On June 13, 2011, the University of California, Riverside held a special honor ceremony.
A businessman named Zhong Xinjia received the Honorary Fellowship Certificate from the President of the University of California, which was his $10 million donation in return for the school.
At the same time, he also became the first Chinese to receive this "honor" since the establishment of the University of California Riverside Campus.
However, Zhong Xinjia, who stood on the rostrum and gave a generous speech, could never have imagined that this honor would drag him into the abyss.
Zhong Xinjia's ancestors have been doctors for three generations, and his parents also hope that he can inherit the family's career and engage in medical related work when he grows up.
When she was 14 years old, Zhong Xinjia began to help catch medicine every day in her father's pharmacy.
However, he has no interest in medicine, and spends all day in the store, lying in a daze when there are no customers.
His father really couldn't look at it, so he said to Zhong Xinjia, "If you don't like this line of work, do what you like, but you must make some achievements, otherwise you are not a member of our Zhong family!" ”
Zhong Xinjia was overjoyed when he heard it, and he was most interested in the art of painting, when his home was full of his brushes and paints.
When his parents saw this, they simply sent him to the local art school, hoping that he would be able to learn and succeed. Zhong Xinjia was also very competitive, concentrating on learning the art of painting, and became a professional painter after graduation.
But trying to make a living by painting was not easy in those days. Zhong Xinjia quickly recognized the reality, so he decisively threw away the drawing board, followed his mother's wishes, and was admitted to Guangdong Medical College.
In order to pass the boring life of a medical student, he began to spend his spare time in the library and read some non-medical books.
Once, Zhong Xinjia flipped to the anthropologist Toynbee's book "Historical Research", which shocked him greatly:
"Human society in the 20th century has entered a critical juncture, because of the overexploitation of the earth's resources, if we do not tap new energy sources, human beings may face the danger of extinction."
He had a hunch that this was a huge business opportunity.
Therefore, after graduating from medical school, Zhong Xinjia once again went against her parents' wishes and went to work as a worker in an electronics factory.
Unexpectedly, Zhong Xinjia, who graduated from medical school, actually ushered in his own highlight moment in the electronics factory.
He has never had any practical experience, and he is almost self-taught in the production and research of batteries. While working, he taught himself the principles and structures related to batteries, and even told his colleagues in the factory that he wanted to develop a new type of battery.
Of course, no one took the hairy boy's words seriously, and his colleagues laughed when he was talking.
Coincidentally, once Zhong Xinjia found that a battery had failed when he was on duty, he tried to repair it himself, and the result was really repaired by him.
Through this incident, the director of the factory transferred him to the technical department for the first time.
After entering the technical department, Zhong Xinjia once again proposed the idea of inventing a new type of battery with the factory director, because most of the products in the factory in that era were lead-acid batteries, which not only had a low capacity, but also quite cumbersome to maintain subsequently.
The director of the factory was infected by his spirit of dedication to research, and specially approved him to spend time researching new batteries.
After a period of hard work, Zhong Xinjia really successfully developed the first maintenance-free lead-acid battery in China and even in the world, which made China's battery industry technology leap forward a big step, and also made Zhong Xinjia famous from then on.
Relying on his own invention, Zhong Xinjia earned the first bucket of gold in his life.
The clever Zhong Xinjia, after having enough capital, did not continue to stay in the battery industry, but focused on the record industry, which is in a rapidly developing stage.
After seeing the bright prospects of the recording industry, Zhong Xinjia once again made a surprising decision, that is, to resign from the factory and go to the sea to run a tape and tape recorder business.
Soon after he founded the tape recorder and video tape factory, the tape recorder became popular all over the country, and Zhong Xinjia got the first piece of the record industry, and his net worth was close to tens of millions.
Later, as we all know, with the development of the Internet, music began to digitize, people could listen to their favorite songs without buying records, and the record industry was greatly impacted and began to decline.
During this period, Zhong Xinjia was also inexplicably involved in the Hainan extraordinarily large smuggling case that year, and ended up in two years in prison for suspected car smuggling, and his wife was overwhelmed and left him.
Two years later, Zhong Xinjia was acquitted, and after returning to society, Zhong Xinjia did not feel depressed at all.
Once, he read the news of a crude oil energy crisis in the newspaper, understood that there were more opportunities waiting for him in the battery field, and he continued to start the research of power batteries.
In 1995, China was in a critical period of vigorously developing the lithium battery industry, in order to attract talents, the state also introduced relevant subsidy policies.
With his achievements in batteries, Zhong Xinjia was favored by a leader who recommended him to enter the Sanzao Science and Technology Industrial Park in Zhuhai High-tech Zone and founded the "Rising Life Source Battery Laboratory".
