Background
Jing Shuping was born on July 7, 1918, China. He was the son of a wealthy Shanghai businessman.
叔平 经
Jing Shuping was born on July 7, 1918, China. He was the son of a wealthy Shanghai businessman.
He received a British-style education in Shanghai in the 1930s. However Jing had to drop out of the elite St John’s University after an oil price war brought his father’s business to the edge of bankruptcy.
He worked as a clerk, typist, and salesman before the family fortunes rebounded. In 1939, he began supervising work at his father’s cigarette and chemical manufacturing factories, remaining in Shanghai throughout the Japanese occupation. He was brought down again by the 1949 Communist revolution, being branded as a ‘reactionary capitalist’ and forced into hard labor during the Cultural Revolution.
His career as a Chinese entrepreneur only resumed after the official conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. He was a manager in several companies in Shanghai, later becoming chairman of the Shanghai Association of the Cigarette Industry. Jing was also active in the China Democratic National Construction Association, and held various leadership roles in the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. Rejuvenated, Jing also became involved in foreign affairs, serving on several commissions dedicated to trade and investment promotion, cross-straits relations and security issues. When he was 83, Jing became the chairman of the board of directors for the Beijing-based Minsheng Banking Corp., China’s first private bank. With $10 billion in assets, Minsheng is a minnow in a sea of whale-sized state-owned banks. But Jing has made it a model of what the big banks aspire to be. In comparison with most state banks, which usually have nonperforming loans close to 40 percent, Minsheng only has 4.4 percent. ‘We have an advantage over all the other banks,’ noted Jing, ‘they are all governed by the state. We have no mother-in-law’ (BusinessWeek, 2001). By 2001, the bank reached a milestone, raising $500 million in China’s second-largest domestic initial public offering. Retired in 2006, Jing was named the honorary chairman for the Minsheng Bank.