A few days ago, Chen Zhencong was released from prison early and officially released from prison, ending the disaster of 8 years of imprisonment. The name "Chen Zhencong" may be unfamiliar to everyone, but if you talk about his girlfriend, Gong Ruxin, the former richest woman in Asia, most people should know a little about her story.
Chen Zhencong successfully won Gong Ruxin's trust and admiration by relying on his ability to read feng shui, and cheated 3.2 billion yuan from her in more than ten years. Driven by greed, he attempted to tamper with Gong Ruxin's will after his death, dumping all her family property, and eventually went to jail for revealing the matter.
Image source Ming Pao
The story of Chen Zhencong and Gong Ruxin seems to be just a bloody battle for the inheritance of the rich, but behind this, there is actually a "love-hate entanglement" between Hong Kong's rich and feng shui masters for decades.
Fast forward to 1977, when Chen Zhencong, who was only 18 years old at the time, did not know what feng shui was. Like many young people in Guangdong, Chen Zhencong, a high school graduate, went to Hong Kong to "pan for gold", and he had little culture here to work as a casual worker: dishwasher, waiter, small vendor, and Chen Zhencong, who did not mix well in Hong Kong, soon returned to Guangdong. One day, he stumbled upon a feng shui book in his father's room. The book made Chan think that going to Hong Kong to show feng shui to rich people might be a good business, and the idea changed his fate.
Chen Zhencong, who was halfway out of the house, was not proficient in feng shui at all, and in order to package himself, he started a feng shui teaching class in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. He claimed to be highly accomplished in feng shui, and there were once high-level feng shui masters who taught him skills, as well as feng shui treasure books handed down from his ancestors.
With a half-hanging feng shui and a mouth that can speak well, Chen Zhencong soon made a little reputation in Hong Kong's rich circle, and thus became acquainted with the rich woman Gong Ruxin. Gong Ruxin was helpless to find Chen Zhencong at first, and wang Dehui, the husband who founded Chinachem Group with her, was kidnapped by kidnappers, and after she deposited the ransom of $30 million into a designated bank account as required, Wang Dehui has not been heard from since.
Although the arrested robbers confessed that Wang Dehui had been thrown into the open seas, Gong Ruxin did not want to believe that her husband had died and had been issuing search notices. A firm believer in feng shui, she wanted to find her husband's traces through feng shui masters, and it was at this time that Chen Zhencong appeared. After pretending to be a ghost, Chan told Gong Ruxin that Wang Dehui was not dead, and that he was living on a desert island in eastern Hong Kong. It was this sentence that made Gong Ruxin believe in him from now on.
Twenty years later, Chen Zhencong's autobiography titled "The Story of Congxin" written in prison reveals the scene when the two first met. No compass, no reason to make a mistake, the first time they met, 32-year-old Chen Zhencong showed his massage skills in front of 55-year-old Gong Ruxin, and he used a unique acupuncture point massage to alleviate Xiao Tiantian's long-term headache. When he left Gong's mansion in Repulse Bay, Chan had an extra HK$53,000 check in his pocket – the first feng shui consulting fee he earned here.
The two who meet and hate each other have to talk on the phone more than twenty times a day, and soon cross the "moral boundary" and develop from ambiguity to lover. After Gong Ruxin gave Chen Zhencong more than 100 million Hong Kong dollars to "improve his life", the "empathetic" wife began to fully support her husband's concern for the widowed elderly.
Since then, Chen Zhencong has worked hard to escort Gong Ruxin's career, using a pair of skillful hands at night to brush away xiao tiantian's tiredness, and punching holes in Hong Kong during the day - it is said that Chen Zhencong's trick is to fight feng shui caves (Chen Zhencong has dug hundreds of feng shui caves in more than 30 properties under Gong Ruxin's name before and after). I don't know whether it is because of Xiao Tiantian's outstanding business talent, or Chen Zhencong really has a stroke of genius, by 2007, Chinachem's market value has expanded from about 10 billion Hong Kong dollars when Wang Dehui disappeared to about 40 billion Hong Kong dollars, and Gong Ruxin has also sat in the position of the richest woman in Hong Kong as desired.
From the first massage fee in 1993 to Gong Ruxin's death in 2007, Chen Zhencong earned 3.2 billion yuan in Gong Ruxin in the past fifteen years. It is said that a few days before Gong Ruxin's death, he also remitted a huge amount of 470 million yuan to a company owned by Chen Zhencong. At his peak, Chan held 19 properties, 8 luxury cars, two private luxury yachts and two private jets.
