In 2020, Chen Jinghe, known as the "King of China's Gold Mines", was burned all over the Internet. First, its Zijin Mining Company was once again on the Forbes list, ranking 3rd among gold companies, and Forbes ranked 398th overall.
This was followed by the news that Chen Jinghe had announced his marriage to his 25-year-old girlfriend, but it was only a year after the death of his previous wife.
As soon as this news was announced, it caused a big sensation in society. Chen Jinghe's history of his fortune was also excavated for a time.
Meet your first love and study together
Chen Jinghe was born in 1957 in Yongding District, Longyan City. One of the Chen family's parents is a teacher and the other is a farmer, both of whom are ordinary people.
His parents knew that their cognition was limited and understood the importance of learning, so they often taught him to study carefully and provide for the study and living expenses to the greatest extent. Chen Jinghe listened to his parents' words, and his grades have always been among the best, and he has never let his parents worry.
When he entered junior high school life, he was fascinated by the subject of geography, and whenever he had time, he ran to the river beach to pick up some stones, and when it was dark, he reluctantly returned home.
It is said that interest is the best teacher of learning, and this sentence cannot be more appropriate to Chen Jinghe.
Chen Jinghe ended his high school life less than 2 years, and the state resumed the college entrance examination. Because of his love of geography and minerals, after consulting teachers, he decided to apply for the geology major of Fuzhou University.
The college entrance examination has only been resumed for one year, and many people are caught off guard and too late to prepare, so the students who can be admitted to the university at this time are undoubtedly outstanding in ability and lucky.
In addition to Chen Jinghe being cared for by the god of luck, there is another lucky person in the same class, she is Chen Jinghe's first love Lai Jinlian.
Lai Jinlian and Chen Jinghe have the same conditions, both come from ordinary families, and have excellent academic performance. In the class, the two were competitors and learning partners, so they formed a deep friendship.
The second year of high school is the period when young girls are full of youth. As a friend who gets along day and night, Chen Jinghe gradually becomes interested in Lai Jinlian. Unable to contain his excitement, he wrote a love poem to her overnight. After seeing the letter, she accepted it shyly.
In order to ensure stable academic performance, the two did not immediately get together and discussed falling in love after high school.
After graduating from high school, the two went back to their respective homes, because of the family's farm work and chores, the two did not have time to fall in love, but still kept in touch.
In 1977, China resumed the college entrance examination for the first time. These two learning "tops" invariably thought of the same thing - seize the time to review, and strive to be admitted to the school of their choice once.
On the day of the college entrance examination, Chen Jinghe learned that Lai Jinlian was admitted to the nurse major of Longyan Health School, and he couldn't help but be overjoyed, looking forward to seeing her day and night.
Later, the two met at the station to the school, and when they saw each other, the two could not help but cry with excitement.
After going to college, they decided on a romantic relationship, and because the two schools were not close, the two often exchanged letters and occasionally came out to get together when they had time. Even so, it was happy and sweet enough for them.
When Chen Jinghe was in his junior year, Lai Jinlian had already ended his two-year life in the health school and entered the society to start working.
After he learned about this, he was happy for her and anxious for himself, afraid that the distance between the two would be getting farther and farther away.
Lai Jinlian didn't think too much about it and took care of him as always. Seeing that her lover's life was poor, she often received him, a habit that remained until Chen Jinghe graduated.
Perhaps it was the acquiescence that Chen Jinghe would become the son-in-law of the Lai family in the future, and her family did not stop too much after knowing it, and acquiesced to her daughter's behavior.
Love mining, insist on leaving
In 1982, Chen Jinghe successfully graduated, and due to his outstanding ability, he was assigned to the Fujian Province Minxi Geological Brigade to work responsible for the development of the Purple Mountain Gold Mine.
Speaking of gold mines, we have to mention Fujian Yongding. During the Ming Dynasty, there are ancient records that Zijin County in Guangdong and Yong'an County in Fujian Province are rich in gold mines, and there is even a saying that "the underground is full of gold".
Among them, Yong'an County, Fujian Province, is Chen Jinghe's hometown - Yongding District, Longyan City, Fujian Province. It seems that he was doomed to an indissoluble relationship with the gold mine.
