Listing the elite
- Source: Global Times
- [10:48 July 27 2010]
- Comments
Rupert Hoogewerf, better known as Hu Run, who publishes the annual Hurun Rich List. Photo: Courtesy of Rupert Hoogewerf
By Liu Sheng
The name Rupert Hoogewerf may be unfamiliar to most people in China, but even the most casual followers of China's upper crust will know his Chinese name - Hu Run, the eponymous title of the country's most famous list of wealthy entrepreneurs.
Born in 1970, Hoogewerf, a native of Luxembourg, has been chronicling the development of China's upper class for more than a decade. The former accountant turned freelance writer turned publisher was the first to bring the idea of a rich list - think of Forbes magazine's annual list of the world's richest people - to China. The idea has made Hoogewerf, or at least Hu Run, a famous name in China as he used the country's wealthiest people to help explain the state of private business in China.
Hoogewerf graduated from Durham University in England in 1993 with a degree in Chinese. In 1997, he transferred to Shanghai where he continued to work as a certified public accountant for four years with Arthur Andersen LLP. During his years in Shanghai, Hoogewerf took notice of the growing number of luxury cars shuttling around Shanghai as a sign of the emerging class of wealthy entrepreneurs, Hoogewerf said during a 2004 interview with the Chinese talk show, Fortune Time.
At first, Hoogewerf was just following his own interest, but as more and more people began to ask him about China's economy, he saw an opportunity.
"Of course I could have told them that China had 8 or 9 percent growth in GDP this year, but to general businessmen and citizens, these figures are too vague to understand China's economy. So I decided to show the economy by means of people and their success stories, which are more interesting," Hoogewerf said in the interview.
Making a list
Hoogewerf compiled his first China Rich List in 1999. He was one of the first people to report on China's wealthiest entrepreneurs through empirical investigation and analysis, and used it as a microcosm for the development of China's broader economy, Qin Shuo, the chief editor of China Business News, wrote in a blurb for Hoogewerf's book, Hurun Rich List - 10 years of Chinese entrepreneurs.
At the beginning, it was not easy. Without any resources, Hoogewerf had trouble getting adequate data. He spent a lot of time in the library reviewing articles in China's mainstream magazines for the previous 10 years, trying to dig up information about China's wealthiest people, one at a time.
When former US president Bill Clinton visited China, the Shanghai government invited him to meet several of the city's entrepreneurs. One of them took a photo with Clinton that ended up on the cover of a prominent magazine. Pictures like that were some of Hoogewerf's first leads into the murky world of China's private businessmen, he said in the interview.
Working by himself, with a staff of two interns from a university in Shanghai, Hoogewerf had no credibility in the upper echelons of the business world, so none of his subjects would meet with him. Without the people, Hoogewerf turned to paper, analyzing their companies' annual financial statements, collecting statistics from the media, and sometimes even getting information from their competitors.
The first rich list, which Forbes published in 1999 contained 50 of China's wealthiest entrepreneurs. Each had to have a personal wealth of at least $10 million. The list was a hit and Forbes continued to publish it until 2002.
