Chinese Tycoons, CEOs & Tuhao

[GeneChing]

About a third of China’s wealth belongs to just one per cent of the population. While China’s poor still inhabit a developing-world economy, a recent report found that the country now has more dollar billionaires than the U.S. does. “What is happening in China constitutes one of the most rapid emergences of wealth stratification in human history,” Jeffrey Winters, a politics professor at Northwestern University, told me. Winters, the author of the book “Oligarchy,” pointed out that China is one of a small number of countries—Russia is the other notable example—where extreme wealth stratification was eliminated in a Communist revolution and then later reëmerged. As in Russia, the sudden formation of a new oligarchy in China means that there are many super-rich people who are unfamiliar with the ways in which more entrenched aristocracies quietly protect their wealth. “No matter the culture or age, old money knows from long experience that it is far safer to be secluded and less seen,” Winters said. But new money, as Thorstein Veblen theorized, asserts itself through conspicuous consumption.


“I’m used to him finishing my sentences, but now he starts them, too.”

A study by the Bank of China and the Hurun Report found that sixty per cent of the country’s rich people were either in the process of moving abroad or considering doing so. (“Rich” was defined as being worth more than ten million yuan—around $1.5 million, a considerable fortune in China, though not stratospheric.) The Chinese are currently transferring money out of the country at a rate of around four hundred and fifty billion dollars a year. Most of that money has gone into real estate. According to the National Association of Realtors, Chinese buyers have become the largest source of foreign cash in the U.S. residential real-estate market.

Moneyed people leave China for various reasons. Some are worried about pollution. Others want to secure a good education for their children. Zhou Xueguang, a sociology professor at Stanford who received his bachelor’s degree in China, told me, “The competition in the Chinese school system is known to be brutal.” He went on, “There are only so many slots in good schools, and, at a certain level, it doesn’t matter how much money you have—you won’t be able to get in.” But, for affluent Chinese, the most basic reason to move abroad is that fortunes in China are precarious. The concerns go deeper than anxiety about the country’s slowing growth and turbulent stock market; it is very difficult to progress above a certain level in business without cultivating, and sometimes buying, the support of government officials, who are often ousted in anti-corruption sweeps instigated by rivals.

John Osburg, an anthropologist who spent years studying successful businessmen in Chengdu, told me that “there’s always a fear that, if the officials to whom they’re tied are brought down in an anti-corruption campaign, it could bring trouble for them, too, and lead to the seizure of their assets. There’s also a concern that business rivals who may be better connected to people in the government could use their ties to the party-state to bring down their competitors.” Some people he knew considered being on Forbes’s annual list of the richest people in China a curse. “The people on that list, for several years in a row, within a year or two of appearing, would be the target of some kind of criminal investigation or they’d be brought down in a corruption scandal,” he said.

In Vancouver, Weymi mentioned the pervasiveness of such anxieties: “Some of my relatives in Shanghai who are officials—all clean ones, of course—have told me stories about their friends who are fretting about the recent corruption crackdown. In China, it’s not just about what you did but what your network of relationships is.”

This is the first time that China’s rich have sought to emigrate in significant numbers. For thousands of years, the ruling class was proudly isolationist. “People now refer to China as an emerging economy, but it was the world’s dominant economy for two millennia, until 1810,” Shamus Khan, a sociology professor at Columbia who specializes in élites, told me. “Before that, the Chinese élite were very reserved and almost snobbish in their view of foreigners. They thought of the European élite as backward people who wanted to acquire culture from China.” Westerners made hazardous journeys to obtain prized commodities—porcelain, tea, silk—from the Middle Kingdom, which considered itself the center of the world.

Only in the nineteenth century did it become evident that the West had outstripped China, especially in the field of military technology. The Opium Wars, which were fought over China’s trade imbalance with Britain, resulted in a humiliating defeat and, ultimately, the end of the Empire. “China’s first encounter with globalization led to its collapse, one from which the country has never completely recovered,” Khan said. “The emergence of a new Chinese élite is China’s second moment of encounter with these global processes, and it’s interesting how certain dimensions are reversed.”

A party followed the filming, and went on until the early hours of the morning. Ray and her boyfriend pointed out a man who they said knew everybody. He owned an Aston Martin, they said—not in itself a distinction, as they were each considering buying one, but this particular car was modelled on the one that appeared in the latest James Bond movie, and was the only one of its kind in British Columbia.

