(FORTUNE Magazine) – It would be tough to find a more worldly businessman than Patrick McGovern, founder of International Data Group. His 40-year-old, $2.4-billion-a-year operation puts on 170 trade shows a year, sponsors more than 400 tech-related websites, and publishes 300 magazines and newspapers--from Computerworld to PC World Bangladesh--in 85 countries. And McGovern, chairman and majority owner of the private company, is still restlessly pursuing broader horizons, having just pledged $350 million to MIT for a neuroscience institute. FORTUNE's David Stipp recently caught up with McGovern just after his 88th trip to China to talk about the next bubble, operating abroad, and Russian hit men.

You've witnessed as many IT bubbles as anyone in the business. Which one stands out most?

For me it was in 1968, when computer terminals came out to replace [punch] cards. Hundreds of new computer terminal companies were started, and they all bought advertising. Our ads began growing by about 20% a month. So we had a plan to go daily with Computerworld. Then all of a sudden, in January 1970, our ads started to shrink by 20% a month. The same pattern occurred with the PC bubble in 1982 to 1985. It's interesting that the time between each of the bubbles has been about 15 years. I think the next wave of irrational exuberance will occur around 2013 to 2015. My guess is that the next big thing is going to be related to the use of information technology in medicine and biotech.

IDG was the first U.S. company to form a joint venture in China. How did you do it?

I made my first trip to China in 1978, before it had diplomatic relations with the U.S. I was going to fly from Tokyo to Moscow and noticed that I could take an Air Iran flight from Tokyo to Beijing, and then go on to Moscow the next day. When I got to Beijing, the immigration people told me I had to have a visa. I said, "No, I'm just here for a day in transit." Finally they all went into the back room and wrote out a visa on a piece of rice paper. They said, "Never tell anyone where you got this." So I went into town and saw all these people buying newspapers and magazines, and I thought, "This is a publisher's paradise." When China opened the door for U.S. joint ventures at the end of 1979, I immediately arranged a tour for seven U.S. technology companies. Within three months we had the project approved by the Chinese State Council and the Bank of China. We had our first issue out [of a version of Computerworld] in September 1980.

Does China's economic miracle seem sustainable?

The Chinese are putting tremendous emphasis upon education, graduating something like 700,000 engineers a year, compared with only 70,000 in the U.S. They traditionally save about 40% of their income. So China is going to have lots of talent and lots of capital to put to productive uses. I see its rapid growth continuing for at least the next ten years.

You were also one of the first U.S. entrepreneurs to do business in Russia in the late '80s. How was that?

After 70 years of a socialist economy, a market economy seemed a very strange animal. For our first magazine, we got 30 Western companies to buy full-page ads. But when we saw the first issue at the launch party, it had only four ads. We found out that the editor-in-chief had decided that 15 of them were boring because they had no technical content, and he considered 11 other ads redundant. We had to explain that if you don't have ads, you don't have rubles. There was also a lot of chaos and lawlessness. One of the Russian groups wasn't paying certain licensing fees, so we asked our lawyer if we could recover the fees in court. And he introduced me to a company that was a KGB spinoff: We could have the person shot on the street for something like $120,000. Poisoning was $80,000. I thought, "I'm getting out of this country as quickly as possible." But things have improved a lot since then.