Since then, Zhong Xinjia has been unstoppable in the field of battery research and development.
In 1998, Zhong Xinjia announced the manufacture of lithium-ion power batteries with a single capacity of 100Ah vehicles;
In 1999, the Shenzhen government sponsored Zhong Xinjia 3 million yuan as a scientific research fund, supported him to establish Leitian Green Electric Source Company, and began to sell 800Ah monomer power batteries to the world;
In 2001, Zhong Xinjia was certified by the state as a battery inventor, and the life source power lithium battery developed by him was listed as a charging technology product.
In 2006, Zhong Xinjia announced that he had created the world's first 3600Ah and 10,000Ah monomer capacity rare earth lithium-ion power batteries, claiming to carry out a battery project with a total output value of 50 billion yuan in the future.
In addition, he also participated in the establishment of the national "863 Plan" lithium power battery research and development center, serving as the director and chief scientist of the research and development center.
With these achievements, Zhong Xinjia became a well-known "battery king" in China, and Morgan Company of the United States also took a fancy to his lithium electronic technology, valuing the technology as much as two million US dollars in the United States, which made Zhong Xinjia excited.
In 2010, Leitian was successfully listed on the NASDAQ in the United States, and Zhong Xinjia became the chairman of the board of directors, thus opening his legendary era.
After opening the US market, Americans found that lithium electronic technology can be applied to the military, Leitian orders are more and more, and Zhong Xinjia has become a piece of fragrant food in the United States.
As the saying goes, once people have achieved great success, they are easy to float up, and Zhong Xinjia is no exception.
He once said to his driver at the gas station: "The gas station will be finished sooner or later, and in the future it will be the world of our thunderous new energy." ”
According to the recollections of employees at the time, Zhong Xinjia also vowed that he would replace Bill Gates as the world's richest man.
In 2011, Zhong Xinjia donated 70 million yuan to the University of California in the United States, which spread to China and caused heated discussion.
A reporter asked: "Why did you donate money to the University of California?" Don't you know that there are many universities in China facing a shortage of resources? ”
And Zhong Xinjia responded like this:
"This is obviously my own hard-earned money, of course I want to spend it how I want!" China's poverty has nothing to do with me! ”
For a time, public opinion was in an uproar, and Zhong Xinjia was also labeled as ungrateful and was scolded countless times.
Before the matter was over, another trouble for Zhong Xinjia came, and he received the court's verdict.
It turned out that Cao Zhong, the partner who had founded the company with him, broke the news that Zhong Xinjia's technology was fraudulent because of the uneven distribution of benefits, and sued him in court.
According to Cao Zhong's revelations, Zhong Xinjia's technical invention is full of doubts. As early as 2000, experts in Shenzhen and Beijing wanted to supervise the production workshop on the spot, but Zhong Xinjia refused on the grounds of trade secrets, and even if he entered the workshop, he was only allowed to look at it and was not allowed to record.
In addition, Zhong Xinjia was also suspected of many cooperation scams, and after signing cooperation agreements with the governments of Guangdong and Jilin, it was not put into production, and the project was completely destroyed.
The wall was pushed down by everyone, and many investors also began to break the news, pointing out that Zhong Xinjia, the "battery king", did not actually dry goods at all, but was just a businessman who would package himself.
The authenticity of the exposed news cannot be confirmed, but there is a detail that the court sentenced Zhong Xinjia to 200 million yuan in compensation, and he did not choose to appeal.
In April 2011, the extraordinary general meeting of shareholders voted to remove Zhong Xinjia and renamed the company "Zhongju Battery", and the company had nothing to do with Zhong Xinjia.
After that, there was news that Zhong Xinjia fled to the United States in order to avoid debt, and a generation of battery kings finally faded out of the public's vision in the form of "bearing a name".
In China, the success of an entrepreneur is inseparable from the help of society and the state, and having a patriotic heart is the foundation of everyone's foothold in society, and capitalists who abandon the motherland will certainly be spurned by the people.
After becoming famous, he threatened that the country's poverty had nothing to do with him, and Zhong Xinjia's pattern as an entrepreneur was too small. It is self-inflicted to pursue the supremacy of interests and reputation in a vague manner, and to fall into such a fate.
Nowadays, the electric vehicle industry is in full swing, and many enterprises that do research and development with heart have emerged, such as BYD and Ningde era, which do not rely on packaging and do things in a down-to-earth manner, which is the future of the new energy industry.
China has bid farewell to the situation of poverty and poverty, and the state has also increased capital investment in emerging industries, hoping that those entrepreneurs who have benefited from national policies can understand entu newspaper, let Chinese technology go to the world, and realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Text/Charlie