This was Paul Oei, a loquacious fifty-year-old with bristly silver hair. When I introduced myself, he immediately took a selfie of us and posted it to Instagram—his usual manner of salutation, it turned out. Then he presented me with three business cards. The first identified him as the founder and C.E.O. of Organic Eco-Centre Corp., a composting company that is also a sponsor of the show; the second as the chair of the Miss Chinese Vancouver Pageant; the third as the head of Canadian Manu Immigration & Financial Services. Manu, which Oei founded a decade ago, provides advice on immigration strategies, investments, and assimilation for Chinese nationals moving abroad. For fuerdai seeking to establish themselves in Vancouver, he is the go-to fixer and an unofficial ambassador.

Oei said that so many Chinese want to move to Vancouver that Manu has many more potential customers than it can accommodate. “They buy properties without hesitation,” he said. “It’s very cheap in comparison to, let’s say, New York, L.A., Hong Kong, or Japan. First, it’s very economical to buy properties, and then, second, these folks have so much money, they want to diversify and put it in a country that is safe.”

I asked him if the people he works with could be considered China’s one per cent. “I wouldn’t say that they are the one per cent,” Oei replied. “More like between the one and two per cent.” His clients tend to have prospered in regional manufacturing cities, whereas the very wealthiest people are from Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. “The tippy top of the pyramid have political backing or connections,” he said. “They don’t need to export the wealth.”

A few days later, Oei took me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant that had opened recently in downtown Vancouver. Bentleys and Range Rovers in the parking lot and the expansive waterfront view gave me a good idea of the clientele, as did the Peking duck, which was eighty-eight dollars. Over aromatic shiitake soup, poured from tiny clay pots, Oei expanded on the aims and the attitudes of Chinese families who decide to put down roots in Canada. Early on, they often think of it as a temporary arrangement. “When they come, in the first month or two months they want to go back,” he said. “It’s too boring in the new world.” The turning point generally comes after a year and a half. “It’s usually the children, who graduate, and they say, ‘I love Canada. This is like heaven—I don’t want to go back.’ ”

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[GeneChing]

The owner of the restaurant, Hu Yan, stopped by our table to say hello to Oei. A woman in her mid-forties, with weatherbeaten cheekbones and an efficient demeanor, she had been a successful restaurateur in the northern city of Xi’an and had come to Vancouver two years earlier. When I asked her how she had made the decision to move, she smiled and shook her head. “My husband was in Vancouver on vacation, and his buddies dragged him to a few open houses,” she said. “The next thing I know, we are signing the deed to property in the city.” Even though it was an expensive purchase, she didn’t feel that she was making a commitment to the city. It just seemed like insurance against the vagaries of the Chinese economy.

What made her think about staying was her eleven-year-old son. She told me that he was currently in L.A. for a junior golf tournament and that she was making plans to gradually move East for him. With some pride, Hu explained her plan to open restaurants in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and, ultimately, New York. I asked her why New York, and she looked at me with surprise. “For my son, of course. The Northeast is where all the best universities are, and that’s where he’ll be living one day.”

Hu’s priorities are typical of her generation, China’s first wave of entrepreneurs. Having amassed vast amounts of capital in the transition to a market economy, they can afford to bring up their children in a new atmosphere of privilege, and the legacy of the one-child policy gives the beam of parental expectation an especially tight focus. Furthermore, the memory of poverty and backwardness is ever-present in the collective consciousness. I remembered something Ray had told me: “The poorer your parents were when they were young, the more they want a better environment for their kids.” The desire to have a Western-educated child is spurred by considerations of prestige as much as by practicalities. Also relevant is Oei’s observation that his clients aren’t the richest or the best-connected people in China; they want their children to have access to the cultural and political capital that is unavailable to them. Underpinning the discussion of fuerdai in China is a national apprehension about the future élite of a country that is just coming of age.

While in Vancouver, I met up with Andy Yan, an urban planner who has done extensive studies of the city’s real-estate market. We drove out to West Point Grey, one of the most expensive areas, which overlooks an inlet. (In general, the most desirable real estate is in the west, toward the ocean, and the influx of international money has pushed longtime residents inland.) It was a bright, cool afternoon, and, as we drove down block after leafy block, the only other vehicles we saw were maintenance trucks. “It feels a little like a movie set,” Yan said. The houses we passed, palatial properties with views of the water, represented a cut-and-paste approach to Old World European glamour: there were French windows flanked by Corinthian pillars and topped by Tudor roofs. Yan pointed out the lion statues that stood beside many of the security gates: “That’s a dead giveaway the owner is Chinese.”

