In late 2004, David Murphy was working as the Beijing bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review. A once-venerable Asia current-affairs title, by now owned by Dow Jones, it had been stripped back to a skeletal writing staff. Murphy had one foot out the door: plans with friends to open a bar in the Chinese capital were at an advanced stage when he fielded a call from Gary Coull.
The Canada-born Coull was a striking character, an old-school thinker and do-er. When he passed away two years later, former Euromoney writer Tony Shale described him as a “splendid anachronism”: a poker player, horse owner and bon viveur. He had two careers: first as a journalist for FEER and the South China Morning Post; then as the founder and chairman of CLSA, a trailblazing Hong Kong brokerage famed for its pithy, punchy research and glitzy, star-studded conferences.
“Coull was a legend,” Murphy says. “He didn’t care about hierarchy. He wanted to make money, get stuff done and have fun. He wanted to know if I was someone who could set up a network that could track what was really going on in China’s economy.”
The call went nowhere at first, but a few months later Coull called again and asked if Murphy would like to head up a new China-themed offering called China Reality Research (CRR).
Murphy