Self-made Business People Flourishing in Western China

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, March 23, 2002

Self-made Business People Flourishing in Western China

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At eight o'clock every morning, Zhang Xiaolin, a 36-year-old self-made entrepreneur, drives his Volvo into a European-style office building in Xi'an, northwestern China and switches on a laptop to begin his work as board chairman of a high-tech company.

Born in a remote village of Huanglong County which is still one of the poorest regions in China, Zhang is now well off.

Looking around his well-equipped office, he says, "Knowledge has changed my destiny."

In his youth, haunted by poverty, Zhang dropped out of school several times. In 1983, however, he entered the Beijing Forestry University with the highest marks in his county.

With 20,000 yuan (about 2,410 U.S dollars) borrowed from friends, Zhang set up his own company in the early 1990s.

After eight years of hard work, Zhang, with his talent for making money by using advanced technology, has become a typical western China self-made businessman.

Dealing in advanced medical apparatus, Zhang's company supplies more than 3,000 hospitals in China and its corporate capital has climbed to 35 million yuan (about 4.22 million U.S. dollars).

Zhang is not alone in his success. Sun Haiying, a local official in charge of science and technology, said that deep pockets like Zhang's will come up constantly as private high-tech companies continue to flourish in Shanxi.

Currently, there are about 8,500 private high-tech companies in Shanxi, of which over 80 are private company groups and 322 have a revenue of more than 10 million yuan ( about 1.2 million U.S. dollars).

Researcher Shi Ying from the Shannxi Academy of Social Science said, "With the deepening of China's reform and opening up, lots of well-educated technical professionals have left universities and scientific institutions to start up their own companies."

Scholar Jiang Tushan said, "These people are different from the farmer-turned-entrepreneurs running township businesses or the industrial entrepreneur of the past. They are intellectuals-turned merchants, with knowledge and technology as their main strength.

The Xi'an New High-Tech Development Zone well known for incubating high-tech enterprises and promoting the use of technical innovations is seen as the cradle of intellectual-turned merchants in western China.

Blessed with the opportunities brought by the country's west development program, more and more college graduates are flocking to the development zone to explore their own career paths.

Han Jun, a former computer student with the Xi'an Jiaotong University, is confident about his career.

Still under 30, Han is now running a company specializing in system integration.

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