Yan was born in Vancouver and his family has been in Canada for nearly a century. He studied urban planning at U.C.L.A. and then got a job in the office of the prominent architect Bing Thom—a Vancouver native whose family is originally from Hong Kong—monitoring the impact of the city’s property boom. In a recent study, Yan found that about seventy per cent of the single-family homes sold in three high-end west-side neighborhoods were bought by Chinese. Many occupants of these properties described themselves as housewives or students—twenty-seven per cent of the respondents in homes with an average value of $3.05 million. The finding led Yan to speak of so-called “astronaut” family arrangements. The home buyer, typically the husband, lives and works in Asia, where cash can be made fast, while establishing his family members in Canada in order to move the money to a place of social and political stability. Yan has coined the term “hedge city” for places like Vancouver: they are a hedge against volatility at home.


“You know, this isn’t helping convince people you’re not a witch.”

In the past six years, the value of single-family homes in Vancouver has risen seventy-five per cent, to an average of $1.9 million. At the same time, the median household income has barely budged. The disparity is not lost on locals. Last year, an indignant twenty-nine-year-old woman tweeted a selfie with the hashtag #don’thave1million. Hundreds of other Vancouver residents followed suit.

David Eby, who represents Vancouver-Point Grey in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, told me that he recently met with the district’s residents’ association. “All the talk was about mainland money. There is a lot of anxiety, and a sense that mainland buyers purchase houses but don’t contribute to the community or take part in it.”

Under pressure, the mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson, has proposed a tax on luxury homes and a tax on income from property speculation. He has recommended raising the tax on vacant investment properties and called for “far better tracking” of international investment and absentee owners. But it seems unlikely that such measures will be implemented. As prices have risen, ordinary Canadians have found that their homes represent more and more of their net worth. Many people in the federal government, including the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, have advocated caution when it comes to steps that would depress property values. Besides, rich international buyers mean higher tax revenues. “The state is addicted to the revenue,” Eby told me.

I asked Bing Thom about the changes. The property boom has, of course, been good for the architectural profession, but Thom, who is now in his early seventies, is troubled by what is happening to his home town. “By all accounts, I have done pretty well in my business, but I made more money from sitting on my Vancouver property than I made by working an entire lifetime,” he said. “That tells you something.”

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[GeneChing]

Thom was alarmed that consumption has effectively replaced production as Vancouver’s growth industry. “The city has become a hotel,” he said. He was opposed to what he called “selling citizenships”—the practice whereby countries including Canada and the U.S. grant residency in exchange for investment. “I think any country should be against that, because you’re not buying the best people,” Thom said. “They don’t invest in their country. There’s no belonging. But it’s a worldwide trend. It’s happening in England. It’s happening in France. It’s happening in Australia. Everywhere.”

There is a common conception that the fuerdai are being groomed to inherit their parents’ businesses, but this isn’t necessarily the case. One of the women on the show told me, “My daddy doesn’t want me to kill the company he has worked so hard to build. He told me, ‘If you don’t have the ability to take over, it’s better for you to collect a monthly income and give the reins to someone else.’ ” Parents often provide their children with money to start a small venture, to test their business acumen. Weymi’s parents promised her half a million dollars to launch a bilingual luxury-life-style magazine, which will be distributed free at high-end stores, in order to foster a sense of exclusivity. “I don’t plan on making a huge fortune from it,” Weymi said. “But my friends all agree: this project is so Weymi.” Ray’s boyfriend, who has yet to graduate from college, is going to open a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant in downtown Vancouver, with a sizable parental stake. “I plan to have menus on iPads, and there will be a video-game component to the ordering,” he told me.

Of all the women I met from the show, the only one who had a job was Pam, who was cheerfully squeezing three gigs into seventy-hour workweeks. She was a producer on the show, worked at a Vancouver auction house owned by an uncle, and ran her own modelling agency. One morning, I accompanied her as she flitted from one job to the next. We met in a clothing store with a makeshift runway, where she’d been casting models for an upcoming charity event, and then took a car to the auction house. She clearly enjoyed this kind of juggling. “Doing a nine-to-five, it’s too boring, and you don’t get to meet people,” she said, laughing. “My biggest flaw is that I have trouble finishing boring tasks.” She cited a Chinese proverb about beginning with the ferocity of a tiger and ending with the anticlimax of a snake’s tail.

