How to join the millionaires' club

• Source: The Global Times
• [21:10 June 07 2009]
• Comments

An advertisement featuring Li Xiaohua, China's first Ferrari owner, in Tiananmen Square.

By Xie Ying

Jamal Malik was one question away from becoming a millionaire. How did he do it? A) He cheated, B) He’s lucky, C) He’s a genius, D) It is written.

When appreciating the film Slumdog Millionaire that swept eight Oscars, many Chinese find themselves asking a similar question: what is the key to wealth?

After analyzing the top 50 rich men from the annual Hurun China Rich List for five years, Southern Metropolis Weekly reporters Qin Wang and Li Siyuan in an article “Chinese wealthy men born in poor circumstances” found that 100 of the 205 moneybags were born to a penniless family like Jamal. And, of 100 rich men, 82 were born in the 1950s-1960s.

Li Xiaohua, the first Chinese to buy a Ferrari, was in the 100-person list. In 1951, Li was born to a poor Beijing family. His father was a worker at an illumination factory, and his mother was a housewife. His six-member family packed into a 7-square-meter room without a window.

Li’s family is not so unusual. “A poor family at that time was always big,” the Southern Metropolis Weekly article pointed out.

Different from the one-child era, China was encouraging mothers to have more children during 1950s-1960s in order to increase manpower for construction of New China.

Zhang Yin

It’s not surprising that one family at that time had more than five members, even around ten. Zhang Yin, the second-richest Chinese woman in 2008, was from a family that had eight children altogether.

Even Huang Guangyu born at the end of the 1960s has two sisters and a brother. The richest man in 2008 Hurun China Rich List was born in a village of 300 people in Guangdong Province. Huang’s was the poorest family in the village. The whole family lived on about ten yuan ($1.49) a month and were often short of food and money.

Poorly fed and dressed, people of this era “have a larger hope to walk out of poverty” compared with those in other eras, according to Southern Metropolis Weekly.

That might explain why Huang’s mother borrowed money from a loan shark to support his decision to make a living away from home.

In the mid ’80s, 17-year-old Huang went north to Inner Mongolia with 4,000 yuan to do business and then switched to Beijing one year later, where he opened an electric appliance shop.

That shop was the original “Gome”, and developed into China’s largest chain retail stores of home appliances.

Like his family that embodied features of the 1960s era, Huang’s own character and route to wealth embodied the ’80s when China was still suffering from poor material conditions and a critical shortage of commodities. When Huang earned his first bucket of gold, nearly all consumer goods were a seller’s market in China, especially the home appliance market then occupied by foreign brands.