Learn From Entrepreneurial Story -- Chen Jiageng, An Overseas Chinese Leader

Chen Jiageng is an outstanding overseas Chinese leader in modern China and a famous industrialist.

He used all the money accumulated in his life to set up a school.

Not only did he set up a very large scale in China.

Mention Mr. Chen Jiageng, it is estimated that many people will not feel strange.

In our history textbook, he is a frequently mentioned name, not only because of his

Today, stroll around the famous Xiamen University, and look at the most beautiful institutions in the country, one brick, one stone, which is filled with emotion. These are the fruits of Mr. Chen Jiageng's education.

There are many rich people, but like Chen Jiageng, he spent all his hard-earned money on education, and supported China's construction, no matter how bankrupt the company was, so the Chinese people would miss him so much and give him so high.

A young boy who is in debt with his father's hometown

In October 21, 1874, Chen Jiageng was born in Jimei village, Tongan County, Fujian. Because of the continuous war, many people went to South Asia to make a living. This became a famous hometown of overseas Chinese.

Chen Jiageng's family is also an overseas Chinese family. When he was born, his father was in Singapore, running a rice shop and a small factory.

From his childhood, he was raised by his mother alone.

Southern Fujian has a very glorious history.

From the national hero Zheng Chenggong to Lin Zexu, who sells cigarettes in Humen, these stories have left a very deep influence in the heart of Xiao Jia.

Jimei village also has Zheng Chenggong's "surname village" and "Guo surname well". In the legend of the older generation, Chen Jiageng was full of admiration for these patriotic heroes from an early age.

The corruption and incompetence of the Qing government made him eager to serve the motherland at an early date.

In 1890, Chen Jiageng was 17 years old, and his father wanted him to come to Singapore to see the world. So he left his hometown and left his mother to go to Nanyang alone.

Although the bustle of the city is a temptation, he stays unmoved and stays in the shop honestly. He follows his old fellow to learn how to manage, and soon becomes his father's left and right hands.

In 1898, her mother died, and Chen Jiageng, who heard the news, returned home immediately to bury her mother.

Before departure, he handed over his own account to his uncle.

His father ran smoothly and had assets of about 350 thousand yuan.

But when Chen Jiageng returned to Singapore after 3 years of mourning, he found that the once prosperous rice shop had been left behind, and its liabilities had reached about 300000 yuan.

It turned out that the father's concubine was born with Chen Jiageng's absence, so he was wasting his debts and faced with the brink of bankruptcy.

Under the law of Singapore, the son does not have to repay his father's debt, and Chen Jiageng is penniless and how to pay it, but he was deeply educated in his father's desolation, or took the debt and inherited the mess, at the time he was less than 31.

From then on, the outstanding entrepreneur began his own independent business trip.

Pineapple "Sultan" and rubber King

The journey alone is extremely difficult.

Chen Jiageng has only a little money in his hands to invest in what he can succeed. After careful investigation, Chen Jiageng found that the pineapple can sell well, and the cycle is short and the funds needed are not many, which is very consistent with his own situation.

So he decided to build a canned pineapple factory.

With insufficient funds, Chen Jiageng borrowed 7000 yuan to start a pineapple canning factory in the freshwater mountain area 10 miles away from downtown Singapore.

All the provinces were saved and saved, and the borrowed 7000 yuan was barely enough to build factories.

The white iron and sugar bars needed for making pineapple can be sold to other merchants.

There is no problem in starting up.

When the pineapple came into the market in April, Chen Jiageng's "new Lichuan" factory began to produce. In order to win the competition, Chen Jiageng named its trademark "pineapple" "Sultan", meaning the king of pineapple canned food.

Under the careful management of Chen Jiageng, the cannery works well, the sales are bullish, and the accounting results at the end of the month are net profit of more than 9000 yuan.

Not only did we recover all the investment in our factories, but we also had surpluses, and the economic benefits were enormous.

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Chen Jiageng won the first battle from the desperate situation. He took the "new Lichuan" as a foothold and ran a new moon pineapple plant which was a partnership between his father and his company. Then he set up the modest rice, and the rice shop was also the business organ of the canning factory.