Pam is uncommonly energetic. Her speech, alternating between slangy English and proverb-laden Mandarin, puts one in mind of a human split screen. She came to Vancouver, from Harbin, to attend middle school. By the age of fifteen, she was renting a place of her own. She told me, “If I had stayed in China, I think I would have been very sheltered. Being so far away from my family has made me more appreciative of their sacrifices.” Pam recalled a moment in college when she was waiting for a fifteen-thousand-dollar wire transfer to arrive. After a few days, she called her mother, who said that there were some minor bank clearance issues. Later, a relative revealed that her mother’s business had been close to bankruptcy. “It was, like, the first real moment when I saw how far my mom was willing to go to spare me the worry. It made me shudder to think how careless I’d been.”

We pulled into a strip mall and parked in front of a sign that read “VANDERFUL AUCTION INC.”—a pun on “wonderful” and “Vancouver.” Pam led me into a display room filled with brush-and-ink landscape paintings, porcelain horse statues, and intricately carved rosewood tea tables. She is the firm’s marketing director and, as the sole English speaker in the business, had spent the past two months translating the auction catalogue from Chinese. On a tour of the warehouse, Pam pointed at a small curved bamboo plank in a glass vitrine, which she said was for calligraphers to rest their arms on. “What do you call this?” she whispered, and then said sheepishly that she had ended up rendering it in English as “Elbow Lifter.” “This business of translation,” she sighed. “It’s harder than people realize, and there isn’t the vocabulary in English for everything.”

The lament was one I heard often in Vancouver, and it seemed to express something about the dislocation that comes with an enviable international existence. As we paused before an exquisite Qing-dynasty armoire, I asked Pam if she ever thought about working in China. As she considered the question, she ran her fingers over a phoenix carved on the cabinet’s front panel.


“The thing is, I’m not sure I’d fully fit in there now,” she said slowly. “I lack my parents’ Chinese business know-how. Westerners are all about being straightforward and direct. But, when you negotiate a deal in China, it’s all about what’s unsaid, simultaneously hiding and hinting at what you really want. In China, I’m treated like a naïve child, and sometimes I feel like an alien.” Pam and many of her friends, having emigrated in their teens, exist between two cultures. Canadians, and the West generally, could be inscrutable. The cultural capital that their parents had hoped would be theirs was elusive. But having been away from China during years of dizzyingly rapid change made them foreigners there, too.

Weymi and I had dinner one night. For once, she was dressed casually—a knee-length wool cardigan, sensible flats, no makeup—and we headed to a no-frills Chinese restaurant called Little Szechuan, in Richmond, an enclave of Canadian-born Chinese, not unlike Flushing, Queens. As Weymi drove, I asked whether she preferred Vancouver to Asia, and she said she did. She tapped the steering wheel and said, “It’s like this: when I am driving here and need to make a turn, I turn on my signal light and do it. It’s the most normal thing in the world. When I first drove in Asia, I flashed my signal and immediately people, instead of slowing down, all sped up to cut me off. It was so maddening, and then, after a little while, I became like everyone else. I never signal when I turn in Asia. I just do it. You don’t have a choice.”

Little Szechuan was bigger than its name suggested. Almost everyone there was Chinese, and Weymi waved to a table of rowdy young men as we entered. “In this town, everyone knows each other,” she said absently. After we ordered, she asked, “Do you want to see my pic with Justin Trudeau?” She scrolled through her phone. “He wasn’t the Prime Minister then, and I just asked him for a photo. I like Justin. I like most Canadian politicians, actually.” But she said that Westerners were too liberal on issues like marijuana and the death penalty. (China executes more people than any other country, more than a thousand people each year.)

