"From 1999 to 2000, I travelled all over China, to almost every oilfield and every manufacturing plant that made oilfield equipment. I met hundreds of people. And I was extremely impressed by China and what China had to offer."

The energy expert said: "I went there (China) early enough. Even in 2001, China had not taken off. But from 2001 to 2007, there was like the great transformation of the sleeping giant awakening. It did not seem to matter what industry you were involved in. There were tremendous opportunities in almost every business. All you had to do was simply be there."

Kenda described his experience of being there in China as adventurous.

"I moved there with the attitude that I was going to experience something that nobody else was going to experience again.

"Going through China's economic development, being there when it was happening, was the greatest adventure. That's what really excited me."

Kenda said that, in 2001, his Chinese partners could not manufacture world-class products, but in 2009, they can.

"In the West, it takes a long time to go through product development, introduce technology and (then) bring it to market.

"The Chinese have been able to compress that time. They compressed 100 years into 10 years. I do not know what drives that development. But it's truly unique to China," he said.

Apart from a hard-working nature, Kenda attributed the country's robust development to two factors: China's reform and opening-up policy and the Chinese people's capability to learn from others.

"When China opened its door, it gave everybody an opportunity.

"Before the opening-up policy, there was just a trickle of business (flow) between China and foreign countries," however, after the opening, there is a "flood" of businesses, Kenda said.

Eager to see China become stronger and wealthier, Kenda said the Chinese government had been implementing the right measures to "keep things going" during the ongoing global economic slowdown by stimulating domestic growth and driving people to spend.

"I think these are also tremendous policies, because they are also helping the rest of the world," he said.

"The fact that the Chinese people are consuming is helping the rest of the world recover. Part of the consumption requires raw materials and those raw materials come from outside of China."

(Xinhua News Agency September 8, 2009)