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This article will introduce the current wealthiest man in China. Due to the specialty of China’s market, there are quite a lot of differences between the richest man in china and others around the world, which may be useful to understand the market further.

Short Biography of Wang JianLin The Richest Man in China

Wang Jianlin, the richest man in china, is a businessman and philanthropist. He serves as the Chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, China’s largest real estate developer, as well as the world’s largest movie theater operator. Wang Jianlin saw his fortune soar by 17 billion dollars last year, more than the GDP of Iceland said Monday Forbes magazine. He dethroned Jack Ma, the iconic founder of the Chinese giant of online commerce Alibaba. At the beginning of the year, the billionaire bought, for 1.05 billion, Swiss-based sports marketing firm Infront, headed by a nephew of the suspended FIFA boss Joseph Blatter and responsibilities include marketing the broadcasting rights of the Football World Cup. He then grabbed a 20% share of the Spanish football club Atletico Madrid. He was known in 2012 for acquiring the chain of American cinemas AMC Entertainment for $ 2.6 billion.

Overview of the richest man’s life experience

Wang Jianlin was born in October 24, 1954, in Sichuan, China. His father fought for Chairman Mao’s People’s Liberation Army during the Long March, which led to classifying WangJianlin as a member of the group of politically connected offspring. Wang Jianlin was appointed Office Director of the Xigang District Government in Dalian in 1970. He has served as Chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group since 1989.

Wang Jianlin has previously served as a deputy to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. He was also a member of the 11th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Standing Committee and has also served as a vice chair of the 11th Congress of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He currently serves as vice chair of the China Charity Confederation; vice chair of the China Folk Chamber of Commerce; vice chair of the China Enterprise Confederation and the China Enterprise Directors Association as well as vice chair of the China General Chamber of Commerce.

Wang Jianlin has been honored with several awards for outstanding achievements in business management and corporate social responsibility. Mr. Wang has twice been recognized as CCTV’s Chinese Economic Person of the Year, both in 2008 and 2012. He has also received three China Charity Awards from the Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2005, 2008 and 2013. In 2013, he was awarded the title of Honorary President of the China Charity Federation. He was awarded Outstanding Individual for Poverty Alleviation by the State Council in 2014. He was recognized as Asia’s richest man by Bloomberg in April 2015, and mainland China’s wealthiest individual by Forbes in 2015.

Source: deadline.com/

Ambitions and Family Background

For Mr Wang, it is all a far cry from his youth in the People’s Liberation Army when, in his own words, he had to “scramble to eat”. “The hardship then was unimaginable,” he said. The eldest of five brothers in Sichuan province, Mr Wang was the son of a Red Army hero. After serving in the New Fourth Army, one of the two main Communist forces during “liberation”, his father rose up to become a senior official in the Sichuan province, the deputy director of the Organization department, the Communist party’s HR division, and then the vice chairman of the Tibetan government according to China’s Entrepreneur magazine. When Mr Wang decided to join up, his father was able to pull strings for him.

“I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier. Back then you needed connections to get into the PLA or I wouldn’t have been able to join at the age of just 15,” he said in an interview in 2009 that was later collected into a book. The contrast between his parents’ revolutionary Communism and his new status as China’s richest man has tickled some observers. “I’m not sure if everyone knows that Jianlin’s father is a Red Army veteran,” said Liu Chuanzhi, the head of the computer company Lenovo, when handing Mr Wang an award in 2010. “The Red Army wanted to subvert the rich entirely. Now his son has become the richest of people. I would like to ask how you and your father talk at home. Does he detest you or like you?” Mr Wang, stunned, answered that when China moved to a market economy, his parents, along with many revolutionary cadres, were “slowly disregarded”. “The cadre retirement home they originally lived in was not very nice. At the same time, Dad was getting old. I prepared a better home for him, prepared a driver for him. Life was better. So later I asked my parents which is better: relying on the institution or relying on your son? They said it themselves: relying on their son was better. Although their goal in the past was to undermine the rich, now they wholly feel having money is better than not having it,” he said.

When the Chinese army was slimmed down in the mid 1980s, Mr Wang was decommissioned. “My dream at first was to be a soldier, but I was among the million who were disarmed, so I went to do business,” he said earlier this month.

His dreams of being a General dashed, he joined the local government in the northern city of Dalian. But the life of a government official was also not for him. “If I had stayed on in that, I would be a district mayor or vice mayor of the city now. That is not interesting to me,” he once told the Beijing News. Moving into his mother-in-law’s house, he took a job at a debt-ridden property developer and quickly became the general manager, changing the company’s name. From there, he scrapped for property deals and endeared himself to local government officials by promising that he could complete his projects remarkably rapidly – within 18 months – so that officials could reap the political dividends before the promotion cycle took them onwards.

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