As we ate, the conversation turned to inequality, and the extent to which it is visible in China and Canada. “Have you been to East Hastings?” she asked, referring to a neighborhood that contains Vancouver’s equivalent of Skid Row and is bordered by fashionable bars and million-dollar condos. “That’s where you see it the most. But for the most part everyone’s life is O.K. here.” She paused. “A lot better than in China, at least.” She recalled a visit to Shanghai when she had strayed into a shantytown of migrant workers from the Chinese countryside, and then spoke of the impoverished rural region of Yunnan, in southern China, from which her mother came. “When I was little, my mom would tell me stories about how poor they were,” she said. “It was a kind of poverty that makes you fearful the rest of your life.” Weymi’s grandmother and aunt took in laundry to make a living. “She didn’t want to be like her mom or older sister, always gossiping about those in the village a smidgen better off than themselves.” Weymi put down her chopsticks. “It’s that kind of typical provincial pettiness, but that was her entire life if she had stayed.” She shook her head and drew a breath. “I mean, can you just imagine?” ♦

Ah the good ol' New Yorker - still the master of long form journalism.

[GeneChing]

Tuhao, fuerdai, parachute kids...I should just change this thread title to "New Chinese Terminology"

Sentenced to prison for assault, teenage 'parachute kids' deliver warning to adults in China


Yunyao Zhai steps into court for sentencing hearing. Zhai is one of three high school students from China that were sentenced for their roles in the kidnapping and assault of another Chinese teenager. Yunyao "Helen" Zhai was sentenced to 13 years in prison. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
Cindy Chang

Xinlei “John” Zhang was 15 when he moved to Southern California to get an American education.

He lived in a private boarding house for teens like himself, so-called “parachute kids” studying at U.S. high schools while their parents stayed behind in China. He fell in with the wrong crowd.

On Wednesday, Zhang, now 19, was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in brutal gang attacks against two fellow parachute kids.

Two other students from China stripped one victim naked, kicked her with high-heeled shoes, slapped her and burned her with cigarettes. They were sentenced to 10 years and 13 years, under a plea agreement with prosecutors that was approved by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Thomas C. Falls.

In statements Wednesday, the defendants and their families urged Chinese parents to think carefully before sending their children to the U.S without supervision. The case has attracted widespread attention in China, where studying abroad at increasingly young ages has become fashionable among the middle-class as well as the rich.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Falls struggled to control the mass of reporters and photographers — mostly from Chinese-language media — seeking to document the proceedings.

Falls did not comment on the case, but at an earlier hearing, he said it reminded him of “Lord of the Flies,” William Golding's 1954 novel about boys stranded on a deserted island without grownups.

“This is a wakeup call for the ‘parachute kid syndrome,’” said one defendant, Yuhan “Coco” Yang, in a statement read to the judge by her attorney. “Parents in China are well-meaning and send their kids thousands of miles away with no supervision and too much freedom. That is a formula for disaster.”

Yang, 19, shielded her face from the cameras with her long, straight hair as her attorney spoke. She received a 10-year sentence for kidnapping and assault, as well as inflicting great bodily injury, in a March 30, 2015, attack in a Rowland Heights park against a then-18-year-old girl who was also from China.

The three defendants, who have been in county jail for almost a year since the attacks, will receive credit for time served. They each pleaded no contest to the charges before Falls sentenced them to the terms agreed upon in the deal with prosecutors.

In their statements, each apologized to the victims. Assistant Dist. Atty. Casey Jarvis said he spoke at length to one victim, who said she forgave her attacker.

“She’s a happy person, and that was taken from her repeatedly. But somehow, she was able to find forgiveness,” Jarvis told the judge.

Zhang received a lighter sentence than the two women because of his lesser role, the judge said.

According to preliminary hearing testimony, Zhang was present during the assaults but did not directly participate other than fetching a pair of scissors that the others used to cut off the victim’s hair in the March 30 attack. They then forced her to eat the hair.

In juvenile court, two other teenagers have admitted to assault in one or both incidents. Authorities believe that additional teens involved in the incidents have fled the country.

A 20-year-old man, Zheng Lu, was arrested in December on charges related to the attacks.

Yunyao “Helen” Zhai, 19, avoided the cameras by putting some papers over her face as her attorney read a statement she had written in jail. Accused by the other defendants of being the ringleader, she was sentenced to 13 years for kidnapping and assault in two attacks and inflicting great bodily injury in one of the attacks.

She is not a bad person, she wrote, but she realizes that she has attracted worldwide opprobrium for her actions.

“I’ve heard that I’m hated here and in China, and I probably deserve to be viewed that way,” the statement said.

Living alone in Southern California, she got caught up in a culture of materialism — the latest iPhone and pretty dress — but she now realizes she “owes everything” to her parents, she wrote.

