Paul Gillis is Professor of Practice at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management and Editor of China Accounting Blog

"If the trade war continues to escalate as Trump has threatened, there's going to be a big impact on the capital markets... I expect that we're going to see a winter in IPOs next year."

Drew Bernstein:

Paul, you've gotten to this point where you've become this guru for all issues related to accounting in China. How did that journey come about?

Paul Gillis:                   

I came to China 21 years ago. I was transferred here by the international accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers. It was Price Waterhouse at the time. I was in China with them for seven years. Then I took early retirement from PwC and I tried playing golf for a while, but got bored with that. So I went back to school. I first studied theology. I enjoyed the academic side of it, so I decided to get a PhD in accounting. I chose, as my topic for my dissertation, the development of the accounting profession in China.

One of the things that I discovered in my research was that there were gaps in the regulation of Chinese companies that were starting to rush to U.S. stock exchanges in the early 2000s. Those gaps in regulation were likely to lead to an environment where there might be a lot of fraud. I predicted it would happen in my doctoral dissertation. About the time I finished it, it all came true. There were over 100 cases of fraud brought against overseas-listed Chinese companies. My work came to the attention of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which asked me to serve on their standing advisory group. And also a lot of hedge funds and other market participants got interested in what I had to say.

My blog, The China Accounting Blog, got quite a bit of attention. After a while, basically, everybody who was following the China stock market was reading what I was writing. That has led to me being, probably, the leading Western expert in Chinese accounting and auditing problems for overseas -listed Chinese companies.