amazed them. "My wife was a docent with the Metropolitan Museum of New York and specialized in Asian culture. We have seen Chinese paintings of high mountains rising up into the clouds behind a creek, a hut and several figures," he said. "But we didn't realize the scenes are real until we went to Huangshan."

Editor: Wing