“They sent me to the U.S. for a better life and a fuller education,” Zhai said in the statement.

“Along with that came a lot of freedom, in fact too much freedom … Here, I became lonely and lost. I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t want them to worry about me.”

Outside the courtroom before the sentencing hearing, Zhang’s father spoke to reporters in Mandarin.

He and his wife have traveled from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen more than a half-dozen times for their son’s court appearances, even though they don’t speak English and can’t understand the proceedings.

The elder Zhang, who would not give his first name, grew up in Anhui Province and moved to Shenzhen as a young man, first working as a laborer and eventually starting a small manufacturing business.

He thought that sending his son to the U.S. would be a step up for the next generation. Through a middleman, he arranged for a “homestay” with a Mexican American family — about $1,500 a month for room and board.


Xinlei "John" Zhang was sentenced to six years for his role in the in the kidnapping and assault of another Chinese teenager. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The son first attended a Christian high school before transferring to Oxford School, a cluster of portable classrooms tucked away in the back of a Rowland Heights strip mall. The athletic facilities are minimal: three worn basketball hoops, a volleyball net and a soccer goal on a small patch of parched grass.

For about $13,000 a year, the teenager took classes with other international students, mostly from China. Since all his friends were Chinese, he didn’t pick up much English, his father said.

The elder Zhang cautioned Chinese parents not to send their children abroad at such a young age.

“If he’d never left my side, that would have been better,” Zhang said.

cindy.chang@latimes.com

[GeneChing]

These Are the Super-Rich People Shaping China
COMMENTARY by Matthias Stepan, Lea Shih MARCH 3, 2016, 8:00 PM EST


Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba
Photograph by ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images

In this Communist state, it was rare to see private entrepreneurs influence public policies.

At the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress that begins Saturday, one group clearly stands out – the 114 of the nearly 3,000 delegates of the National People’s Congress (NPC) that are on the Hurun list of richest Chinese. China’s richest people account for close to 4% of the members of the body that officially acts as China’s national legislature. This high level of representation is at least somewhat ironic in a nation that still follows Communist doctrine.

But in a departure from the past, China’s most successful — and obviously well connected — private entrepreneurs aren’t just there for the prestige or to show off. They want to influence policymaking.

As things stand, for the first time in the history of the People’s Republic, private entrepreneurs are actively involved in the preparation of a five-year plan. That is a remarkable vote of confidence by the country’s leadership in the importance of the private sector — and at the same time an important admission on the part of the government. The basic message is this: We need you because you have a head start!

This is an important development, even though Xi Jinping’s core focus in his reform policies clearly rests on strengthening increasingly feeble state owned enterprises, giving them preferred access to capital and urging them to undertake mega-mergers.

However, the privately owned companies operating in China’s advanced services and technology sectors realize that their hand has been strengthened greatly. They know that they are China’s main engines of growth in a period of economic transition, which gives them considerable power.

Consider the case of the founder of the IT company Tencent, Pony Ma, who has an estimated fortune of $18.8 billion. Ahead of last year’s annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the 44-year-old wrote an open letter demanding a national strategy for China to advance the digitization of the economy. A few days later, Prime Minister Li Keqiang, as part of his report on the government’s plans and activities, announced the launch of an “Internet Plus” strategy.

Insiders immediately realized who had coined that term. It was none other than Pony Ma, who had started to use that phrase beginning in 2013, based on the concepts developed by his company’s own research institute. Even though Ma is not a member of the CPC, the “paternity” of the “Internet Plus” is undeniable. Officially, of course, his company denied any involvement in the government report.

When the National People’s Congress will pass the new five-year plan in the upcoming session, it will likely also feature the recommendations of Jack Ma’s private think tank, Ali Research, to promote Big Data as an important source of economic growth. Jack Ma, 52, is the second richest Chinese and head of the Internet company Alibaba BABA 2.03% . As is the case with Tencent, he established a private think tank, in 2007, to develop relevant policy recommendations.

While both of these think tanks were primarily established to deal with issues of Internet governance and legislation on issues of the Internet, their activities also much include broader matters of economic and industrial policy. Other entrepreneurs have been following in the two Mas footsteps. Lei Jun, the 46-year-old founder of Xiaomi, the successful smartphone maker, recently advocated for a revision of China’s Company Law.

