Rises & Falls of Some Millionaires in China, People's Comment

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, July 09, 2003

Rises & Falls of Some Millionaires in China, People's Comment

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Zhou Zhengyi, the so-called "richest man in Shanghai" who shuttled to and fro between Shanghai and Hong Kong for business, came a cropper in his fortune seeking when news spreading out that he was under investigation for suspected financial misconducts. This reminds us of some other millionaires like Mou Qizhong, Liu Xiaoqing and Yang Bin, who were once on the glorious Forbes richest people list but later ended up in failure with fame broken and even sentenced to years of imprisonment. Is this a mere co-incidence that led to their falls?

If we dig into details we would be surprised to find that most of these "bigwigs" completed their accumulation of personal fortune in only a few years. Zhou Zhengyi for example, who emerged from an alleyway in Shanghai, opened a little restaurant featuring stewed foods by the band in 1994, but claimed a fortune of 320 million US dollars by 2002. Yang Bin, a penniless "peasant entrepreneur" in 1989, had gathered up a sum as high as RMB 4 billion by 2001 according to the Forbes estimation. And Mou Qizhong, who once howled to "level the Himalayas to ground to divert warm air-currents into China from the Indian Ocean", practically had nothing before the 1990s but already claimed an owner of 800 million yuan by the Forbes in 1994.

The Chinese soil after being opened up is brisk with vigorous opportunities, and people's mind began to change during the process of establishing and improving the socialist market economy. It is quite natural for them to seek fortune within legal and moral confinement. However, reports on overnight millionaires, which once for a time soaked the newspapers, were on the lips of people, making them follow suit. What is regretable is that many gold-rushers went against the most basic "game rule" and "moral bottom-line" during their avarice for primitive capital accumulation. Wu Zhijian, the former "richest person of Hunan Province" who was on the Forbes 2000 list, had been boasting "business based on honesty and credibility" before he was sentenced to 17 years of imprisonment on charge of contracting fraud and forgery of state documents. Mou Qizhong, who had always been good at amassing fortune out of nothing, was given a lifelong sentence because of credit letter swindle while Yang Bin is in custody for court verdict because he is under six charges involving false investment, contract fraud and forgery of financial papers. The self-styled "trillionaire" movie star Liu Xiaoqing was also found guilty of tax fraud and evasion. Actually there are also many other rich people in the country who build up their fortune depending on honest labor and lawful business.

The overnight rich "millionaires" who bounced into fame through "unspeakable means" but came to a tragic end, must have forgot an old saying "even a nobleman loves money but he has to get it by an honorable way". Today's Chinese people are no longer "afraid" of, or antagonistic to, getting rich, and always hold a respectable attitude towards the people who got rich by honorable means. But when the much-worshiped "millionaire" myths were blown up we are therefore worrying if their dishonorable ways for money seeking would be taken up by latecomers.

The dramatic shining but tragic ends of these millionaires also laid bare some corrupt practices in our society. Both their prosperity and ruin bore a symptom of the time. When we are going to consider over these cases we should never rest on subjectively their individual circumstances but must delve into the social strata of certain systems. In a word, we should continuously strengthen and improve the related social systems and mechanism built upon the socialist market economy.

By PD Online Staff Member Li Heng

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