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In April 2007, Gong Ruxin died less than a year after winning the property battle with her father-in-law, leaving behind a fortune of HK$40 billion. In October of the same year, Chen Zhencong appeared in front of the media, saying that he held a will signed by Gong Ruxin in 2006 and was the "sole heir" of the estate.
Chen Zhencong therefore confronted the Chinachem Foundation, in order to prove the authenticity of the will he took out, he described in detail the process of the two people's acquaintance in court, disclosed the details of the private affair, from several videos to the private belongings of the two, and even the gossip weekly scolded Chen Zhencong for not having a lower limit. The Hong Kong media even gave him a nickname of "Chen Pi Duck", which shows how bad Chen Zhencong's wind evaluation was at that time.
In order to pay the sky-high legal fees, Chen Zhencong gritted his teeth and sold his private jet, luxury car and four mansions. During the lawsuit, the Gong family proposed a settlement for him to give him a third of the inheritance; but Chen Zhencong, who dreamed of a hundred billion inheritance, was unwilling to accept it. For the first time in Hong Kong's judicial history, feng shui experts were introduced to testify, together with medical and handwriting identification as supporting evidence. In the end, the jury of the Hong Kong High Court ruled that Chan Chung Chung was convicted of forging the will of the late Chinachem Chairman Gong Ruxin and using false documents, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
However, the story does not end there, and Chen Zhencong is obviously not convinced by the court's decision. During his imprisonment, he continued to delve into legal documents and insisted that the will in his hand was true. In 2018, Chen Zhencong formally filed a civil lawsuit with the Siming People's Court of Xiamen City, accusing eight companies, including Chinachem Charity Fund and Chinachem Group, of serious infringement of his reputation, personality and dignity.
Image source Hong Kong 01
Chinachem Group also accused Chen Zhencong of defaulting on 28 million yuan in legal fees and applied to the court for Chen Zhencong's bankruptcy. Chen Zhencong, who once fished 3.2 billion yuan but is still not satisfied, is now facing the dilemma of not being able to pay even high legal fees, and I don't know if he will feel a little ironic when he recalls the days after he is released from prison.
Although the story of Xiao Tiantian Gong Ruxin being deceived by the feng shui master is somewhat exaggerated, there are many examples of rich people planting in the hands of feng shui masters in Hong Kong. In 2015, according to Hong Kong's Sing Tao Daily, a wealthy Hong Kong businesswoman who ran aquatic products in Guangzhou hired her nephew to work because she mistakenly believed in a feng shui master, saying that her nephew who had just been released from prison would bring good luck. Do you know that the nephew who is rotten and gambling has eaten inside and outside, involved in the name of investment, etc., and has defrauded the female owner of 190 million yuan, resulting in her bankruptcy and debt.
Before and after Chen Zhencong was imprisoned in 2013, a series of cases of feng shui masters cheating money and deceiving color broke out in Hong Kong. Not only do they deceive the rich in Hong Kong, but some people also deceive the rich people in the mainland under the name of "Hong Kong Feng Shui Master". In 2010, a "Master Xu" who claimed to be from Hong Kong and had long been a feng shui consultant to Lee Shau Kee came to Zhuji City, Zhejiang Province, to "read feng shui by fortune tellers" for wealthy women in the city.
In 2012, Ms. Chen, the owner of a large enterprise in Zhuji, was recommended by a friend to go to Master Xu to see feng shui. Master Xu told Ms. Chen that her son would have a big disaster after he turned 27, and ms. Chen spent 250,000 yuan here after a meeting in less than 10 minutes. After returning home, she told her husband about the matter, and the two vaguely felt that something was wrong, so they chose to call the police. After the Zhuji police opened an investigation, a fraud gang under the guise of feng shui fortune telling surfaced: "Master Xu", whose real name was Xu Honghao, was 34 years old, originally from Anhui, and before being packaged as a "master", he was a training instructor who sold cosmetics. In the second half of 2009, after consultation with four other colleagues, he came up with a way to make money, posing as a "feng shui master" to rely on fortune telling to see feng shui to defraud money, and defrauded a total of 7.69 million yuan in more than two years.
Sometimes, however, feng shui masters who are familiar with the fate of others cannot predict their own misfortunes. In 2014, Zheng Guoqiang, known as the "Star Feng Shui Master" in Hong Kong, braved the rain to go to a cemetery in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, to see feng shui for guests, but he encountered a mudslide, and the two were buried alive by the mud with 5 locals in their travels. When rescuers rescued 7 people, Zheng Guoqiang had unfortunately died.
