An American in Shanghai

For almost three tumultuous decades, insurance and investment fund executive Russell R. Miller, plied his trade in China and Southeast Asia. Buying and selling companies, setting up new ones and moving into public service by creating cultural and educational organizations — all the while witnessing far reaching societal transformation in China and her neighbors.

For almost three tumultuous decades, insurance and investment fund executive Russell R. Miller, plied his trade in China and Southeast Asia. Buying and selling companies, setting up new ones and moving into public service by creating cultural and educational organizations — all the while witnessing far reaching societal transformation in China and her neighbors. In An American in Shanghai, Russell R. Miller chronicles this sweeping transformation with an eye for the telling detail as well as a sure grasp of the big picture. Mr. Miller’s vantage point of the insurance and investment industries, as well as his public service activities, gave him the perfect window to capture the contradictions of the New China. Here is an emerging superpower, with the world’s second largest economy, striving to be modern in all things and overcome centuries of grinding poverty and humiliation by the West. A Communist political system coexists with a capitalist economy and gleaming skyscrapers can be found around the corner from a back alley being swept by a dried bamboo branch broom whose design stretches back one thousand years, nearby a sleek Mercedes pulls up to a stoplight by a pushcart piled high with discarded goods From his home in Shanghai, one of the most Western of Chinese cities, once known as the “Paris of the East,” Mr. Miller takes us on an instructive and entertaining journey through China. As insightful as he is engaging, Russell R. Miller makes the ideal traveling companion for this journey through the paradoxes of the emerging powerhouse of New China.

Russell R. Miller is a native of San Francisco, California, and has been working on projects in Asia for almost thirty years. With headquarter offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, he directed two investment funds and in 2002 founded The Spirit of Enterprise, a nonprofit, cultural, educational organization dedicated to fostering the entrepreneurial spirit. Recently, he joined with others to start ZenPlay, a nonprofit aiming to help children’s charities. He also worked for three years in the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., and won a contested nomination for a U.S. Congressional seat, although he lost the general election. His papers for that period are found in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, a principal repository library for California History. Prior to living in Singapore and now in Shanghai, he was an investment banker, having created a specialty firm in the United States that focused on the domestic and international insurance industry. He founded the National Insurance Leadership Symposium, a leadership forum for insurance executives. He served as a trustee and executive committee member of the College of Insurance, St. John’s University, in New York. He was a co-founder of the Insurance Industry Charitable Fund. A recipient of The Republic of Singapore’s Pingat Bakti Masyarakat Public Service Medal, he lives in both Shanghai and San Francisco.