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China to Make Millionaires out of Intellectuals
Tens of millions of Chinese are crazy about lottery amid eager expectations to become millionaires overnight. However, very few intellectuals are reportedly following suit, as a more practical channel has unfolded before them: to make a fortune by knowledge.
Chinese intellectuals, including scientists, have come to realize that both the government and the market encourage them to create values and make themselves rich through knowledge.
Just last month President Jiang Zemin presented to Wu Wenjun, a Chinese mathematician, and Yuan Rongping, "father of hybrid-rice," with a five-million-yuan check each as the top science and technology award for the year 2000.
According to Xie Shengming, general manager of the Wuhan Hongtao (Hearts) K Group Company, his chief engineer Zhang Tingbi, a professor of life sciences at Wuhan University, now owns more than 120 million yuan of private assets.
Xie, who is also a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), began developing one of the professor's research findings eight years ago. The private company has managed to make the invention a marketable health product. Sales of the product reached 1.2 billion yuan last year.
Prof. Zhang is only one of the emerging rich in the country. An increasing number of intellectuals, including managers and key scientific and technical personnel of listed state-owned enterprises, are becoming wealthy members of the society.
Premier Zhu Rongji's promises in his report to the NPC session have further assured the intellectuals that the government will protect their new efforts to get rich through knowledge.
The premier said the government would allow capital, technology and other elements of production to be included in income distribution, adding that the government would raise the salaries of managers and
technicians of state-owned enterprises and introduce the annual salary system on a trial basis.
In addition, officials and key technicians of listed state-owned companies will be allowed to hold stock options, the premier said.
As a matter of fact, according to a set of regulations promulgated in 1999, technology can constitute as much as 35 percent of a new company's total equity from the previous 20 percent.
Global economic competition, with high-tech as the driving force, has jolted Chinese intellectuals, who usually stand aloof from worldly affairs, to the forefront of the times and offered them an opportunity to get rich, said Zhu Zuoyan, an NPC deputy and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Of course, Premier Zhu called for tightening supervision over personal income distribution in industries of a monopoly nature and regulating social wealth distribution a bid to prevent the excessive widening of income gaps.
But the policy has been to encourage some people and some regions to get rich first. And the first proponent of the policy was none other than Deng Xiaoping, who said in the early 1980s that China should encourage part of its people to get rich first so that they will bring about prosperity to all later.
As a result of the policy, some farmers and workers made fortunes by doing business and processing, while intellectuals complained that their incomes were not even as good as street hawkers.
Many local governments adopted policies to award excellent scientists, usually with high-value prizes. But Zhu Zuoyan said government favors represent only remuneration for individual labor but have nothing to do with market economics.
A share-holding system came in vogue throughout the country in the 1990s, leading to a rapid growth of the capital market. And further reforms have gradually touched upon the property system and the wealth distribution system. Now, private property rights, including intellectual property rights, are protected by law.
The rising value of knowledge and technology has fully justified Deng Xiaoping's definition that science and technology is a primary productive force and made it possible for China to implement the strategy of revitalizing the country through science and technology.
The trend of getting rich through knowledge will further fuel the nation's enthusiasm for learning science and knowledge and prepare China to tough competition on the world market, observers say.
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