A few days after being assigned to the unit, he was full of joy and enthusiastically proposed to his lover.
However, at that time, the locals needed a very generous dowry to get married. This is a very difficult thing for Chen Jinghe, who has a general family background and has just joined the work.
Lai Jinlian's family had long known about Chen Jinghe's existence and told him: Don't want a penny for the dowry, as long as it is good for Lai Jinlian, it is enough.
At the end of the same year, the two who had been married for less than a year gave birth to their first child, Chen Lei.
At that time, Chen Jinghe was highly motivated and determined to do a great job. Mining was unusual, the conditions were harsh, and the energy was extremely draining, but in order for the work to go smoothly, he and his colleagues moved to an abandoned temple and slept on the ground every day.
In this way, the family gathers less and leaves more, and they do not see each other several times over the years.
However, his wife has always been very supportive of him, silently taking care of the children while working, and gritting her teeth despite the very hard life. Fortunately, the effort ushered in the harvest, and the family's life ushered in a new turning point.
In 1984, Chen Jinghe first proposed the concept of "gold and copper" in his published paper, which was verified in engineering exploration, so he won the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award and was also favored by Pan Kuoxiang, then director of the Fujian Institute of Geological Sciences.
Soon after, he was transferred to the Institute, becoming the youngest senior engineer. The institute has a superior environment, provides a good salary, and even allocates houses, solving Chen Jinghe's housing problem.
For ordinary people, working comfortably in such a good unit until retirement, they can raise their lives and live a carefree and peaceful life. But Chen Jinghe is different from ordinary people.
Probably after a hard life, he decided to return to work on the Purple Mountain. For him, zijin is a love that cannot be felt in his life, difficult to give up, difficult to forget.
When his wife learned of this, she did not obstruct him too much, supported his decision as usual, and became his strongest support.
He stayed in Purple Mountain for three years, during which he followed the geological team to investigate according to his own research, and finally found many mining sites, and indeed mined some mines.
However, with the development of time and again, Chen Jinghe found that the quality of the ore here was not good, and the profits available were quite meager, which was a "loss-making" job for the geological staff.
In order not to let the painstaking efforts put into vain, but also in order to let purple mountain realize its own value, Chen Jinghe once again made a decision - to give up the "iron rice bowl" of senior engineers, apply to go to Shanghang County Mining Company, research and development, and develop the mines of Purple Mountain by himself.
Of course, this decision was also strongly supported by his wife Lai Jinlian.
Vigorous rectification and reform, set a new high
In 1992, Chen Jinghe came to Shanghang County Mineral Company as general manager. After arriving at the company to understand the situation, Chen Jinghe smiled helplessly.
It turned out that the company made no more than 30,000 yuan a year, and could only barely maintain its expenses, exactly the same as his current living conditions.
What gave him a headache was that he only got a project loan of 3.5 million yuan, but the first phase of the mine needed about 30 million.
How does a penniless general manager manage a small, half-dead company? This is not a small challenge for Chen Jinghe.
At that time, he resisted the pressure of the outside world, first greatly rectified the company, drastically changed the management system, and changed the company's name to "Zijin Mining Co., Ltd."; then compared various mining technologies, resolutely chose the heap immersion method, greatly reducing the cost of developing mines.
The company's veteran employees questioned his overhaul; experts hired shook their heads at his approach out of concern for the environment. However, Chen Jinghe still gritted his teeth and persevered, and the result made everyone praise.
In less than a year, when the first phase of the Purple Mountain Gold Mine project was concluded, Chen Jinghe used less than 8 million yuan to mine more than 50,000 tons of mineral deposits.
In just 8 years, Purple Mountain's mining industry has led the country, and its development has soared, once becoming the most efficient single mine in China.
In 2000, Chen Jinghe led his employees to Guizhou, Xinjiang and other places to seize the opportunity and participate in mining projects, and the annual sales of Zijin Mining Co., Ltd. soared to 400 million yuan, with total assets of about 600 million yuan.
Immediately after, the company's shareholding system transformation was completed, and a group of shareholders such as Xinhuadu were introduced to invest in shares.
