Time Magazine on Wang Shi

Wang Shi will be speaking at the International Sustainable Cities Forum and will be participating in the Q&A session.

Time Magazine’s feature on Wang Shi entitled Changing the Game in China

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

Time Magazine, 20 Jun 05

Tags: china, international sustainable cities forum, property, time magazine, vanke, wang shi