by Brooke Salkoff for China Business Review

For Alex Gruzen, CEO of wireless charging pioneer WiTricity, working with a tech-focused venture capital firm in China seemed a natural fit. Gruzen knew China well from his time at Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and then Dell, where he led the company’s global notebook business. Since joining Boston-based WiTricity, Gruzen’s priorities included getting the tech right, growing the US customer base, and then breaking out in China, where the automotive and consumer electronics industries – the company’s primary targets for licensing and embedding its technology – have seen meteoric growth.

The Chinese investor in this case was Haiyin Capital, a Beijing-based venture firm deploying its third fund with a new cross-border focus. Yuquan Wang, Haiyin’s founding partner, had experience partnering with American firms; early on in his career as a consultant for US consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, he helped China Mobile grow to become by market cap the largest mobile telecom company in the world. With a decade of venture capital experience, Wang had a profound appreciation for the potential of untapped synergies in the Chinese and US tech worlds.

“The next Steve Jobs won’t come from China,” Wang noted, referring to Apple’s former CEO. “But he’ll need China if he expects to build a global company. Our idea is to find those companies in the US and help them use China to achieve explosive growth.”

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By LINGLING WEI, Wall Street Journal

BEIJING—China’s campaign to turn the tightly controlled yuan into a global currency is crossing a new threshold, as the government plans to make it easier for individuals and companies to invest overseas.

The latest initiative, expected to be announced in the next few weeks by the State Council, China’s cabinet, will allow individual Chinese and businesses to directly purchase stocks, bonds and real estate in foreign markets, removing limits on such transactions, according to Chinese officials with knowledge of the matter. Though initially limited to people and businesses in certain designated free-trade zones, the proposal can be scaled up over time, the officials said.

The step-by-step approach is typical of the leadership’s strategy to keep a firm grip and minimize risks as the economy decelerates, while still pushing forward economic reforms.

Efforts to relax capital controls have gained urgency as Beijing is gunning for the yuan, also known as the renminbi, or people’s currency, to be declared an official reserve currency by the International Monetary Fund later this year. Taken together, the actions—including currency-swap deals with other countries and opening stock-trading channels with Hong Kong—advance China’s long-stated national goal of allowing investors and businesses to move money in and out of the country freely.

“This is a breakthrough,” Hans Shen, a senior executive at Hony Capital Ltd., one of China’s largest private-equity firms, said of the new plan. “But it will be implemented with great caution as the government wants to control risks.”

A press official at the State Council referred questions to China’s central bank, which is spearheading the new initiative. The press office at People’s Bank of China didn’t respond to a request to comment.

Freeing up what’s known as the capital account, or cross-border money flows for financial transactions, creates sizable risks. The government wants to avoid a surge of money moving offshore, further weakening the economy, according to the officials. Rapid inflows, too, would put pressure on the yuan to appreciate even more, making it harder for Chinese exporters to compete in foreign markets.

But relaxing capital controls ultimately should give Chinese people greater opportunities in managing their wealth, open up new businesses for financial-services firms and help China’s transition to an economy driven more by consumption and services.

Ordinary Chinese currently have few options for investing their money. Bank deposits frequently pay less than the rate of inflation. A result is a flood of Chinese savings into stocks and property that has fed boom-and-bust cycles in local stock markets and puffed up real estate bubbles in many cities.

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by Katie Fehrenbacher

Combining the best in Chinese manufacturing with the best in U.S. high tech R&D. At least that’s the idea.

Dozens of some of the most promising high tech entrepreneurs in the U.S. are headed to Beijing over the next day or two for a weeklong trip that could represent the future of U.S.-China technology cooperation.

The trip is organized by Chinese venture capital firm Haiyin Capital, which just finished dispersing its third fund of $50 million into mostly U.S. tech startups like energy storage startup LightSail Energy, based in the Bay Area, solar tech startup 1366 technologies, located just outside of Boston, private space flight company XCOR Aerospace, in Mojave, Calif., and crowdfunding companyAngelList (distributed offices).

The attendees on the trip are mostly entrepreneurs that Haiyin Capital has funded. LightSail Energy‘s co-founder and chief scientist Danielle Fong is already on her way there; LightSail co-founder and CEO Steve Crane leaves today. Frank van Mierlo, the CEO of 1366, is also en route.

The group will start in Beijing, and tour through the manufacturing regions of Hangzhou and Guangzhou, meeting with local businessmen and government officials along the way. They’ll also attend entrepreneur-focused events that Haiyin has organized, some of them giving talks to Haiyin’s network like one next week in Beijing by a test pilot of XCOR’s private space tech.

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