INDIA 12/10/56
HORATIO ALGER
* In India, where Horatio Alger sagas are as rare as Hindu beefeaters, one of them concerns the career of Mohan Oberoi, 56, India's Conrad Hilton. A onetime farm boy from the Punjab, he started out in 1921 without a rupee to his name. He now owns a $20 million interest in Oberoi Hotels (India) Ltd., a string of 13 hotels, and a luscious beach guesthouse on the Bay of Bengal. Last week, hotelman Oberoi was constructing in New Delhi Asia's most modern hotel, the nine-story, 200-room, completely air-conditioned Oberoi Intercontinental.

When completed in October 1957, the Oberoi Intercontinental will have an acre-large artificial lily pond for boating, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a glassed-in rooftop restaurant, 20 stores clustered around a patio. Cost, including land and fixtures: $2,250,000.

COMMUNIST ENTERPRISE 8/3/59
CHINESE JUNK
* Hardly a Western businessman could be found last week in all of Red China. The foreign traders who came and went with revolving-door regularity only a few months ago, crying the benefits of trade with the Chinese communists, have gone home. What soured them: unbusinesslike methods of doing business, developed by the Chinese into an exasperating art. "It's a damned waste of time," snapped a British trader.
When Peking started its highly touted trade offensive short months ago, it lured Western businessmen with offers of $7 violins, $23 sewing machines, $14 bicycles and promises to deliver nails, newsprint and electric motors at prices far below those of Japanese goods. But haste to gather foreign exchange to cover a huge trade deficit with Russia led Red China to overstep itself. A classic example of chaos was Peking's decision to encourage hundreds of thousands of peasants to set up tiny blast furnaces in their backyards to raise steel production. The system proved so uneconomical that it has been abandoned.