EAT YOUR HEART OUT, DONALD!
Who would think that China's Donald Trump would be an ex-People's Liberation Army soldier who majored in drainage at the Lanzhou Railroad College? But Wang Shi, who made a spectacular decision in 1984 when he moved to a tiny backwater called Shenzhen, is the country's most successful real estate mogul. He heeded Deng Xiaoping's call to explore the virtues of capitalism, starting a trading company that moved everything from copy machines to the odd crate of shellfish. Although private property was still a dirty word in communist China, in 1993 Wang invested in real estate. He had heard of a man named Trump, and he was intrigued. "I didn't know much about management," he says. "But I thought, Western companies already did it well, so why not just copy that?"
Today Wang's real estate company, Vanke, has projects in 20 cities across China. It had revenues last year of more than $930 million. If his firm grows as it has over the past decade, Vanke in another 10 years could become the world's largest housing provider. Sixty percent of urban Chinese own their homes, up from practically zero when Wang started. And Shenzhen, that sleepy town where Wang, 54, made his base? It's a booming metropolis of 12 million people--one of dozens of cities that have sprouted across the nation seemingly overnight. "You blink in China, and another building goes up," says Wang. --By Hannah Beech/ Shanghai, with reporting by Bu Hua/ Shenzhen
ONLINE PATRIOT
With his slight frame and unassuming expression, Kang Lingyi, 24, hardly looks like a firebrand. But the Internet executive is at the forefront of one of the most powerful movements in China today: nationalism. Kang got his first taste of patriotic power back in 1999, when NATO forces bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Incensed by what he and other Chinese considered to be a deliberate attack, Kang joined 20,000 Chinese hackers who broke into several U.S. government websites, including that of the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Kang now runs one of several dozen patriotic websites, and he gets 30,000 hits a day on such topics as U.S. hubris in Iraq and Washington's friendly relations with Taiwan. "America is much too involved in China's internal affairs," he says. "China does not try to impose its human-rights standards on America."
Kang's feelings suit Beijing. Since the democracy movement exposed fissures in Chinese society 16 years ago, the government has tried to supplement a fading communist ideology with nationalism through a concerted education and media campaign. The two biggest protests in China since 1989 have been patriotic demonstrations essentially endorsed by the government--one an anti-American conflagration after the Belgrade bombing, the other a series of anti-Japanese protests in April that erupted in several Chinese cities. The latest demonstrations were spurred by nationalist websites and cell-phone text-message campaigns that persuaded tens of thousands to march against Japan, a country that they believe has still not fully atoned for its brutal occupation of China 70 years ago.