As the pineapple canned business is getting bigger and bigger, the demand for pineapple is growing. In order to solve this problem, Chen Jiageng bought a piece of open space near the "new Lichuan" and used to plant pineapple, named "Fukuyama garden". In fact, in the summer of 1906, when the pineapple jar fell sharply, Chen Jiageng could barely keep the profit of 10 thousand yuan. This attack made him realize that shopping malls, like battlefields, could not adapt to the changing market, and he was looking for new projects.

By chance, Chen Jiageng realized that a rubber merchant sold his rubber garden at a high price. He immediately realized that it was an opportunity, so he quickly contacted the businessman and bought 180 thousand rubber seeds from him.

At that time, because of the depression of pineapple business, many people came out of their pineapple garden. Chen Jiageng took advantage of this opportunity to buy a lot of land, which became his rubber plantations later.

By 1913, Chen Jiageng's pineapple production accounted for more than half of Singapore's total and jumped to the top. It really became the industry's Sultan. This year, he was already an overseas Chinese entrepreneur with two rubber plantations, four pineapple canning plants, a rice mill, a rice shop, fixed assets and a net profit of 4.5 million yuan.

However, the market is changing. In the autumn of 1914, when the pineapple canned production season arrived, the first World War broke out, and European countries restricted access to pineapple cans.

So the foreign businesses stopped purchasing.

Chen Jiageng's Pineapple cannery was hit hard, and tens of thousands of boxes of products could not be sold.

Not only that, the war also brought trouble to Chen Jiageng's rice industry, especially when many merchant ships were attacked by German warships in the eastern India ocean, and almost all of the strained shipping stopped.

There are more than 10 thousand bags of cooked rice in the warehouse of Chen Jiageng rice mill.

The direct consequence of product backlog is the difficulty of capital circulation. The rent of factory rent can not be repaid, and the cost of living of workers must not be defaulted.

Chen Jiageng was trapped in the "hard maintenance, day after year" situation.

In the winter of 1914, Chen Jiageng finally sold all the goods.

At that time, he decided to operate the shipping industry decisively. He first leased the 1300 Wanda ships and 2500 Wanda Wanda ships, which were loaded by the chartered vessels, and pported the large demand of cooked rice to India for sale.

Soon, because of the expansion of the market, he added 2 more ships to undertake the goods of the British government.

He evaluated the situation and promptly changed his business strategy to win considerable profits.

Only a year later, it made a profit of about 200000 yuan.

After that, many ships were purchased, but they did not operate in person, but they were leased to the French government, which not only saved things, avoided risks, but also made profits very quickly.

In 1916, Chen Jiageng made epoch-making measures.

At that time, European countries fought each other to provide a rare opportunity for the US economy to take off.

The rapid development of American industry stimulated the demand of rubber products, and led the rubber industry in Malaya to become a pillar industry, and output ranked first in the world.

Malaya has become the "Rubber Kingdom" in the world.

Chen Jiageng's previous investment has finally been rewarded, and he has been included in the annals as recognized as one of the four heroes of the Malaya Rubber Kingdom.

Over the next 2 years, Chen Jiageng gradually shifted his focus to the rubber industry. He changed the pineapple canning factory and Heng Mei rice mill in Singapore to the "modest" rubber factory, and made the rubber cloth from a single farming to industrial manufacturing.

Then he tried to get in touch with the rubber industry association of the United States, and did the advertising in the United States, and sold most of the products of the "modest" rubber factory to the United States.

In this way, he made second leaps: to integrate rubber, agriculture, trade and trade, and to create a precedent for the direct trade between overseas Chinese and foreign merchants in the British rule of Singapore for a hundred years.

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During the first World War, Chen Jiageng not only did not suffer losses, but also was safe and sound. By relying on rice, gum, shipping and selling iron sheets stored in canned pineapple plants, Chen Jiageng earned a total of about 4500000 yuan, deducting all kinds of expenses and saving 4 million 300 thousand yuan in assets.

It quickly became one of the richest Singaporeans, and became a famous entrepreneur and an overseas Chinese tycoon in Singapore.

Dissipate wealth for Education

After World War I, Chen Jiageng realized that the danger and temporary nature of shipping industry had not continued. He began to expand his Rubber Kingdom.

In 1919, with the extensive application of rubber products, British investors continued to seize the market in Malaya. The powerful overseas Chinese businessmen and small owners also changed their rubber plantations or set up small rubber factories, and the competition became more and more intense.

