Li Qinfu, snapping his fingers to emphasize the points he was making, raced his purple Lamborghini toward what looks like the US Capitol rising above the canola fields south of Shanghai.
As he turned into the manicured grounds surrounding the domed marble building, a slightly smaller copy of Washington's own, he pointed to the pinnacle. There, instead of the original's Statue of Freedom, stands a 5.4m, three- tonne bronze likeness of himself, right hand raised as if beckoning to the future.
"It would have been too dangerous to cast the hand waving with the palm turned out," he said, referring to the gesture that is still reserved for statues of Mao Zedong (
Li, at 40 and one of China's wealthiest private businesspeople, is well aware of the suspicion with which the new super-rich are regarded here and of the symbolism of his politically inspired edifice and effigy high in the air.
While the Communist Party is publicly embracing capitalists these days, inviting them in a controversial decision last July to join the party, it is still trying to restrain the emergence of a wealthy class.
For the party, the disparity between rich and poor is potentially dangerous in a country where, according to Lu Zhiqiang, a senior government official addressing the Asian Development Bank on May 9, 70 percent of citizens feel that the growing gap threatens social stability. Bold displays of riches are rare.
Yet, try as the government might to keep capitalists from amassing huge amounts of capital, people like Li, whose money comes from printing and garment manufacturing joint ventures with a Japanese company, are beginning to blip onto the world's wealth radar screens.
There are now thousands of multimillionaires in China, and the super-rich have reached such critical mass that Forbes compiles a list, however imperfect and incomplete, of the country's wealthiest individuals. Li ranks 71st, though he asserts that his true ranking is much higher.
Last year, No. 5, a Shanghai real estate developer, stunned tycoon-thick Hong Kong by paying US$30 million for the territory's most ostentatious house, an unheard-of public show of wealth by a mainland businessman.
Li, who estimated his wealth at hundreds of millions of dollars, is also not afraid to show his money, though he steers clear of reporters in China. Besides his Lamborghini, which he said cost him about US$500,000 after paying China's exorbitant import tax, he said owns a Bentley, two Mercedes-Benzes, several BMWs and a fleet of Japanese luxury cars.
Li's Shanghai offices are like a five-star hotel occupying a three-floor glass cube atop one of the city's tallest new office towers.
A forest of bureaucratic barriers and government prejudices make the accumulation of such vast wealth difficult, even risky, for people here.
One reason is the government's fear that without restraint, the population could slip back into the stark disparity that marked China in the 1930s and 1940s, when a very few enjoyed inordinate wealth amid a sea of poverty.
The government report presented to the Asian Development Bank conference says China now has one of the world's greatest gaps between rich and poor, from one that, officially, was almost nonexistent 20 years ago.
Li lifted his hands repeatedly off the Lamborghini's small steering wheel and touched his wrists together, miming a man in handcuffs, as he listed fellow entrepreneurs who have ended up in jail.
"They all ran into trouble when their wealth grew too great," he said, adding that he had been far more careful in acquiring his riches. For example, he said he was scrupulous about separating personal from corporate assets and paid taxes in three countries: China, Japan and the US.
Li believes that the Communist Party is misguided in its effort to suppress the upper reaches of society to keep glaring social inequalities to a minimum.
"It does help social stability, but only in the short term," he said. "In the long term it will hurt China."
He suggested that a more democratic political system would be a better way to ease the social pressures, and worries that without one the slow polarization of Chinese society can spell trouble. "In a one-party country everything looks peaceful," he said, "but when there's a problem, it's a big problem."
Meanwhile, the widening gap between rich and poor is good for the economy, Li said, because it creates pressure and incentive among the masses to improve their lives. "The current problem is that there's isn't enough competition and people aren't worried," he said.
Li's own career tracks China's slow march toward a market economy.
The eldest of five children born to a farmer and raised in a tile-roofed house not far from his mock capitol, he vowed to devote his life to the Communist Party as a member of the Young Pioneers.
"We spent our days in bayonet practice," he said.
A decade later, he was fired from his job in an electric fan workshop for, he said, "advocating capitalism."
Then, in 1983, Li took advantage of sweeping economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) that allowed individuals to take over government-owned enterprises and run them as quasi-private businesses if they guaranteed the government a fixed return.
Li, then 21, promised to pay the local government US$240 a year for the right to operate a defunct textile factory.
As part of the deal he was obliged to keep all of the factory's 40-odd employees. But he could keep any profits after paying the local government its annual fee.
He started with 500 yuan in savings -- worth about US$250 at the time -- making polyester shirts and pants. He netted more than US$7,000 the first year.
By 1988 the government had ratcheted its annual rent on the business up to US$24,000, but the factory was still earning double that, so the government took it back, making him an employee.
After that, he looked outward for help. He found a Japanese partner for the factory and in 1990 formed a joint venture that began making uniforms for Japanese companies. In 1993 he and his new Japanese backers started a high-quality printing business.
Last year, after taking the Chinese side of the garment joint venture public, Li bought the local government's share for US$15 million. His capitol-inspired headquarters was built on the spot where the original factory once stood.
Li was vague about how the few million yuan he saved as contractor of the factory multiplied so much in just a few years, but says he and his businesses are debt-free.
Today Li said he owns 30 percent of a group of companies that include the biggest supplier of company uniforms to Japan and China's biggest printer of airline tickets and receipts for payments of the value-added tax, a kind of sales tax.
"It's like printing money," he said, stopping by one of the print shops to watch the machines whir.
Despite his political views, Li did not arrive at such wealth without plenty of help from government officials, though he will not name benefactors.
"In China you have to have relations with the government," Li said. When state-owned enterprises want to do something, he said, the government clears the way, but for private companies, he said, holding up his hand like a cop stopping traffic, "we still need a lot of approvals."
Li said he spends most of his time petitioning the government or entertaining officials to win permits or understand policies that frequently change and are often not made public.
Though he is not a party member, his wife is, and he is a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress. Friends said Li is being courted for membership in the National People's Congress.
"If you want to succeed you have to socialize with powerful people," he explained.
His trajectory from his humble beginnings is aimed at steering him clear of the turmoil that marked his early years. Though he travels on a Chinese passport, half of his wealth is invested abroad. His 16-year-old son lives in a Manhattan apartment near the UN with a chaperon and a chauffeur to ferry him to a private school in Scarsdale.
Said Li, "He prefers it there."
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