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The richest Chinese family that has been rich for more than three generations
On September 14, 2004, Cai Wanlin, the former richest Chinese and the founder of Taiwan's "Cathay Pacific Group", passed away.
According to Forbes' calculations, his assets reached $4.5 billion, or about NT$156.4 billion. According to Taiwan's 50% inheritance tax, the descendants of the inheritance need to pay NT$78.2 billion, but people have found that the real assets under the name of Cai Wanlin are only NT$300 million, and it turns out that the richest man has transferred most of his assets to the family members through "share gifts" before his death, and the inheritance tax of more than 70 billion yuan naturally cannot be collected.
Cai Wanlin, who is known as the "god of gathering wealth", even the wealth that cannot be taken away after death has been calculated early.
Cai Wanlin represents an era.
Before him, Taiwan did not have a decent business figure, and after him, the "king of foundry" Gou was able to rise and replace him with the position of the richest man.
He is also the largest landlord in Taiwan, and it is from him that real estate developers hoard land, taiwan land prices soar, and the 230 buildings he owns in Taiwan have billions of yuan in rent alone every year.
Adhering to the concept of "only renting and not selling" to speculate on land and build buildings, Cai Wanlin has been accused of being the "culprit" of Taiwan's soaring land prices and housing prices. In 1987, he bought a 1,000-pyeong plot of land on Nanjing East Road in Taipei at a price several times higher than the market price, resulting in a subsequent increase in the price of surrounding land, and the rent and house prices were also rising, and the biggest beneficiary was Cai Wanlin, who owned the most office buildings in Taiwan.
Such behavior has led to protests from the Shellless Snail Movement, with more than 50,000 people spending the night on the streets to protest the rise in housing prices. At that time, Taiwan had just "lifted the strict law", and with a long-term fear of the government, more than 50,000 people started the first movement on the issue of urbanization in Taiwanese society with great courage.
In the face of accusations, Cai Wanlin expressed his grievances: "Taiwan's economy will take off, the land will definitely rise, and The national life is just talking about business." ”
The Cai family, whose business is getting bigger and bigger amid accusations, has been rich for three generations in Taiwan.
In 2020, the second generation of the Cai family fully withdrew from the company's board of directors, and Cai Wanlin's grandson, Cai Zonghan, who was only 45 years old, took over the family banner. The rich third generation, who has a doctorate in law from Harvard University and has worked as a registered lawyer in the United States, started as an assistant after returning to Taiwan, and has been tempered for more than a decade, and is considered to be the youngest and most capable successor of Taiwan's largest consortium.
Today, Cathay Pacific remains Taiwan's most powerful and promising financial group, with assets of more than NT$150 billion and more than 50,000 employees. This fortune building, at the beginning, only started from taipei's wet market.
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From wet market vendors to the richest Chinese
Cai Wanlin was born in 1924 to a family of sharecroppers in Miaoli County, Taiwan. Since childhood, he and his brother Cai Wanchun have been wandering around Taipei to make a living.
The brothers went out in the early hours of the morning every day, stopped the vegetable farmers far away from the market, bought them at a low price, and then shipped them to the market to sell.
After accumulating a little money, they opened a grocery store, the main product is their own production of soy sauce, at this time the two brothers have brought the whole family to Taipei, set up a family workshop to produce soy sauce, the grocery store has gradually expanded its scale, become a trading house. By 1945, 21-year-old Cai Wanlin and 29-year-old brother Cai Wanchun had accumulated nearly NT$600,000, which became the starting point of the Cai family's career.
Since then, the two brothers have invested their savings in shopping malls, hostels, daily chemicals, toys, steel and other industries, and their wealth has expanded rapidly.
In 1957, the two brothers won the "Taiwan Tenth Credit Union" and officially entered the financial industry. At that time, the Kuomintang government that had defeated Taiwan was extremely short of construction funds, and the two brothers saw this opportunity and launched the marketing slogan of "one person and one dollar deposit to save the country" and created the "one dollar account opening, happy deposit" movement.
The former site of the Tenth Credit Union
When the two brothers took over, the "Tenth Credit Union" ranked only 61st in Taiwan, and three years after taking over, it rose to the second place.
In 1960, another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity fell in front of the two brothers.
Previously, the Kuomintang government had been restricting the development of the insurance industry, and the wealthy businessmen on the island could only insure foreign-funded enterprises, resulting in a large amount of foreign exchange loss. In order to gather funds, this year announced the opening of restrictions on the insurance industry. The following year, Yan Jiagan, then "minister of finance" and later "vice president", found Lin Dingli, who had a close personal relationship with him. Under strict care, Lin took the lead in obtaining a business license for the establishment of an insurance company.
However, Lin did not have much money in his hands, and found the Cai family brothers through introduction. The two families hit it off, and with the financial support of the Cai brothers, in 1962, the "Cathay" life insurance company was opened, which means "Cathay Min'an". Cai Wanchun is the managing director and general manager, Cai Wanlin is the executive director and deputy general manager, and Lin Dingli is the executive director.