Meanwhile, the 47-year-old multi-billionaire Robin Li turn, CEO of Baidu, the web services company, is suggesting the creation of a national platform for artificial intelligence research to the National People’s Congress. And Fosun, the largest privately owned conglomerate and investment company in China, presented a national development strategy for healthcare in advance of this year’s NPC session.

To date, Chinese private entrepreneurs are not an autonomously organized group that challenges the primacy of China’s Communist Party. But they are nevertheless gaining considerable influence. Their technological know-how is very much in demand, as are their state-of-the-art business models and strategies. This provides them with a lot of clout vis-à-vis the government and Communist Party policymakers in general. Not least for that reason, the number of private research institutes has continued to rise ever since Xi Jinping took office. Although these new outfits have less direct access to decision makers than pro-government think tanks, they are much better equipped financially and also better connected globally.

Reflecting the top entrepreneurs’ rise in the Chinese political landscape, President Xi Jinping increasingly takes them along on his trips abroad, both to showcase their (and hence China’s) success and to provide these private entrepreneurs with more global growth opportunities.

Xi is keenly aware that these top companies’ and entrepreneurs’ continued success at home and abroad will be a critical factor in determining whether or not the economic transformation strategy which the leadership has launched will succeed.

Many IT entrepreneurs also appreciate their government’s political support for global expansion. The Communist Party “China Dream” evidently also includes more internationally successful company modeled after Alibaba.

How far will this process of mutual enchantment between the CPC leadership and the Internet entrepreneurs go? Alibaba founder Jack Ma probably put it best, when he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2015: “We want to enchant the government, but we don’t want to marry it.”

Matthias Stepan is head of Chinese Domestic Politics Program at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin, Germany. Lea Shih is a research associate at MERICS.

More on Jack Ma in our Jet-Li-s-TaijiZen-International-Cultural-Development-Company thread.

[GeneChing]

These Are China’s Youngest Billionaires China Tech
March 2, 2016


After inheriting a fortune from her father, the 19-year-old Alexandra Andresen has been named the youngest billionaire on the globe by the Forbes World’s Billionaire List. Forbes has got Weibo talking about money. The teenage girl Alexandra Andresen from Norway is worth an estimated 1.2 billion US$ according to the Forbes billionaires list. The young rich woman became trending on China’s social media site Sina Weibo under the title of ’19-year-old girl becomes world’s youngest multi-millioniare’ (19岁少女成世界最年轻亿万富翁). In light of this news, What’s on Weibo explores who the richest ‘kids’ of mainland China are: a top 10 of China’s youngest billionaires, according to Forbes’ World’s Billionaires.

No. 1 – Wang Han (王瀚, 28 years old):



At just 28 years, Wang Han became one of the world’s youngest billionaires – he is number 7 in the international top 10. Wang became a billionaire after inheriting shares in regional airline Juneyao Air (吉祥航空有限公司) from his late father Wang Junyao (王均瑶), who was the founder. According to Forbes, Wang Han owns 27% of the airline and 14% of department store Wuxi Commercial Mansion Grand Orient (无锡商业大厦大东方股份有限公司). The Juneyao Group also has businesses in the education and food sector. They are also active on social media; Juneyao also has a rather large fanbase on its Weibo account.

No. 2 – Wang Yue (王悦, 32 years old): 1.1 billion US$



Wang Yue is a newcomer to the list of the world’s youngest billionaires, according to Forbes 2016. He is called China’s “web game billionaire”. Wang earned a fortune being an online and mobile game entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Shanghai Kingnet Technology (上海恺英网络科技有限公司), better known as Kingnet (恺英网络).

No. 3 – Cheng Wei (程维, 33 years old): 1 billion US$



Cheng Wei (程维, 1983) is CEO of China’s Uber rival Didi Kuaidi (滴滴快滴), a transportation company which was formed in early 2015 as a merge of Cheng’s company Didi Dache and Alibaba’s Kuaidi Dache. Previous to starting his own company, Cheng worked for Alibaba for 8 years and became vice president for Alibaba’s online payment service Alipay. Cheng has a verified Weibo account, but he has not posted much since his rise to fame.


