The image of tiny bound feet stepping gingerly across rough countryside is etched into the memory of Yin Mingshan, one of China's richest men. The feet, a sign of nobility in old China, belong to his mother, and as the recollections from half a century ago gain shape and color, Yin little by little remembers being a shivering 12-year-old boy thrown into a hostile world.
The Communists had just seized power, and in the city of Chongqing they were channeling all their restless zeal into land reform, a euphemism for merciless war on the former ruling classes.
"They chased my mother and me from our home, took away everything we owned, and sent us packing with just what we could carry on our backs -- a pair of chopsticks, a bowl, five pounds of rice," he said.
ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA
Today, aged 67, Yin exudes power and influence as he sits in his dark suit in a spacious office overlooking the sprawling factory compound of motorbike-making conglomerate Lifan Group in suburban Chongqing.
But the self-professed great talker is at a loss for words when he tries to explain how you can be pushed so far that you are almost happy your father is dead. His wealth was why the family was singled out as class enemies.
"If he had still been alive at the time, we would have been in even deeper trouble," Yin said quietly.
Yin survived the first years after being expelled from his old home by selling needles and thread in the marketplace. He couldn't have known it at the time, but the harsh lessons he learnt then were to help him become the main character in one of modern China's most remarkable rags-to-riches stories.
On the annual Forbes list of wealthy Chinese, he is one of 136 yuan billionaires who made fortunes as China embraced capitalism and opened up its vast economic potential. First, however, he had to spend the best years of his life -- the time when others launch careers and start families -- languishing in confinement.
`NEVER LOSE FAITH'
In the mid-1950s Yin was jailed for nine-and-a-half months for being too honest about what he thought of Chine Communist Party (CCP) rule. That was to be the start of a 22-year odyssey through China's labor camp system.
"My biggest lesson from those years was never to lose faith in life, never to lose faith in the future of China," he said.
Yin did not even begin to escape from his position as a persona non grata until after CCP founder Mao Zedong (毛澤東) died in 1976, and class background gradually mattered less when picking the winners and losers in society.
His professional career got a late start, but knowing that time was limited may have added intensity to his efforts. He spent the next quarter century in a frantic effort to do as much as possible.
After a stint in publishing, he set up motorbike maker Lifan Group in 1992 with capital of 200,000 yuan (US$24,000) and a staff of just nine. Since then the group has grown beyond anyone's expectations, not least those of skeptical relatives, and today it employs 8,000 people and has annual turnover of 5.9 billion yuan.
Hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian lives have changed as a result. Everyone from Indonesian police officers to Vietnamese teens ride Lifan motorcycles. Yin's fortunes, too, have been transformed beyond recognition. His worth has risen to 1.1 billion yuan.
One of Yin's most headline-grabbing deals, in 2000, was to buy the local football team and rename it Chongqing Lifan.
"We made motorbikes for eight years, and no one had heard about us. After we bought the football team, everyone knew us immediately," he said.
Several years past normal retirement age in China, he is planning his next venture with the vigor of a newly-hatched business school graduate. The future belongs to the car, he argues, as he prepares to copy the success of Japanese motorbike makers such as Suzuki and Honda, which moved into auto manufacturing.
"Motorbikes can carry two people, cars four. So a motorbike is half a car, and motorbike manufacturers can naturally do well in car production," he said.
Some 600 workers stand ready to build the Lifan 520 sedan at a 900 million yuan facility on the outskirts of Chongqing. They are waiting for approval from authorities wary of giving the go-ahead for anything because of concerns about an overheating economy.
But two decades in labor camps taught Yin to balance patience with quiet optimism.
"Probably in two months or so we'll get the green light. And we'll definitely be up an running by the end of the year."
"PURE GOLD FEARS NO FIRE'
As he sits, tall and skinny, with horn-rimmed glasses, and rattles off auto-industry statistics, Yin looks like a philosophically inclined professor of, say, economics.
Citing America's founding fathers, expounding complex social science concepts, or humming the theme of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's symphony From the New World, Yin shows he is steeped in world culture.
He is a living representative of old China's well-educated upper classes, thought by many to have been erased from history after the Communist takeover, but now staging a quiet renaissance and claiming back their rights.
