Alex Blum; Westerner Established Trade Links With Mainland China

Alex Blum, a modern-day Marco Polo who made millions of dollars sending the goods of China to the department stores of the West, died Oct. 16 in Liphook, England.

Blum, also known as Abe Blum, was 70, said a daughter, Janet, from Los Angeles this week.

Blum, who had lived in England for the past three years after spending a decade in Hong Kong, was among the first Westerners to establish trade links with the People’s Republic of China.

Under the liberalized regime of Deng Xiaoping, Blum’s companies were at the forefront of the 3,000 contracts worth more than $9 billion that were signed with Mainland China from 1977 to 1985.

In 1979, two years after the lifting of embargoes, the UCLA economics graduate employed 700 Chinese in nine factories in Shanghai, Canton, Qingdao and Wuxi that produced $30 million in silk apparel for the man the Chinese referred to as the “silk king.”

His other exports included citrus, cotton and California wine.

Blum began small-scale trading with China in the 1960s, a decade before President Richard Nixon went to Beijing, where he worked out comprehensive trade principals. Early on, Blum’s silk apparel began appearing in American department stores and catalogues and his success contributed to the furthering of compensation financing, under which Chinese-manufactured goods are partially paid for with the sophisticated U.S. equipment and technology that China lacks.

Before moving to Hong Kong, Blum lived in Sherman Oaks, where he was a past president of the Southern California Sportswear Assn., president of his own Blum of California and then Blum International.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Grace, a son, Mark, and three other daughters, Jeri-Ann, Liz and Bianca. Donations to the City of Hope are asked to be made in Blum’s memory.