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.
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