HONG KONG (AFP) — When asked for his advice on how to survive the financial crisis, global investment guru Jim Rogers often tells his interlocutors: "Teach your children Mandarin."

The 66-year-old financial commentator has practised what he preaches, in 2007 selling his mansion in New York and moving his family to Singapore.

"I am (in Asia) because this is the exciting part of the world. This is the future, and I want my children to grow up knowing Asia, and knowing things Chinese," he said during an interview from his exercise bike.

Indeed, he said his five-year-old daughter is now a fluent Mandarin speaker.

He had thought about moving to China or Hong Kong, but decided against it because of air pollution, adding: "I don't want to breathe Hong Kong air."

Rogers, who is due to speak on regional investment opportunities at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong on January 19-20, made his name and fortune with investment legend George Soros. In 1970 they co-founded Quantum Fund, which saw its portfolio gain 4,200 percent in 10 years.

In recent months, Rogers said, as the global financial crisis has unfurled, he has been buying shares in Chinese firms, his top choices being agriculture, water, infrastructure and tourism.

"Mao Zedong ruined agriculture. China has to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to repair and revitalise it," he said, referring to the Chinese communist leader's rural reforms in the 1950s, which led to famine, poverty and environmental destruction on a massive scale.

The political and economic mess that followed the communist revolution in 1949 created abundant opportunities that Rogers said Chinese people jumped at as soon as they got the green light from the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping.

He said this was clear during a long motorcycle journey he made across the country in 1986 -- less than a decade after Deng launched economic reform policies in 1978 aimed at bringing China into the modern world.

"I was dumbfounded at how much work, initiative, excitement and investment there was," Rogers said of his trip. "I went back realising that all of that propaganda that the American government was saying was wrong."

The reality, he said, was that many Chinese people did not care about Mao and his communist ideals because "they were too busy trying to make money".

In 1990-92, he motorcycled 100,000 miles (161,000 kilometres) across the world, a feat that landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest motorcycle journey.

In subsequent best-selling books based on his journeys, including "Investment Biker: On the Road with Jim Rogers" and "Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip," he analysed the countries he rode through as investment destinations.

Turning to the current crisis, Rogers believes that Beijing has coped better so far than the US and Europe, but says efforts by the communist government could be stymied by the fact that the Chinese yuan is not fully convertible.

"You need the free flow of capital to become a fully developed major world currency. That is a mistake the Chinese are still making," he said.

Despite his optimism, there is growing concern about how resilient the Chinese economy really is with its heavy reliance on exports and foreign direct investment.

(Source)⇒AFP

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, said he’s been buying shares of Chinese companies even as growth in the world’s fourth-largest economy slows.

Rogers, 66, started buying Chinese shares in 1988 and is now favoring equities traded in Hong Kong and Singapore that are cheaper than yuan-denominated stocks in Shanghai. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, which tracks the city’s so- called H shares, climbed 1.4 percent today. The CSI 300 Index, which tracks shares in Shanghai and Shenzhen, lost 0.9 percent.

China is slowing but “some parts of the Chinese economy will be totally unaffected by what happens in the West,” Rogers said in an interview in Hong Kong today. “I started buying in October again. I never sold any Chinese shares.”

The global credit crisis has dragged the world’s largest economies into recession this year, hurting demand for Chinese products. China’s exports fell for the first time in seven years in November, imports plunged and output contracted by a record.

The People’s Bank of China has cut interest rates five times in three months to lend support to a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) spending package intended to revive in an economy that grew in the third quarter at the slowest pace in five years.

Hong Kong’s H-share Index plunged 51 percent this year, the biggest annual decline since at least 1994. The CSI 300, which tracks yuan-denominated A shares listed on China’s two exchanges, fell 66 percent in 2008, the second-worst performance in Asia this year after Vietnam’s benchmark index.

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Companies on the Hong Kong measure are valued at an average 10 times estimated profit, cheaper than the CSI 300’s 13 times.

Rogers, who correctly predicted the start of the commodities rally in 1999, has written books including “A Bull in China: Investing Profitably in the World’s Greatest Market.”

The investor said he has been buying Chinese agricultural stocks amid government measures to bolster economic growth. Other industries he favors are infrastructure in China, water and tourism in Asia. He didn’t name any specific stocks.

Premier Wen Jiabao unveiled the 4 trillion yuan stimulus package last month, which included spending on roads and bridges. Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, pledged to promote economic growth, according to a speech posted on the central bank’s Web site today.

(Source)⇒Bloomberg