卫平 宋
Song Weiping was born in 1957 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, Song’s parents moved to the Zhoushan Islands where the family experienced first-hand the bitter period of the Chinese natural disasters in the early 1960s, when people had hardly enough food to eat.
Despite the hardship, Song found the experience helpful in strengthening his willpower. As an elementary school student, he read many classical works and demonstrated an interest in arts, which greatly influenced his later career in many ways. In 1982 Song graduated from Hangzhou University with a bachelor of arts in history.
After working for five years as a teacher in a school for members of the Chinese Communist Party, he left for Zhuhai in 1987 and worked at a computer company, where he rose from a secretary to become group manager.
In 1994, Song returned to Hangzhou and decided to do business in real estate, which he thought required less technology than other industries. With faith in his own management skills and RMB150 000 borrowed from friends, he embarked on the journey with five colleagues. Later he borrowed 3 million yuan for land bidding and gradually expanded Greentown China Group to its current size. Song is well known for his sense of timing and exploitation of opportunity, always wining the targets for which he bids. He has the razor-sharp mind that is so necessary for a successful businessman. In little over a decade, Greentown China Group has accumulated property worth RMB2 billion, and made Song one of the richest people in China.
However, there is more to Song than business. He developed a passion for soccer at a young age, when he was still a PE instructor. On 15 January 1998, he launched his Zhejiang Lücheng Soccer Club, which made him an overnight sensation among diehard Chinese sports fans. Two years later he bought a soccer team, renamed it Lücheng and invested RMB85 million equal to two-thirds of his revenue in 2001. Shortly after he ignited a media war on the so-called ‘black whistles’, and for months made himself a celebrity in sports news. From the end of 2001 to April 2002, Song was at the center of the storm, revealing a list of corrupt referees in the Chinese Professional Soccer League. After several years’ endeavour, Lücheng Soccer succeeded in becoming one of China’s Super League (Level A) teams in 2006, ranked 9th out of 15 teams in the league.
He joined Chinese Communist Party in 1987.
Although soccer has been both his love and sorrow, Song has more recently once again devoted his energy to his real estate business, which he describes as his true battlefield. A tycoon in real estate while still modest and thrifty in person, Song has forever changed the business landscape and left his mark in the Hangzhou metro region of Southeastern China.