The most obvious reason, of course, is that Hong Kong's rich are too willing to spend money on "feng shui". After the death of Li Ka-shing's wife Zhuang Mingyue, he was heartbroken. After finding the feng shui master Cai Boli, just because of the sentence "Your dead wife died tragically", Li Ka-shing willingly threw 2 million feng shui fees.
In 2019, when the gambling king Ho Hung-sun was critically ill, Hong Kong feng shui master Yu Zhilin revealed in public that the gambling king's relatives had privately sought him out and hoped to spend 5 million yuan to ask him to come out to light the "seven-star lamp" for the gambling king to continue his life, but he was rejected by himself, because he had already renewed his life for the gambling king "seed base" 10 years ago.
Whether it is the life events of marriage and funeral, or the details of life in the residential layout and the placement of objects, of course, it is indispensable to the guidance and correction of business decisions, and the every move of Hong Kong's rich people is closely bound to the feng shui masters.
When Li Ka-shing invested tens of billions of yuan to build the Changshi Center, he heeded Cai Boli's advice and designed it into a boxy "shield" shape to block the sharp edge of the sword-shaped Bank of China Tower next to it. Can repair graves, but also build buildings, most of the top rich people have long-term cooperation with fixed feng shui masters. Where to buy a house and land, when to open and start construction, behind the highly modern Hong Kong enterprises, is the life of the rich bosses who have been arranged by feng shui masters.
Feng Shui theory has existed since ancient times, and now not only in the East Asian cultural circles, but also in European and American business owners have begun to study feng shui, but it is indeed rare for rich people in Hong Kong to be obsessed with feng shui. Southern China has preserved more traditional culture, and after the founding of the People's Republic of China, a large number of feng shui masters have moved to Hong Kong, making feng shui metaphysics a business increasingly prosperous on Hong Kong Island. In addition, living in the geographical environment of the island, isolated from the mainland and surrounded by the ocean, the tight population density of natural resources, the increase in randomness in a highly competitive environment, and the weakening of control over the environment will also prompt more people to believe in feng shui and fortune.
As an international financial center, hong Kong Island has not only been affected by the world economic situation, but also experienced a huge transformation from a colony to a special administrative region in the past half century, which has made Hong Kong's GDP fluctuate sharply. In an unpredictable economic environment, both the rich and the ordinary will have to think more about making money to make a living than ever before. The rich people who have been sinking and floating for half a lifetime will take feng shui as a life-saving straw in this storm, and grasp it in their hands first if it is useful or not.
Because of the firm belief in the feng shui master's statement, the self has a positive psychological hint with faith, and it is inevitable that anyone will be said by the master several times in their lives. Hong Kong businessman Yang Shoucheng, in his autobiography "Fighting for Qi", recounted the magical experience of turning to Chen Lang, the so-called first feng shui master in Hong Kong, when he was full of debts when his investment failed. At that time, Chen Lang pinched his fingers and told him to develop westward, so Yang Shoucheng went to Kuwait to speculate in foreign exchange, and paid off hundreds of millions of debts in only three years, and since then he has taken the words of the feng shui master as a guideline.
Whether the rich can succeed in their careers is because the masters are really skilled, or because the rich people have many years of experience in business and judge properly, it is actually difficult to say. When in crisis, even the most materialistic people will have a rather credible attitude towards feng shui metaphysics. The rich see the vagaries of the mall, and once or twice they are said to succumb to the power of superstition.
And in the special historical context of Hong Kong, whether from a business family or at the end of the last century, it was inevitable to deal with illegal social groups and underground money banks - there is probably no rich man in this world who can guarantee that every sum of money will come to be innocent, and as the rich grow older, the business network spreads across various industries, family members are scattered, and social relations are more complicated.
Pulling a hair and moving the whole body, they are no longer the young people who can desperately take risks in order to fight a gamble, so they are more and more worried that the loss of wealth will affect the foundation of the family business, and in the deepest part of the heart, there is probably a trace of fear of karma that cannot be ignored, at this time, ask the master to calculate feng shui, and then go to the mountain to build a few temples to offer a few Buddhas, which is undoubtedly the best placebo and indulgence for the rich people after middle age.
Placing a turtle in the living room to the door can absorb the breath and suck in the money, and hanging a gourd in the place where there is a gas can dispel the disease and eliminate the disaster. It is probably these rich people who have experienced more hell and heaven than ordinary people trying to convince themselves that in the impermanent fate, there is still the law of feng shui to follow.