And for This He Read Poetry?

JONATHAN ZHU

MORGAN STANLEY CHINA, HONG KONG

Jonothan Zhu, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley China, calls himself an "accidental banker"--and for good reason. In the late 1980s, the Shanghai-born Zhu was studying the poetry of William Wordsworth in a Ph.D. program at New York's Cornell University. Wordsworth, he says, wrote his best work during the French Revolution, a period Zhu felt reflected his own experience in Mao's China. But in 1988, Zhu's life changed forever when he joined other Chinese studying abroad on a special tour of his home country, organized by the communist government. He met farmers and fishermen,...