Yin has inherited the didactic inclinations of China's old rulers, a Confucian approach of relying on moral suasion to get people to do the right thing. His hobbies include coining new mottos, which are reproduced on huge posters and pasted around the factory area. "Pure gold fears no fire," is among his favorites.
Yin values the loyalty of his workers, perhaps because he carries with him a dark personal history of betrayal. He knows from bitter experience how politics can smash families.
His elder brother was a hardline party member who fought the Americans in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. When he returned home, he severed all ties with his family, and Yin today only has vague ideas what became of him.
"He never talked to us even once," Yin said
Now the tables have turned. The elder brother lives in obscurity, while Yin prides himself on his growing political clout. He is close to important politicians such as Premier Wen Jiabao(溫家寶), whom he refers to by his given name.
"Sometimes Premier Jiabao contacts me to hear my views on policy issues such as how to cool economic growth," he said. "The leaders want to know what private business thinks."
He has also taken up official titles, and is now the highest-ranking entrepreneur in a sprawling system of consultative assemblies that form part of China's complex political system. But four years after the CCP officially welcomed capitalists among its ranks, he has yet to become a member.
"I've applied, but the Communist Party said, you stay on the outside and work for us there," he said. "That way you can make a bigger difference."
And Yin does want to make a difference. He is keenly aware that industry has not just brought prosperity to millions of Chinese, but caused horrific damage to the country of his childhood.
"Some of the rivers I swam in when I was young are so polluted now that the stink is unbearable," he said. "These are problems brought about by business, and we need to make up for that."
`DELIGHT IN HELPING OTHERS'
While some of China's new super-rich have been caught up in high-profile corruption scandals, Yin believes its capitalists must give back to society, as part of an unwritten contract they have entered into with the political rulers, he argues.
"When the enterprises are very small, the government gives them tax breaks and preferential loans and so on," he said. "It's because of a traditional Chinese idea of `raising children with an eye to old age.' You raise your kids so they can look after you in dotage, and that's what the government is doing with enterprises too."
Yin seeks to contribute to society by investing not just in locations and industries where he can be sure of fat profit margins, but also where the social impact will be tangible. His company has invested 70 million yuan in poor areas such as Yunnan Province. He may lose money, but he helps keep people out of unemployment and families away from ruin.
"Those of us who have had the privilege of becoming rich first have a responsibility to help those who came after us, so they can also prosper," he said.
Lifan Group has set up a network of schools.
"I'm not a Buddhist, but my wife is a very devout believer and has impressed me with the idea that you should delight in helping others," he said.
His wife Chen Qiaofeng, with whom he has two grown-up children, is a member of senior management at Lifan Group.
For decades, Yin was forced to live a simple life. Now it has become a habit.
"I don't drink and I don't smoke, because when I was young I was too poor to buy cigarettes and boots," he said.
Known by his staff to frequently eat lunch with them in the company cafeteria, Yin is worried about a wave of conspicuous consumption launched by the very rich in China.
"On the one hand, allowing them to spend lavishly may help boost consumption, but on the other hand it also means wasting resources, and China's resources are indeed scarce," he said.
"You drive a car. 160 or 180 horse powers is enough to get moving. What do you need 600 horse powers for? That's a waste. It's just for show," Yin said.
`NEVER COMPLAIN'
For someone who has had his freedom restricted for decades by the CCP, his attitude towards it is surprisingly forgiving.
"We need the Communist Party. Otherwise, there would be chaos in a country with 1.3 billion people. Many Chinese have no education. No one would respect the red lights at intersections," he said.
At the start of China's reform period, the CCP admitted its mistakes and then decided to move on. Yin applauds that.
"I've never complained about what happened to me. I think that belongs to the past. Let's concentrate on the future," he said.
He recalls how, while in a labor camp in the late 1960s, he wrote a propaganda poster containing the sentence "In the whole world, is there a person who does not support Chairman Mao?"
"People went crazy over the question mark. They thought I was expressing doubts about Mao. I was criticized for more than a year over this," he said.
"By comparison, China today is just so much more democratic and freer than before," he said.
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