American John Perkins is best known for his controversial book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, a 70-week New York Times bestseller. Published in 2004, it tells the real-life story of his extraordinary dealings as an "economic hitman" (EHM). According to Perkins, this describes those highly paid professionals who cheat countries out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder.

Perkins was recently in Shanghai during his first visit to the Chinese mainland to speak at the 2009 Being Globally Responsible Conference, an event organized by MBA students from China Europe International Business School.

Q: Why have you waited until now to come to China?

A: Several times during my EHM tenure in the 1970s I stood on a hill in the New Territories outside Hong Kong and peered into the Chinese mainland. My passport at that time would not allow me to enter the country. China was locked behind a wall of secrecy.

Q: What does an EHM do?

A: An EHM's job is to convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development - loans that were much larger than needed - and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to US corporations. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the US government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able to control these economies, ensuring that oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building a global empire.

Q: Are there any EHMs in China?

A: There are certainly some economic hitmen in China. I don't have personal experience here. My main experience is in Indonesia. We were the generic version of EHM in those days. Today there is still that type of EHM sent by the government. But corporations have their own version of EHM. The world has changed so the government is less important than before.

Q: What is your next book about?

A: My next book, the English version, will be published in November. Today the geopolitical situation has changed. Nations are losing their importance. The world is controlled not by military might but economic power. In the old days, few had as much influence as today's corporations.

Q: How do you compare China and the United States?

A: I just visited many countries in Latin America. They want to borrow from China, rather than the United States. This is because China does not attach strings to the loans and China does not have a history of military presence in Latin America.

Q: What do you think of China's recent development?

A: No one back in the 1970s believed that any country could sustain double digit economic growth for more than a couple of years and under no circumstances for a decade. China accomplished the impossible. And then it did it again. And again. In three decades, the most populous nation on the planet rose from the depths of poverty to become the symbol of what human determination - and capitalism - can accomplish.

(China Daily 06/20/2009 page13)