China's elite aim to teach heirs the limits of money

 In a borrowed classroom of the provincial Communist Party School, a newly busy philosophy professor addressed 15 well-groomed adult students. His message: Try to have a soul.

"In China, if you are only rich, people will not respect you. You also need good manners, an outgoing personality and good morals," said Zhang Yinghang of Zhejiang University, a professor increasingly in demand on the lecture circuit. "This is what rich children in China lack."

It was opening day of Jiaye Changqing, or "Family Enterprise Lasts Forever," a weeklong course for the sons and daughters of rich entrepreneurs — especially those sons and daughters who are about to inherit the family business. While the course included standard lessons on management strategy, it was also intended to instill traditional Chinese values in a younger generation schooled in Western, capitalist ways.

In other words, there's more to life than making money.

"The school exists partly because of the only-child syndrome, where little emperors and princes were brought up with everything within their sights. They've never shared anything with anyone else," said Luo Yu, 31, a graduate of the class in Cixi who runs his father's factory, which makes $50 million a year selling valves, pumps and gear boxes to the United States.

Once ridiculed and looked down on, entrepreneurs are now among China's elite. Along the way to wealth, however, many have neglected to show their children what they consider the proper way to behave.

Like many newly rich Chinese, the parents of the students at Jiaye Changqing have worked hard and relied on friends and relatives as business contacts. They have also ridden a wave of economic reform that over the past 20 years has transformed China.

Their children are better educated but unaccustomed to hardship. They spend money freely and return home from studying abroad with strange ideas such as networking with outsiders. Half the students in the course have studied abroad, including one woman who has jetted back and forth to China since age 7 and understood only part of Zhang's lecture.

"Entrepreneurs are leading where society is going, and if this group doesn't understand Chinese culture, it will be very bad for society," Zhang said. "People will be less and less happy, even though they have more and more money."

The founder of Jiaye Changqing, an entrepreneur himself, saw this firsthand.

In crisscrossing China to tell his own success story, Mao Lixiang frequently met tearful parents who didn't know what to do with their children. One son from Anhui province didn't want to study. A scion from a family in Zhejiang province wanted only the best clothes and the fastest cars. Other children simply weren't interested in inheriting their parents' businesses, even though most Chinese who work in the private sector do so for family-controlled companies.

"The badly behaved children don't make up a huge number, but their influence is great and it gives rich people a bad image," said Mao, 67, who began his career as an impoverished, "barefoot" teacher with a high school education. He is now board chairman of Ningbo Fotile Kitchenware, a $178 million appliance company.

Mao made his fortune selling lighters and gave his first company to his daughter. He handed off his appliance company to his son. Now his focus is the school, which he hopes to expand to teach parents and their children.

"Blood is thicker than water. Most Chinese hope their legacy will live on through their children's lives and careers. Every entrepreneur dreams this," said Chen Ling, an economics professor at Zhejiang University, which offers a training course for family-run businesses.

Luo Yu, for one, didn't share the family dream. His father started the Cixi Huili Machinery & Electric Company here in Zhejiang with 30 people in 1988. The company now has 1,100 employees and $50 million in annual revenue.

"When I graduated from university, I had plenty of my own very good ideas. I was very farsighted," said Luo, 31 now general manager of the company. "In 1996, I noticed Cixi didn't have a good florist shop. In 1997, no Internet cafe. In 1999, no coffee bar. All of these things had potential, but my father did not agree."

Gradually, Luo said, he saw his father's sacrifices and understood the importance of a family business. "Why should we give away what we earn through such backbreaking effort to someone else not in the family and in poverty?" the former Jiaye Changqing student said.

Meanwhile, Zhang, who seven years ago couldn't get graduate students at Zhejiang University, has achieved popularity through his lectures at Jiaye Changqing.

For the past year, he has told students that Bill Gates read ancient Chinese classics in middle school. In college, he said, Gates refused to sacrifice sleep to accommodate both his company and his studies. "You should comply with the natural law. ... Don't be so utilitarian." he said.

His students don't always agree. "I think for doing business, utilitarianism and a focus on the bottom line is good," said Ruan Shengliang, 23, who runs a shoe factory in China's southern Guangdong province. "While treating people well and giving them what they want, a businessman also needs to get back what he ought to get."

While older Chinese are trying to impart business lessons to their children, the education sometimes works the other way. Many young Chinese are teaching their parents, for instance, that casual networking with peers can be just as effective as relying on family.

Dong Ming, 26, is vice manager of his father's 400-employee metal machinery factory in nearby Chengzhou. While his father networks at the dinner table, Dong chats online or goes to karaoke bars and teahouses with about 30 friends, all children of wealthy entrepreneurs.

"My father's network is limited by his primary school education," Dong said. "It's mainly clients, government and his entrepreneur friends. Whenever he dined with officials and clients, he asked me to join him. It's important. But I should build my own network. I make friends with the media, with scholars and young people at my own age. You get new ideas from them."

That said, Dong acknowledges the importance of his father's ways and the limits of money.

"To people who already have enough money, $10 million or $100 million doesn't make a lot of difference. We can buy more luxury goods, but actually we can't consume it all. A man driving a BMW who still spits on the road, people will despise him. So money is not the most important thing," Dong said. "My father made our factory the most powerful in our township or city, but I hope to make it influential and respectable within the industry."