On the night of February 8, 1952, Lu Zuofu, the founder of Minsheng Shipping Company, known as the “Chinese Ship King”, committed suicide by taking sleeping pills.
In the war, he alone, under fire from the Japanese, transported China’s most important industrial equipment to the rear of Sichuan via the Three Gorges. These enterprises constituted China’s industrial lifeblood during the war, and laid the material foundation for the final victory of the war. It was known in history as the “Yichang Retreat”, also known as the “Dunkirk of China”.
Before his suicide, the military representatives had already been stationed at Minsheng, the general manager had been detained, and the seamen’s union, which was in the process of preparing for a de facto takeover, had begun to replace managers and cadres in the personnel department. A large number of company executives and old employees were swept out of the company, and Tao Jianzhong, one of Lu Zuofu’s right-hand men and director of the Minsheng Machinery Factory, was also publicly shot in the crackdown on the rebellion.
In the two days before committing suicide, Lu Zuofu in the company’s study group of agents to do review, tears – even though he was the first batch of capitalists to apply for public-private partnership.
Lu Zuofu’s life of openness and honesty, cleanliness, on the solicitation of bribes officials, corruption and malpractice has always abhorred. But eventually someone exposed him, said he used his private salary income to entertain colleagues, with the intention of “corrupting the cadres”. Lu Zuofu finally chose to die.
In June 1950, at the CPPCC meeting, in the face of capitalists’ concerns about public-private partnerships, the leader reassured that nationalization was “still in the distant future”. But in October 1955, in a speech calling together businessmen and industrialists, the leader made it clear that a socialist transformation was needed. Raw materials, markets, and financing channels must be controlled by the state. There was a very vivid saying at the time: a machine gun mounted on three sides, allowed to go only one side.
There were many who followed in the footsteps of Lu Zuofu. Harbin “with the record” company boss Wu Baixiang, only five years of private school, not much culture, completely by their own hardship and hard work to start from scratch. He lived a particularly simple life, walking to work every day, not concubines do not prostitutes, with the promotion of the share system in the same book, dividends to employees, and the construction of staff hospitals, baths, sports grounds and other welfare facilities. In 1955, the Tongji was converted into a public-private joint venture, and Wu Baixiang, who had a knot in his heart, proposed that the public-private joint venture interest rates were too low, and was consequently beaten as a rightist and brutally criticized during the Cultural Revolution, and hanged himself at the age of eighty.
Guo Linshang, general manager of Shanghai Yongan, China’s largest department store before 1949, was once the richest man in Shanghai. In 1956, the company became a public-private partnership, and in 1966 it became completely publicly owned. Guo Linshang fled to Hong Kong, but was recalled by both sides and was repeatedly criticized at the age of 70. His treasured relics were confiscated, and in order to protect himself, he could only post a slogan on the door of his house: “I am willing to donate all my furniture”, but he was still locked up in the cowshed.
Another famous capitalist in Shanghai, Sin Kuan Seng, was the founder of Kuan Seng Yuen, a leading food company today. Originally a street vendor, he had to struggle for decades to make Kuan Sheng Yuan a well-known brand in China. In April 1952, Sin was forced by workers from his home to pay his wages and confined to his office for two days, after encountering the tax bureau’s demand for payment, he jumped to his death on April 21, 1952 from the Kuan Sheng Yuan building on Nanjing Road.
Due to the large number of capitalists who chose to commit suicide, Chen Yi, then mayor of Shanghai, called them “airborne troops”. In just two months, from January 25 to April 1, 1952, 876 capitalists committed suicide in Shanghai, with an average of more than 10 suicides per day. Moreover, many chose to commit suicide together as husband and wife, or even with the whole family.
The upper echelons had said in late 1956: “It is possible to eliminate capitalism and engage in capitalism again.” “Now the state and joint ventures cannot meet the needs of society, and if raw materials are available and state investment is difficult, private individuals can open factories if society needs them.”
Understanding this statement, one may be able to understand the life and death of a businessman.
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