In 2003, Zijin Mining was vigorously listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with a net asset of 2.8 billion yuan. Chen Jinghe was not satisfied with this, and led many employees to push Zijin Mining to a new height.
In April 2008, Zijin Mining returned to A-shares and was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with a record trading record.
Chen Jinghe holds nearly 114.6 million shares, and has also won the titles of "The First Head of China's Gold Market" and "China's Gold Mine King".
According to public data in 2019, Chen Jinghe's annual income from Zijin Mining, which he single-handedly brought up, was as high as 15.6 billion yuan, more than a thousand times more than before.
In November, Zijin Mining completed the issuance of 2.346 billion shares, and the stock price increased to 236%. It didn't take long for Zijin Mining to rank among the world's top 500 companies.
The company's top 10 shareholders have also become billionaires, and the "Hurun Rich List" has announced that 4 of the richest minerals are all investors in the company. The market value of the shares held by Chen Jinghe himself has already exceeded 480 million.
Once a poor boy who was penniless, and now an entrepreneur worth more than 100 million, Chen Jinghe is like the mine mined in that year, after several times of refining, it finally became a grain of sparkling gold.
Negative effects, continuously
However, the mining industry is not always in the ascendant, and it will soon become precarious and crumbling. Chen Jinghe's position as the "first person" has also begun to waver, and he himself has been questioned by the outside world.
Mineral deposits have always been an issue.
Mining is not up to standard, labor-intensive, not to mention, investment costs also have to be put in; but if you want mineral profits to rise, over-exploitation is inevitable, conflicts of interest, environmental pollution, safety hazards and other issues are unavoidable.
In order to pursue high profits, Zijin Mining developed too fast in advance, destroyed the farmland near Purple Mountain, and the promised compensation was also delayed, thus causing dissatisfaction among the villagers, and later the local government came forward to negotiate to solve this problem.
In 2009, some brokerages released news that Zijin Mining would join forces with kazakhstan gold companies.
The next day, Zijin's stock price doubled several times, and many investors were optimistic and invested a lot of money.
However, when the two companies ended cooperation, Zijin failed to issue an announcement at the first time, resulting in heavy losses for many shareholders and causing dissatisfaction with Zijin.
It's much more than that. In the same year, Chen Jinghe fell into a series of turmoil such as tax evasion and stock cash-out.
Some media broke the news that Chen Jinghe and several major shareholders cashed out more than 27 million shares and made profits of more than 100 million. This piece of news is like a stone stirring up thousands of waves, and outsiders have questioned Chen Jinghe and others for tax evasion.
In order to calm the public opinion of the outside world, Chen Jinghe was interviewed by the media, saying that the company's internal management was indeed improper, causing losses to shareholders that he did not want to see, and as for cash-out and other behaviors, it was a shareholder problem, and he himself was unaware.
Chen Jinghe's attitude is constantly lowering, ensuring that Zijin Mining will no longer fail everyone, but his guarantee is a blank check.
In 2010, the mine's wastewater and sewage seeped out, causing pollution in the surrounding waters and killing a large number of fish and shrimp. However, Zijin Mining waited more than 9 days before making it public, which deprived nearby personnel of the best opportunity to recover their losses.
Suddenly, the online media attacked and criticized the company's practices. In order not to let things ferment, Zijin Mining quickly paid out of its pockets and tried to make the media "seal".
In the end, the compensation that the person in charge of the company should compensate, the prison that should be imprisoned, Chen Jinghe himself did not have anything at all.
Although Chen Jinghe was safe and sound in this series of storms, the subsequent impact dimmed his celebrity aura by a few points.
His wife will die, and his wife will be in his arms
In December 2015, his wife Lai Jinlian was unwell and lying in bed in pain, so she rushed to major tertiary hospitals for examination and treatment.
An examination found that Lai Jinlian was already in advanced stages of lung adenocarcinoma. Cancer cells in the lungs have spread to other internal organs, triggering a series of symptoms.
At this time, it was the busy time of large and small enterprises, and Lai Jinlian did not want to disturb her husband, for fear of delaying his work, and instructed her children to hide their illness.
After all, the paper could not contain the fire, and Chen Jinghe soon found his wife's discomfort and took her to Beijing to seek medical treatment and medicine, trying to save her life.
