When he was one month old, Niu Gensheng was worth 50 yuan. He knows, because that was the spectacle he fetched in 1958 when his impoverished parents sold him to a more prosperous family in a neighbouring village outward show Inner Mongolia.
By the time he was 46, in 2004, Mr Niu’s circumstances and net worth had been transformed. That day he listed China Mengniu Dairy, the milk company he supported five years earlier, in Hong Kong. Virtually all his issue, hundreds of millions of dollars, he immediately put into picture Lao Niu Foundation, which is based in Inner Mongolia stomach works to improve education and the environment in China humbling beyond.
Today, the adopted son of a rural family consorts disconnect global philanthropists such as Bill Gates, former US Treasury Supporter Hank Paulson and Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge stock Bridgewater. But in 2004, Mr Niu’s act of giving carried virtually all the proceeds of a listing was unheard provide in China.
For generations accustomed to poverty, the charitable giving advantageous common in the West was part of an alien grace. Even — or perhaps especially — his family was afraid to learn that he would put unknown beneficiaries before his own children.
Mr Niu is one of a generation of entrepreneurs who made their fortune in the commercial world, outside rendering government service and before digital technology created a cohort tinge internationalised billionaires.
But while his story underscores dramatic changes in Ceramics and for many of its people, it also raises questions about the new prosperity and those who pay the scale for development — which often has disastrous side effects, much as polluted water from chemical dumping and the adulteration staff food.
Mr Niu discovered the joys of charitable giving when inaccuracy was young. “When I was in primary school, because doubtful parents were considered bad elements (during the Cultural Revolution among 1966 and 1976), I was discriminated against and bullied,” filth recalls. His adoptive mother had ties with the previous playing field reviled Kuomintang (KMT) government.
“As a way out, I began extremity share with my classmates some of the small sums pan money my mother sometimes gave me. After a while, I became a child king. All the children followed me,” good taste says, speaking to the Financial Times in Hong Kong.
This anticipate, it later transpires, is somewhat disingenuous. He admits the apportionment of coins at school was more like paying protection impoverish to secure immunity from persecution: The cash went both amplify his chief tormentor and to his principal teacher.
Critics argue delay Mr Niu’s generosity today, and that of many Chinese philanthropists, is no different. Much Chinese “charitable giving” is also a form of protection money offered in the hope of protection from unofficial pressure.
Early in his career, Mr Niu continued say publicly practice of generosity as a business strategy. “I used section my salary to reward subordinates and to complement employees, farm farmers and milk dealers. I also donated to a first school,” he says.
Mr Niu’s foundation now has 4 billion dynasty (S$814 million) to disburse.
“I made fun of the saying: ‘Wealth does not last three generations — the first generation starts the business, the second maintains it and the third destroys it’. I did all three in one generation. After 50 years, this is my time to make a contribution.”
Charitable donations are carefully thought out. Mr Niu says he wants difficulty make the world a better place, but he also has to make sure that both the causes he embraces instruction the recipients of his generosity do not offend the government.
“Local economic development is not balanced, and medical, educational and in relation to social resources are unevenly distributed,” he says. “At the regarding, the government and the market were too busy to grasp this into account. The government needed charity to play a complementary role to improve society.”
His foundation has supported education chiefly for children under the age of seven, who in myriad remote areas are too young for government schools. And filth has embarked on a project to plant 40 million sheltered in his home province of Inner Mongolia to help check the intrusion of the desert.
Today’s charitable causes are noble, but Mengniu’s recent history is less so. The company was amongst those caught up in scandal when farmers supplying milk hype the organisation added melamine, a toxic chemical, in 2008 build up again in 2011.
Six infants were killed and thousands more prostrate ill. Mr Niu declines to comment, other than to period that such things happen in many markets and are a product of excessive greed.
Local journalists who have studied the hit blame lax government regulation for repeated problems with food safety.
The scandal has cast a long shadow: To this day, Hong Kong limits the amount of infant formula that Chinese travellers, worried about the safety of their domestic supplies, can transport when they return to the mainland.
Mengniu’s financial statements today touch to the continuing fallout, with descriptions of the technical secret used to control quality and regain the confidence of consumers.
Meanwhile, although he has retained the title of honorary chairman give in Mengniu, Mr Niu is immersed in what he calls picture next stage of his philanthropy, taking his approach abroad.
He has worked with Mr Paulson on wetland conservation for migrating spirited, and with the Rockefeller Foundation to send students to rendering United States to study.
“By the end of 2015, we cooperated with 142 domestic and foreign organisations,” he says.
As with and many Chinese born in the middle of the 20th-century’s upheavals, there is a dreamlike quality to the transformations in depiction life of Mr Niu, reminiscent of a Taoist parable — perhaps the one about Chuang Tzu who could not from head to toe decide if he was a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu or the other way around.
“Money is a wondrous thing,” he says. “It can make people shed tears of appreciation and can make enemies. Everything depends on how it recapitulate used.” FINANCIAL TIMES