BEIJING — China's richest man has amassed a fortune of nearly $2 billion but lives like a frugal accountant.
After leaving his 32-story office tower at night, Huang Guangyu returns to a modest apartment he shares with his wife and two daughters in southwest Beijing. He shuns the golfing craze sweeping China, opting instead for snatches of TV. He says he has no hobbies.
"I don't know what else to do," Huang said.
In the United States, Huang's rise -- from high school dropout to China's richest man -- would be celebrated as a Horatio Alger story. But in China, where corruption is rampant, many believe that the 300,000 people who became millionaires in the last two decades did it the old-fashioned way: stealing from the masses.
The 36-year-old Huang and other nouveaux riches here find themselves at one end of the largest rich-poor gap since the founding of Communist China in 1949. Beijing has been confronted with a rising tide of riots by farmers and poor workers upset about losing their land and factories to robber barons. The protests have spawned calls by some intellectuals to stop what they say is capitalism gone amok.
"We have so many mysterious rich people. Others admire their money but they question the morality of it," said Victor Yuan, a senior analyst at Horizon Research Group in Beijing. "You've got to be rich silently."
Huang, the majority shareholder of retail chain Gome Electrical Appliances, China's version of Best Buy, knows the other side of the wealth divide. The second of four children, he was born in a predominantly Catholic village near Shantou, a coastal city in the southern province of Guangdong that is renowned for its entrepreneurs.
In an interview, Huang recalled growing up hungry. But he was fed plenty of tales by his mother, Zeng Changmin. She recounted the adventures of their ancestors who traveled to Thailand to trade sugar and beans, and share stories from the Bible.
One story appeared to have left a deep impression on him: Jesus' parable of the talents, in which a master rewards two servants who invested gifts of money but punishes a third for burying his grant in the ground.
Huang said he attended Mass weekly. He didn't pray to be rich but wanted to break free from the poverty of his village -- some 300 households that farmed rice and wheat on small plots. People who know Huang said other village children taunted him, his older brother and two younger sisters because they were poorer than their neighbors.