Experts in Beijing jointly consulted and discussed the use of targeted drug therapy, which can not only ensure that the treatment method is not too extreme, but also control the disease and inhibit the spread of cancer cells.
A year has passed, and the wife's illness has been effectively curbed, and the whole family can't help but be overjoyed.
However, the good times did not last long, and Lai Jinlian's condition recurred. This time, she did not survive the torment of the disease.
In 2019, his wife Lai Jinlian passed away. This woman accompanied him step by step, through several spring and autumn, supported his every decision, was his best partner, and was his strongest backing.
Chen Jinghe has long been accustomed to his wife's careful companionship and care, and his wife's death caught him off guard.
Whenever he thinks of the past years, he still unconsciously shed tears, and when he misses the extreme, he even writes a 10,000-word long article for his wife to tell his lovesickness.
In the text, he tells his wife that in the future, when the two get together in another world, he will also be married to her and continue the frontier.
Just when netizens sighed for the love of the husband and wife, Chen Jinghe's actions made everyone stunned.
In 2020, Chen Jinghe, who was already the year of Ershun, met Qian Bing at the annual meeting of Xiamen Enterprises, and after that, quickly completed the wedding with him.
Qian Bing once studied in Fujian, got married and had children, and later had a disagreement with her husband, divorced and went abroad to study, and studied for a master's degree in business administration.
In 2017, after graduating from New York University of Technology, she began to start a business. After three years, she transformed into an elite in the industry, so she was able to meet Chen Jinghe at the annual meeting.
At this time, Qian Bing was young and beautiful, 25 years younger than Chen Jinghe.
Capable and dashing temperament, good eloquence, let Chen Jinghe's eyes light up. Suddenly, Chen Jinghe fell in love, unable to extricate himself, openly pursuing Qian Bing, hoping to enter the marriage hall with him.
At the wedding, Qian Bing clasped Chen Jinghe's hand, looked at him affectionately, and said: "I never believed in love until I met Mr. Chen..."
Then he turned his head to look at the guest friends under the stage, "This marriage can prove that true love can cross and break through the boundaries of age." ”
The relatives and friends present cheered for the couple, but some netizens were not very optimistic about the marriage.
On the one hand, the age difference between the two is too large, and the time of acquaintance is too short, which cannot prove whether the feelings of the two are sincere; on the other hand, Qian Bing's resume seems to have some problems.
Qian Bing's resume shows that she has served as vice president of the channel department of several companies, but this information is not available. Secondly, although she has a company called "Hera Love Health Management", there are many problems in the scope of operation of this company.
The company's main projects are american third-generation IVF, legal third-party assisted reproduction and so on.
Legal third-party assisted reproduction is commonly known as "generation of pregnancy and childbirth", because it involves human ethics, moral laws and other issues, and the domestic praise and criticism are mixed.
In addition to the external doubts and opposition, Chen Jinghe's son Chen Lei is also extremely opposed to his father's "yearless love". But Chen Jinghe has always been persistent and insisted on completing the wedding with Qian Bing. In the end, Chen Lei could only compromise helplessly.
Once upon a time, every step of Chen Jinghe's development was inseparable from his wife Lai Jinlian. It can be said that part of Zijin's achievements are due to her.
Today, Chen Jinghe is pregnant with his wife and continues to develop Zijin Mining with the pressure of public opinion. In 2021, the performance report released by Zijin Mining shows that the company's net profit increased by 140.80% year-on-year.
Due to the current high heat of new energy vehicles, Chen Jinghe's target is to point to lithium mines, attacking mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other countries in one fell swoop. The development of Zijin Mining seems to be more vigorous and powerful.
Chen Jinghe, the story of the "king of the gold mine", also continues.
Resources
[1] "China Youth Network", "63-year-old chairman married 38-year-old wife, and in July has transferred 314 million shares to his son"
[2] "Red Star News", "Behind the 63-year-old chairman marrying the 38-year-old wife: 300 million shares worth of shares have been transferred to the son, the owner of the bride's suspected fertility agency"
[3] China Securities News, the 63-year-old chairman married his 38-year-old wife, and in July, he transferred 314 million yuan of shares to his son! Shares rose 119.28% in 113 trading days