Relying on the cooperation of government and business, the career of the Cai family brothers began to take off really.
In 1979, his brother Cai Wanchun suffered a stroke and retreated to the second line, and the family banner was taken over by Cai Wanlin, who also quickly rose to the position of the richest man in Taiwan and the richest man in China.
The key to Cai Wanlin's success, in addition to having good political relations, is also the strategy of "hoarding land and building buildings to collect rent". This strategy can be described as "killing three birds with one stone".
First, at that time, the land price in Taiwan had not yet risen, and Cai Wanlin could buy a large number of land plots, which later brought him hundreds of times the profits.
Second, hundreds of buildings have been built on these plots, each of which is a giant three-dimensional billboard that shows Cathay Pacific's strong economic strength. In order to seize the rural market, cathay insurance business personnel will drive a tour bus to the countryside, and those who do not enter the city all year round will be loaded into the cathay mansion in batches, so that these people will be shocked by cathay's strength during the visit and visit, and they will be more at ease when buying insurance.
Third, continuous land investment can drive the rise of house prices and rents in the entire region, as the largest landlord and landlord in Taiwan, Cai Wanlin can get into the gold every day while lying down.
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The "culprit" of Taiwan's high housing prices,
The full life of a Chinese landlord
Taiwan's real estate industry has experienced a process of ups and downs and rapid progress for decades.
In this process, some people get rich overnight, some people die, and some people secretly harvest, but for more Taiwanese people, they bear the rising house prices and rents, and the increasing pressure of life. At the rate of soaring housing prices, the gap between the best and hard-working workers and the landlord class is getting bigger and bigger.
Someone once gave an example to illustrate the difference between hard work and lying down to collect rent:
Lin Shichang, a large landowner in Ximending, Taipei, owns 23 stores and collects NT$30 million a month.
The top taiwanese office worker, named Zheng Mingkai, is a securities analyst who can earn NT$30 million a year. The top office workers earn as much as a month as a big landowner earns. And Zheng Mingkai is 996, every day hard work, Lin Shichang lies at home every day to enjoy life, in addition to checking the rent of the account every month, there is no collection, idle.
If it is said that the hit workers are "unable to make a head out of the work" and cannot be compared with the landlords, then can we win the war by taking Taiwan's listed companies out to fight?
Among the 1679 listed companies in Taiwan in 2017, the companies that can earn 30 million yuan per month are probably ranked around 510. Then the performance of Ximending's rent collection king can hang 70% of listed companies.
Lin Shichang is just a large landlord in Ximending, Taipei, not to mention a super landlord like Cai Wanlin who hoards land with the power of a consortium. It is these consortia who are well versed in the value of land, pushing up land prices and house prices for decades – you buy land at a high price, and then the land near me grows, and then I spend another piece of land at a high price, and then the property price near you also grows, and everyone is prosperous and united to "earn the money of the poor ghost".
However, strictly speaking, the "culprit" of Taiwan's land price increase is actually not cai Wanlin's turn, but the design of the entire system.
The design of Taiwan's land system is to encourage consortiums to hoard land and speculate in houses.
Like Cai Wanlin, there is no cost at all to hoard land, because they rely on political and business relations to get a License for Insurance in Taiwan, and then use the premiums they collect to buy land and build buildings, and then rent or sell these buildings to the people, so that the people can go to the bank loans they opened, and become "house slaves" who work for the bank... And hoarding land basically has no land idle fee.
Because most of the people who design the system and make the laws are also landlords or politicians funded by landlords, they will not introduce policies that cut off their own financial resources.
Taking Cai Wanlin as an example, after tasting the dividends of political and business cooperation, his participation in politics is very high.
In 1974, Cai Wanlin hired a number of famous painters to paint 10 paintings with heavy money to wish Chiang Kai-shek's birthday. After Chiang Kai-shek's death, he donated another NT$30 million to build the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. He also vigorously attracted retired high-ranking officials to serve as directors of Cathay Pacific enterprises, such as Xiao Zhengzhi, former deputy director of the "General Political and War Department of the Ministry of National Defense", Miao Zhongying, former "lieutenant general of the army", and Ye Qianren, son of former "intelligence bureau chief" Ye Xiangzhi. Cai Wanlin even personally participated in politics, and was elected to the first and second terms of the "Taipei City Councilor".
A year after Tsai's death, Gou, who had started Foxconn in Shenzhen for seventeen years, finally overtook his predecessor and became Taiwan's richest man — a rare industrial richest man in Taiwan for many years.
Cai Wanlin's era is over, he saved 230 buildings for his children and grandchildren, hundreds of billions of family businesses, arranged a good inheritance tax avoidance plan, and he also arranged a posthumous destination for himself - a cemetery covering an area of 6,000 ping. Everything is the most satisfactory ending for a Chinese landlord.