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China’s Rich List The remarkable achievement of alumnus Rupert Hoogewerf China has a million millionaires. Almost. There are currently 960,000 people with personal wealth of more than 10 million Yuan (or just under £1 million) and there are 60,000 super-rich who have more than 100 million Yuan. Of the million millionaires, 55 percent derive their wealth from their private businesses, 20 percent are property speculators, 15 percent have made their money on the stock market, while the remaining ten percent are high-earning salaried executives. The average Chinese millionaire was born in 1972 and is, at 39 years of age, a full 15 years younger than his or her Western counterpart. Thirty percent of the millionaires are female. We know this because wafting through the new Chinese world of mirror-glass skyscrapers and tinted-window Mercedes is an archetypal English gentleman who has made it his business to find out. Tall, slender and self-effacing, Rupert Hoogewerf is the same age as the millionaires he investigates and he has been compiling his Chinese rich list since 1999. The annual list is now an institution and has become the centrepiece of a publishing business aimed at the same entrepreneurial class it documents. Apart from the Hurun Report, a monthly magazine which takes its title from his Chinese name, Rupert also publishes a biannual Wings and Water magazine that caters to demand for planes and yachts, a Hurun Art List for those who want to invest their wealth more tastefully, a series of country-specific Guides to International Education – as four out of five wealthy Chinese seek to educate their children abroad – and even a Horse and Polo magazine, that lushest of pursuits being the latest craze in so-called concrete China. But it is the China Rich List that made his name. Its creation has been described by China Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the ten most important business events in the
last twenty years. Another magazine Global Entrepreneur, named Rupert among the 100 Top Influencers in China’s Globalization, while Dragon TV called him one of the 30 most influential people in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In a one-party state in which other political viewpoints are banned and in which religious, press and artistic freedoms of expression are carefully overseen, Rupert Hoogewerf has done more than simply catalogue the wealthy. He has found a way to describe and envision modern China. “Imagine someone creating a North Korean rich list today,” he suggests, by way of a comparison. “It would be met with a stunned silence, but that’s how it was when we did the first rich list in China. People assumed that the only rich people were cronies of the government and that there were no real entrepreneurs, only nepotistic relatives of the elite. The China Rich List has proven that there are real, highly capable entrepreneurs in China and shown the world who they are.” And this is who they are. There is 65-year old Zong Qinghou, founder of the Wahaha drinks business, who topped the list in 2010 with a personal fortune of US$12 billion. In second place, there is Li Li and his family, the owners of Hepalink, a pharmaceutical company whose main product is a blood thinner purified from pig intestines which is used to prevent blood clots. In third place, there is the “Paper Queen” Zhang Yin whose recycling business has made her the richest woman in China and the richest self-made woman in the world. And on and on it goes for over a thousand places, the biggest published rich-list in the world.
The day Durham First meets him, Rupert Hoogewerf is having lunch with Lord Wei, David Cameron’s advisor on social entrepreneurship. The venue is fitting. The former residence of the British consul in Shanghai and now a restaurant, it is a colonial villa with a cool, shaded terrace and an overgrown courtyard garden filled with bamboo, mature willows and the thick undulating limbs of a huge Southern Magnolia tree. Rupert’s tale as he tells it is founded in simple curiosity and serendipity. So much so that there is an intriguing mismatch between the scale of his achievement and his self-effacement. Ex-Eton, ex-Durham, ex-Arthur Anderson, he protests that he never intended to make China his home or even to create his own business. It was, as he calls it, happenstance. He chose to read Chinese with Japanese at Durham’s St Cuthbert’s Society “out of academic interest” and then qualified as an accountant. Coming to Shanghai on secondment in 1997, it all started when he asked his Chinese conversation tutor to prepare a topic on the most successful business people in China. “She came back the next week and could tell me nothing,” he says. “It was bizarre. How could you not know? Surely you could find out who the Chinese equivalent of Bill Gates was?” Rupert went back and asked his colleagues at Arthur Anderson. “It was the number one agency in China at the time, the closest people to the wealthy. In London, if you had asked the same question of a top accountancy firm, they would have had an inkling that it might be, say, Richard Branson, but they had no idea. And I thought, if these people don’t know, no one knows.”