Wang Jianlin will take to the red carpet on Sunday, flanked by a cast of celebrities, to celebrate a £3 billion investment in the Chinese film industry. Malcolm Moore looks at the rise of China's richest man.
When he was a skinny 15 year-old, he marched on army exercises for two months through snow and ice, covering 750 miles with his gun and ammunition on his back. Now, as China's richest man, Wang Jianlin rarely walks on anything but red carpet.
A household name in China, where his enormous Wanda Plaza shopping centres are the most popular attractions in the 71 cities they grace, Mr Wang has very global ambitions – and has begun one of the largest spending sprees the world has ever seen to achieve them.
His company's war chest, he says, contains £20 billion. On his shopping list are hotels, cinema chains and television stations.
Earlier this year, he announced his company, Wanda, would build a hotel in London to rival the Ritz, the tallest apartment block in Europe on the south bank of the Thames, and that he had snapped up Sunseeker the Poole-based luxury yacht maker, for £320 million. All on the same day.
"We wanted to buy 30 Sunseeker yachts because we are planning to build three marinas here in China. So then we thought it would be a better deal if we just bought the company," said the man whose personal fortune, at £9 billion, is already greater than Rupert Murdoch's.
Today sees the next phase of his plan. This evening, Mr Wang will take to the red carpet in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao, flanked by the likes of John Travolta, Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman, to celebrate a £3 billion investment in the Chinese film industry.
Having become the largest Cinema owner in the world last year – with around 6,000 screens across Asia and the United States, talks under way with both Odeon and Vue to buy his way into the European market and a plan for another 120 Imax screens in China – Mr Wang now wants to make films to show on them.
As he remarked in a recent interview: "If Wanda can control more than 20 per cent of the world's three most important film markets – the United States, Europe and China – then it will have an empire with great voice in the industry."
So far, Mr Wang has kept the details of his £3 billion investment closely guarded. But as well as a giant new film studio, his spokesman has confirmed that the money will pay for the construction of a theme park like the Universal Studios complex in Orlando, Florida.
In order to underline his commitment, and to win friends on the other side of the Pacific, Mr Wang has also made a $20 million (£12.5 million) donation to a new film museum being built by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, in order to stamp the Wanda name on a gallery of film history.
For Hollywood, it is the second coming in terms of foreign investment, after the Japanese arrived at the end of the 1980s, when Sony bought Columbia and Matsushita bought Universal Studios.
For Mr Wang, it is all a far cry from his youth in the People's Liberation Army when, in his own words, he had to "scramble to eat". "The hardship then was unimaginable," he said.
Born the eldest of five brothers in Sichuan province, Mr Wang was the son of a Red Army hero. After serving in the New Fourth Army, one of the two main Communist forces during "liberation", his father rose up to become a senior official in Sichuan province, the deputy director of the Organisation department, the Communist party's HR division, and then the vice chairman of the Tibetan government according to China Entrepreneur magazine.
When Mr Wang decided to join up, his father was able to pull strings for him.
"I was born in a family with a strong military background, so I chose to be a soldier. Back then you needed connections to get into the PLA or I wouldn't have been able to join at the age of just 15," he said in an interview in 2009 that was later collected into a book.
The contrast between his parents' revolutionary Communism and his new status as China's richest man has tickled some observers.
"I'm not sure if everyone knows that Jianlin's father is a Red Army veteran," said Liu Chuanzhi, the head of the computer company Lenovo, when handing Mr Wang an award in 2010. "The Red Army wanted to subvert the rich entirely. Now his son has become the richest of people. I would like to ask how you and your father talk at home. Does he detest you or like you?"
Mr Wang, stunned, answered that when China moved to a market economy, his parents, along with many revolutionary cadres, were "slowly disregarded".
"The cadre retirement home they originally lived in was not very nice. At the same time, Dad was getting old. I prepared a better home for him, prepared a driver for him. Life was better. So later I asked my parents which is better: relying on the institution or relying on your son? They said it themselves: relying on their son was better. Although their goal in the past was to undermine the rich, now they wholly feel having money is better than not having it," he said.
When the Chinese army was slimmed down in the mid 1980s, Mr Wang was decommissioned. "My dream at first was to be a soldier, but I was among the million who were disarmed, so I went to do business," he said earlier this month.
His dreams of being a general dashed, he joined the local government in the northern city of Dalian. But the life of a government official was also not for him. "If I had stayed on in that, I would be a district mayor or vice mayor of the city now. That is not interesting to me," he once told the Beijing News.
Moving into his mother-in-law's house, he took a job at a debt-ridden property developer and quickly became the general manager, changing the company's name.
From there, he scrapped for property deals and endeared himself to local government officials by promising that he could complete his projects remarkably rapidly – within 18 months – so that officials could reap the political dividends before the promotion cycle took them onwards.
Mr Wang's shopping centres focused on China's rising middle class, offering them designer brands, top restaurants, karaoke bars and cinemas. They became wildly popular and he was able to then sell apartments and office space in the giant developments at premium prices. With the support of China's state banks, he has also become famous for his ability to pounce on a bargain. As property prices plummeted during the financial crisis, Mr Wang snapped up more than £1 billion of bargain sites to develop.
He continues to run the company with military rigour. "In our company if I make a decision and you do not carry it out immediately, you need to pay a fine. The basic principle is I command and my employees carry it out immediately," he said.
Soon, Mr Wang had grown wealthy. He was able to send his now 25-year-old son Sicong to school at Winchester College and was one of the first businessmen in China to own a private jet. Local officials began coming to him to ask for Wanda to open a shopping complex in their cities.
"China is a government-oriented economy. No one can say he can run his business entirely without government connections. Anybody who says that he or she can do things alone with any connection with the government in China is a hypocrite," he told the World Economic Forum in Dalian earlier this month.
"But you cannot hook up with government officials too closely. Don't ally your personal interests with the development of the company," he cautioned.
That lesson appears to have shielded Mr Wang from the fallout from the trial of Bo Xilai, who became the acting mayor of Dalian in the same year that Mr Wang took charge of Wanda.
By coincidence, Mr Bo will be sentenced on the same day as Mr Wang unveils his film project, in a courtroom in the same province, just 220 miles away.
The billionaire has had to face dozens of questions in the past few years about his connections to the Bo family. He maintains that his relationship with Mr Bo was strictly business.
And while Mr Bo's star has ebbed, Mr Wang's is still rising.
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