Background
Mou Qizhong was born in 1941,China. The son of poor farmers from Wanxian, Sichuan Province, Mou told people that his father, Mou Pingzi was a famous financier in Chongqing before 1949.
其中 牟
Mou Qizhong was born in 1941,China. The son of poor farmers from Wanxian, Sichuan Province, Mou told people that his father, Mou Pingzi was a famous financier in Chongqing before 1949.
Mou displayed his verbal talent from an early age. He wanted to become a journalist, but failed to get into college and went to work at a local glass plant, where he read widely and actively participated in all kinds of debates and discussions. During the Cultural Revolution Mou was thrown into prison for writing a book titled Where is China Headed? and in 1974 he was sentenced to death. However, Mou narrowly escaped death when another person claimed responsibility for the book, and the sentence was lifted soon after Mao Zedong died in 1976.
Mou was released from prison in 1979 and a year later he took advantage of a more relaxed political climate, quit his job at the glass plant and started out on his own business journey with a small capital of 300 yuan to trade rattan chairs. Later he opened Zhongde Store, the first private enterprise in Sichuan Province. The company did not manufacture any products, but helped other people’s merchandise, especially surplus goods, to find a market. He quickly discovered that a certain 555-brand desk clock made by a factory in Shanghai sold well in the local marketplace, as every young couple getting married would buy one. He found a military factory in Chongqing that was half-idle, and asked them to make 10 000 duplicates of the 555-brand desk clock at 25 yuan apiece. He then went to Shanghai and sold the copied clocks for 32 yuan apiece to a trading company. This exchange earned him a net 70 000 yuan. However for this, he spent another year in jail in 1983 on charges of speculation and profiteering.
What Mou specialized in was to ‘assemble market’, that is, to utilize the intermediary means to adjust and optimize the market supply and demand and to reallocate resources. He was once quoted in the Washington Post: ‘Politics can’t motivate people. The desire to get rich that is the only way to mobilize the whole society’. Another milestone on his way to becoming the richest man in China was the 1991 launching of the Nande Economic Group in the Tianjin Special Economic Zone. In 1992 Mou seized a historic opportunity and stuffed 500 railroad cars with surplus pork, clothes, and cheap electronic goods and sent them to Russia. He received four Tupelov 154-passenger jet planes in exchange which he sold to Sichuan Airlines, netting $11 million. Mou had always been good at amassing a fortune out of nothing. From practically nothing before the 1990s, by 1994 Mou already claimed a personal wealth of 800 million yuan, according to Forbes.
However, as China’s economy slowed, Mou’s company accumulated major debts reported to be $80 million – through various undertakings, and was unable to resume normal operations. After employees complained that their wages had been unpaid, Mou and four key staff members, including his son, nephew, and sister-in-law, were accused of fraudulently obtaining a $75 million loan. The company had nearly collapsed before he was detained on 7 January 1999, and on 8 February Mou was formally charged with business fraud. Since Nande Group was a private company, it was not qualified for a business loan under Chinese banking rules. However Mou had turned to a state firm, Hubei Light Industrial Import and Export, for a letter of credit from the government Bank of China.
Prosecutors revealed that Mou was applying for funds for a fabricated import deal. Hubei Light reportedly handed over $22 million to the Nande Group, but it is unclear what happened to the remainder. Mou’s employees claimed the money was legally borrowed and then loaned to the Nande Group at an exorbitant interest rate, a common practice in a country where private businesses have often faced severe problems in obtaining bank loans.
A man of ambition and imagination, Mou was never short of dreams, whether they were practical or not. He once proposed to ‘level the Himalayas to the ground to divert warm air-currents into China from the Indian Ocean’. Mou also dreamed of developing Manzhouli, a Sino-Russian border city in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, into a continental trading spot, linking Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. In addition, Mou wanted to launch 88 satellites and form a close-knit network to provide cheap communications. He even considered purchasing an aircraft carrier for the Chinese Navy from Russia for $3.1 billion. Besides his wilder dreams, Mou also sponsored football clubs and a Chinese New Year party organized by the Ministry of Culture, contributed $360 000 to support China’s first research expedition to the North Pole and gave $120 000 in 1996 for space exploration.