After Cho Tak Wong took over the major auto glass producer and exporter, Fuyao Glass Industry, he managed to grow the business to levels it had not reached before, expanding not just the auto glass company’s reach but also his own personal fortune. Cho Tak Wong made it to the 99th place in this year’s Forbes list of China’s Top 400 richest entrepreneurs, having amassed a personal fortune that is estimated at an astounding $1.2 billion. Yet the auto glass mogul has more to his record than mere money-making: he also ranked 2nd on the Forbes China Philanthropy List for this year, proving that money-making is not always about money-taking.
The list of top Chinese philanthropists was published in the Chinese-language version of the Forbes magazine and showed Wang Jianlin, the chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, as the top philanthropic figure in China for 2011. Apparently, Jianlin had donated an estimated 1.28B yuan, which converts to US$197M, to various charities and organisations. Jianlin himself made it to this year’s Forbes list of billionaires, coming in at #232 with a personal wealth of $4.6B—no small change, to be sure.
Jianlin was followed in the philanthropy list by Cho Tak Wong, whose estimated donations to philanthropic causes has been set at 1.03B yuan, which would be US$158B. Cho Tak Wong was recently interviewed by Tang Weiwei of Forbes China regarding his remarkable and long-standing involvement in charity work. Cho Tak Wong spoke of his father’s achievements before him during the interview and remarked that perhaps there was some truth to the saying that entrepreneurial skill could be transmitted across generations by the vector of blood and heredity.
He also recalled the disastrous times when his family had to journey from Shanghai to Fuzhou with all their worldly possessions in a single boat, which haplessly sank before reaching them. As a result, said Cho Tak Wong, his mother had sell a great many of her jewellery pieces so that they would survive in the new location. Cho Tak Wong himself recalls having to sell tobacco with his father for money: a perilous task in the 1970s because the sale of tobacco was severely punished at the time by the Chinese government. The auto glass billionaire suggested that the hardships he had experienced during that time predisposed him to being more conscious of the troubles others had to undergo.
Now, the auto glass mogul has donated as much as $40M to his hometown alone, specifically for the repair and construction of temples in the area. Cho Tak Wong compared charitable actions and thoughts based on his religion (Buddhism) to flow like water from a central source, and claimed to be ever conscious of his responsibilities as a member of society.
