A Chinese Donald Trump?

[kdavid]

Are there any Donald-Trumpesque Chinese out there? People who have built/managed successful (and lasting!) businesses?

Are there any well-known business gurus who have written books (in Chinese) on how to succeed in the business world, specifically in China?

[roddy]

You could take a look through this listing of books on amazon.cn and see if there's anything that suits. You'll need to ignore the ones about foreigners. Jack Ma (马云) springs to mind, not sure if he's written anything himself.

[Long Zhiren]

We may want to specify how we define successful.

IMO, Donald Trump is not successful.

His underlying philosophy has been wealth is about managing debt.

People who've followed this philosophy have basically driven the United States into its current financial crisis. Of course, the crisis is being shared with the rest of the world.

And then there is the Bill Gates way of managing a successful business by being ruthless.

Or maybe some people think American Big Oil, as suspect, as being successful business by monopoly.

Or perhaps the British Opium operations in China, other drug dealers or even Starbucks portray successful business by working with addictions.

Or perhaps one would think of casinos or of some pyramid schemes as being successful business models.

IMO, a better philosophy is cash is king. The ability to purchase things should be better limited to those who have cash on hand. Purchasing on credit causes a lot of problems. Ideally, a business should be altruistic if that were possible?

In that vein, maybe you're looking for a Chinese David Ramsey?

[jbradfor]

Are you looking for only Mainland companies, or are you interested in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well? There are many many examples of the latter.

[imron]

Jack Ma (马云) springs to mind

Shi Yuzhu (史玉柱) would be another. He's the guy responsible for Naobaijin, and he's now heavily into the online computer game business. Given that the opening up and economic reforms only started 20-30 years ago it'll be difficult to find any really long lasting successful businesses that were started by private entrepreneurs, as opposed to those spun off from former state-owned enterprises. Edited September 20, 2008 at 06:00 AM by imron
spelling mistake

[rezaf]

I don't know anything about business and stuff, I just have some questions that I think might be related to this topic. Is China a communist country? Do people have the chance to become millionaires or billionaires like Donald Trump and Bill Gates or are there some kind of limits implemented by the communist party? What are those limits?

Edited September 19, 2008 at 02:24 PM by rezaf
spelling

[Outofin]

^^^

These are very strange questions from Shanghai. Just look out your window. I’ve heard people call China “state capitalism”, and the US “socialist” after recent bail-outs.

[rezaf]

Well Shanghai is an exception. I have seen rich people here but I have never heard of billionaires in China and also I went to a language school in London where there were many students from all over the world (and btw we had all kinds of small celebrities like singers and football players.) There were many Taiwanese students but I didn't see anyone from China which gave me the idea that Chinese students can't afford it. I know that it is not enough for making a general judgment, that's why I am asking.

[yonglin]

Actually, there are 108 dollar billionaires on the Chinese Mainland (see here). This is excluding Hong Kong, which has 21 on its own.

For a more exhaustive list, consider this.

I don't know about rezaf's observations, but there is a very high number (not necessarily proportion) of wealthy people on the Chinese mainland. Moreover, the presence of their kids in American/Canadian/British/Australian universities is very high.

[rezaf]

Well judging by the population of China it was strange that in a language school full of people from wherever you can think of there were no(or at least very few) Chinese students. OK if people have the chance to become that rich then doesn't it cause any problems for the government in controlling the economy?

[Outofin]

OK if people have the chance to become that rich then doesn't it cause any problems for the government in controlling the economy?

That would happen in command (or planned) economies. In market economies, governments controls the economy mainly by financial means, the banking systems. No matter how rich they are, they're chickens under the power of central banks.