No. 4 – Yang Huiyan (杨惠妍, 34 years old): 4.9 billion US$



Born in 1981, Yang Huiyan from Guangdong’s Foshan is one of the world’s richest women. She became the largest shareholder of real estate developer Country Garden Holdings (碧桂园集团) after her father transferred his holdings to her when she was just 25 years old (also see the featured image). According to its official website, Country Gardens is “a company constantly fighting for the development of a harmonious society.”

No. 5 – Frank Wang Tao (汪滔, 35 years old): 3.6 billion US$



Wang Tao, also known in English as Frank Tao or Frank Wang, is the founder and CEO of Shenzhen-based DJI, the world’s largest supplier of civilian drones. Forbes describes him as “the world’s first drone billionaire”. Headquartered in China’s “Silicon Valley” Shenzhen, DJI started as a single small office in 2006, and has now turned into to a global workforce of over 3,000. Their offices can be found in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Beijing and Hong Kong (dji.com).

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[GeneChing]

No. 6 – Zhang Bangxin (张邦鑫, 35 years old): 1.01 billion US$



Who ever thought after school tutoring could make you rich? Zhang Bangxin (1980) is the cofounder, chairman and CEO of the Beijing-based educational tutoring firm TAL Education Group (世纪好未来教育科技有限公司). The company has been around since 2003, and it provides after-school tutoring for pupils from kindergarten to 12th grade at over 500 locations throughout China. Zhang is also an official Weibo microblogger, but, like his fellow billionaires in this list, he might be too busy making money to actually post on social media.

No. 7 – Cai Xiaoru (蔡小如, 36 years): 1.2 billion US$



Cai Xiaoru is chairman of Tatwah Smartech (达华智能), a company that is specialized in the research, development, manufacture and distribution of radio frequency identification (RFID). The company produces, amongst others, non-contact IC cards and electronic labels. Cai became a billionaire in mid-2015, following the fast-growing stock price of Tatwah Smartech.

No. 8 – Li Weiwei (李卫伟 aka 李逸飞, 37 years): 1.3 billion US$



For Li Weiwei, it is all work and all play. The young entrepreneur, who was born in Chengdu city, is the vice chairman of online game company Wuhu Shunrong Sanqi Interactive Entertainment Network Technology (芜湖顺荣三七互娱网络科技股份有限公司). The company is better known under the name of 37wan, a platform that offers high-quality game products. Li Weiwei is also known as Li Yifei (李逸飞).

No. 9 – Zhou Yahui (周亚辉, 39 years): 2 billion US$



Another billionaire who got rich through the gaming industry is Zhou Yahui (1977) – the CEO of Beijing Kunlun Tech (北京昆仑万維科技股份有限公司). Kunlun Tech is one of China’s biggest web game developers and operators. In January of 2016, NY Times reported that the company paid $93 million for a 60% stake of Grindr, the largest social networking app for gay men in the world. With over 2 million daily users in 196 countries, the app has proven to be a good investment for Zhou.

No. 10 – Wu Gang (吴刚, 39 years old): 1.3 billion US$



Wu Gang is co-founder and CEO of money management company Beijing Tongchuang Jiuding Investment Management (北京同创九鼎投资管理股份有限公司), better known as JDcapital (九鼎投资), “a leading investment firm with deep roots in equity investment and management”, as it describes itself.

On Weibo, some netizens have asked Norwegian billionaire Alexandra Andresen to come and visit China. With so many other billionaires, the young heiress will certainly have no reason to feel lonely at the top in China.

By Manya Koetse

Sources: *163 (2015): http://news.163.com/15/1104/14/B7J6UOEO00014AED.html *Jiangsu.China.com (2015): http://jiangsu.china.com.cn/html/jsn...2758273_2.html *Forbes.com (various pages, see in-text links) and the China Rich List sorted by age. Images: Featured: Yang Huiyan (http://blog.sina.com.cn) – http://www.ittime.com.cn/news/news_10433.shtml – http://www.eeyy.com/jinjing/2014/ – http://uk.china-info24.com/british/t...29/200775.html – http://baike.baidu.com/view/880927.htm – http://startupbeat.hkej.com/?author=12 – http://www.cyzone.cn/a/20131114/247015.html – http://money.163.com/15/1216/07/BAULIVAD00252G50.html – http://www.laonanren.com/news/2015-11/104275.htm – http://www.forbes.com/profile/zhou-yahui-1/ – http://www.gsm.pku.edu.cn

The guys all look a little nerdy. The two gals look hot, as in billionairess hot.