Jeffrey Towson is a private equity investor and a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management. Along with Jonathan Woetzel, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, he has written The 1 Hour China Book, which, as its subtitle (Two Peking University Professors Explain All of China Business in Six Short Stories) indicates, is a book that attempts to explain everything that anyone might want to know about Chinese business in an hour to 90 minutes.

We reached Jeffrey Towson by phone to ask, is it really possible to tell someone everything they need to know about such a large topic in so short a time?