Background
Yang Guoqiang was born on October 9, 1954 in Shunde, Guangdong. Yang is the son of a village farmer in Guangdong Province.
国强 杨
Yang Guoqiang was born on October 9, 1954 in Shunde, Guangdong. Yang is the son of a village farmer in Guangdong Province.
Yang Guoqiang was educated locally.
He first worked as a migrant construction worker, as did many of his peers in the early years of the post-1978 reforms. In the 1990s Yang began his career in real estate development by acquiring wastelands. In 1997, he founded Country Garden along with several other Shunde residents, including Yang Erzhu, Lee Shau Kee, and Cheng Yu-Tung, leveraging on the boom in the residential property market triggered by China’s newly affluent middle class.
On 20 April 2007, Country Garden Holdings was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange as Biguiyuan Group, raising a respectable US$1.66 billion in its initial public offering. Although still actively managing the company, Yang is only the nominal chairman, as the stocks have officially been held by Yang Huiyan since 2005. Yang Huiyan joined the family business upon graduating from Ohio State University with a degree in marketing, and is being groomed by her father for leadership transition through a position as executive director, overseeing procurement, enterprise resource management, and development strategies.
In 2002, he founded a tuition-free middle school to assist poor students and has since poured over 260 million yuan (US$35 million) into the project.
Yang is not only generous to his daughter. As a renowned philanthropist, respectful of his past and responsible with his wealth, since 1997 he has helped more than 4000 college students through a scholarship fund that has grown to US$2 million from its original 1 million yuan (US$135 000) annual contributions.
Quotes from others about the person
‘He is a man who understands how to respect wealth instead of being obsessed by money, thanks to his previous life experience of hardship and difficulties’ (Beijing Review, 2007), close friends are quoted as saying about Yang Guoqiang.