Faced with the challenge, Chen Jiageng adjusted himself to achieve third leaps: he expanded the scale of the "modest" rubber factory, changed the crude processing plant into a deep processing rubber maturing factory, and retired from 3 rubber companies who invested 500 thousand yuan in two years ago, and set up Chen Jiageng company to list him under the name of the rubber general company.

In 1922, the capitalist free competition led to market depression. Rubber prices declined for 3 consecutive years, and many small-scale rubber plantations and rubber factories were forced to stop production.

At that time, Chen Jiageng company was very bold. He concluded that the rubber industry is a new industry, and the good scenery is still ahead.

After inspecting all parts of Malaya, Chen Jiageng bought 9 rubber factories at once.

In 1924, he set up more than 10 rubber stores in Malaya and Indonesia, and then set up branches, branches or offices in other places.

The aim is to expand product sales and raw material sources and reduce losses caused by intermediate links.

This year, the British government, in order to raise the price of rubber in the international market, monopolized profits from it, implemented rubber production restrictions in Singapore and Malaya, and achieved remarkable results in the past second years. In addition, with the rapid development of the US automobile industry, rubber prices rose substantially.

This year is the peak of Chen Jiageng's rubber industry. In the British Secretary's survey of Singapore's industry, he also referred to Chen Jiageng's company as the "largest enterprise in Asia".

At the same time, Chen Jiageng did not forget his hometown Jimei, Fujian.

He believed that the purpose of revitalizing industry and commerce was to serve the country, but the key to serving the country was to advocate education, so "determined to gain wealth and education through life".

In 1893, when he was 20 years old, he started a "Qi Qi school" in his hometown.

In 1913, he founded the Jimei primary school.

Later, he and his younger brother, Mr. Chen Jingxian, worked together to raise funds and run schools. The scale of their schooling continued to expand. They founded schools and Xiamen University in Jimei, including kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, teachers' schools, fisheries, navigation, commerce, agriculture and forestry. They supported more than 110 schools in 20 counties and cities in Southern Fujian Province, and sponsored and sponsored many schools such as Dao Nan primary school, AI Tong Primary School, Chung Fu primary school, South Vietnamese middle school, South Vietnamese normal school aquatic navigation and so on.

He spent more than one hundred million dollars on education, almost equal to all his family wealth.

People call Mr. Chen Jiageng "school master" affectionately.

Some people say that Chen Jiageng has run so many schools just to improve his reputation. But Chen Jiageng does not run this school.

He did not regard it as a capital, but on the contrary he made enormous sacrifices.

Since 1926, Chen Jiageng has made a lot of efforts to maintain the funding of Jimei schools and Xiamen University.

In the absence of funds, he even sold rubber plantations at a low price.

In October 1929, the capitalist world economic crisis broke out.

The biggest export of Singapore and Malaya is rubber and tin, the largest buyer is the United States.

The depression in the United States caused the Great Depression of the new, Malaysia rubber and tin industries.

But Chen Jiageng has provided funds for schools in Jimei and Xiamen up to 900 thousand yuan.

At that time, Chen Jiageng company owed nearly 4 million yuan of bank debt.

The company's assets are only about 2000000 yuan and are insolvent.

The creditor bank led by the British HSBC asked Chen Jiageng to stop supporting the financing of Jimei Xiamen University, and was flatly rejected by Chen Jiageng.

He thought he could not and should not give up his obligation. If the school was built up, it would have to be maintained. Once the door was closed, there would be no hope of recovery.

If schools are shut down, they will not only delay the future of young people, but also have a bad influence on society.

If the business is failed due to the burden of the school, this is the ups and downs of individual business.

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In 1932, Chen Jiageng's hard founded business was finally closed. Although his career ended, Chen Jiageng never regretted it, because he successfully founded so many schools, especially the Xiamen University and Jimei schools.

In August 21, 1961, this great entrepreneur and educator died in Beijing.

At the time of his stay, he still eagerly expects Taiwan to return to the motherland, and instructs to "run the Jimei school" and dedicate 3 million yuan to the country.

In order to thank all these years for his immortal contribution to the country, People's Republic of China has given its burial to the state. The coffin has been pported back to Jimei and buried in its hometown to comfort the once brilliant and selfless patriotic overseas Chinese.

The secret of Chen Jiageng's success lies in the guidance of his father's father and his diligence and diligence.

To run schools for the benefit of the nation and the people is of great benefit to future generations.