In 2000, *Rich Dad Poor Dad* Got Chinese People Thinking About Money | What Bestsellers Show Us About China ②

In part this is a look back at the stories behind these legendary books. But the bigger question is this: why did we end up with the society we have today? What have we been through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?

A society gets the book market it deserves.

We picked a number of books that have had a major impact in China, tracked down the authors or editors involved at the time, and asked them to tell the story of each one.

In part this is a look back at the stories behind these legendary books. But the bigger question is this: why did we end up with the society we have today? What have we been through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?

This is the second book in the series.

1

In 1997, Robert T. Kiyosaki, a Japanese-American businessman, wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad. He built it on the "Cashflow" board game he had invented and on cases he collected from a wide swath of the American middle class. In the book he draws on his own life, calling his biological father "poor dad" and a friend's father "rich dad." What separated the two was how they thought about money. In the end Kiyosaki took his rich dad's view — "don't be a slave to money; make money work for you" — learned to use the power of capital, and became rich himself. In short, it is a book that teaches you how to manage money and get rich.

Unfortunately, many American publishers turned the book down. Editors found it "too rambling," "not very deep," "a long way from being a real book." Kiyosaki ended up publishing it himself.

In 1999, Ma Qingyang, head of the copyright department at the World Book Distribution Company, met a copyright agent at the Frankfurt Book Fair who pitched Rich Dad Poor Dad. Ma later looked the book up on Amazon and found it ranked 17th among the 3.7 million titles on the site; the books Ma had handled before ranked only in the tens of thousands. After talking it over with colleagues, they decided to buy the rights.

There was a condition attached: the first print run had to be 50,000 copies. For a business book at the time that was no small number, and it meant the publisher would have to put up nearly a million yuan before selling a single copy.

More to the point, China had established its market economy system less than a decade earlier, and the country was still in a commodity era. Buying goods to hold their value was the common wisdom, and saving was how people managed their money. Rich Dad Poor Dad, a book preaching investment as the way to make money, seemed a long way from what Chinese readers wanted or believed. That is why the five other domestic publishers competing with World Publishing Corporation for the rights all dropped out.

In 2000, to spread the risk, Chen Fei, who ran the finance editorial office at World Publishing Corporation's Beijing company and had already been turned down by five houses, went to Tang Xiaoming, then playing the stock market, and asked him to co-publish Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Tang read the manuscript and thought the book was unlike the bestsellers then on the market — it was "more philosophical." "In 1999 and 2000, the finance books that sold well in China, or reasonably well, were all technical books that taught you directly how to trade stocks, buy property, trade gold, trade foreign exchange and so on," Tang told QDaily.

Tang thought "the content had real force to it" — that the rich don't work for money, that wealth keeps polarizing and why. He put in 800,000 yuan and decided to publish Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Until then Tang had never worked in publishing and "didn't understand publishing." In 1978, at 16, he entered the mathematics department at Sichuan University. Four years later he stayed on to teach, the youngest teacher in the department. The 1980s brought China a wave of "culture fever," and like many young people of that era Tang loved Western philosophy and poetry. He wrote poems himself, published them in magazines such as Poetry Monthly (《诗刊》), and later brought out collections including Experimenting on Myself (《试验自己》).

But 1980s idealism could not hold out against economic pressure. Tang lived in a young teachers' dormitory, four to a room, with holes where the windows should have been, and earned 60 to 70 yuan a month. Money was so tight that he once went six months working in nothing but a pair of flip-flops, until his department head asked him, "How is it you don't even own a pair of shoes?" "To get out from under the money pressure, I couldn't go on being a teacher," Tang recalled in a media interview.

"At the time a million-strong army was heading to Shenzhen and Hainan to make its fortune." Tang, who felt his mathematics degree had "little use," first won a place in the econometrics graduate program at Renmin University of China, then became a civil servant at the State Education Commission. In 1992, the year of Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour, he finally made the jump into business and entered China's earliest securities market. After investing in electronics, culture, building materials and other sectors, Tang completed his run from poet to teacher to civil servant to businessman, and became one of those who "got rich first."

2

Having decided to publish Rich Dad Poor Dad, Tang first set up the Beijing Dushuren Culture and Art Company, then took charge of the book's planning team. "We worked hard at the marketing," Tang said.

Rich Dad Poor Dad came out in September 2000, just as the Beijing International Book Fair opened. The project team took booths on all three floors of the exhibition hall and covered them in cover posters. They also built a two-meter-tall paper copy of the book, which drew heavy press coverage. In mid-September the team held a press conference at Xinhua News Agency and invited a long list of media outlets and organizations to build momentum. Xinhua then put out a wire story that evening papers around the country reprinted. In October, during the Nanjing national book fair, the team lined up coverage in outlets such as Xinmin Evening News (《新民晚报》) and Jiangsu Business Daily (《江苏商报》). After the order fair, more than 200 outlets had written about the Rich Dad Poor Dad series, and the buzz turned into a wave.

The most important thing this campaign sold was a concept: financial quotient, or FQ. The series' main slogan was "IQ, EQ, FQ — you can't do without any of them."

In 2001, CCTV's Dialogue (《对话》) devoted an episode to the book, called "Dialogue on Financial Quotient." Its guests were Liu Chijin, then vice president of Nokia China; Song Nannan, vice president of Huanle Media; Yang Huaiding, the famous retail stock investor known as "Yang Baiwan," or Millionaire Yang; and Zhong Jianfu, a freelancer.

Each stood for one of the four types of people in Kiyosaki's book: employee, business owner, investor and self-employed worker. Kiyosaki came on stage to join the discussion and took questions from the studio audience. Social media did not yet exist, and television was still the most powerful mass medium. Dialogue's ratings at the time matched those of Tell It Like It Is (《实话实说》), another of CCTV's biggest programs. Kiyosaki also gave talks on financial quotient at the Beijing International Convention Center, Tsinghua University and elsewhere, and drew crowds.

The episode landed hard enough that the Dialogue production team later joined the Rich Dad Poor Dad project team to stage spoken dramas and theatrical shows, which toured Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Chengdu and other major cities for more than a hundred performances. That same year the project team opened its first financial quotient summer camp in Beijing's Shijingshan district; founded a financial quotient education research institute with Renmin University of China; launched the "Rich Dad" Financial Quotient Network; and ran a survey of high school and college students' financial literacy with Beijing Evening News (《北京晚报》), among other ventures.

The team also held forums on financial quotient in 12 cities, under the banner "Raising National Financial Literacy." "After a dozen-odd big cities, we finally got this concept of 'financial quotient,' this kind of wisdom, into the lives of a lot of families and businesses," Tang told QDaily.

The concept won backing from economists of the day, Liu Wei and Wang Guogang among them. "The economy was in an adjustment period and fairly sluggish, so people wanted ways to stimulate it," Tang said. Rich Dad Poor Dad urged people to start businesses and invest, which fit exactly what China wanted at the time.

The Rich Dad Poor Dad team was also early to build a customer database. It ran a reader campaign with CITIC Bank offering a "50,000-yuan investment opportunity" as the prize; opened a "Rich Dad" hotline; and set up a phone club, a readers' club, a press club and a special club. Within a few months it had gathered a loyal base of some 6,000 people.

In 2001 Tang founded the Beijing Financial Quotient Education and Training Center, and later the Financial Quotient Group, which sold adult and youth financial quotient education, books, games and courses. "From the start we didn't treat this as just a book. We treated it as a social need. Given that need, what service should we provide? In a way the market pushed us along."

Media reports at the time called Rich Dad Poor Dad the first Chinese finance bestseller truly led by marketing. The better-known finance bestsellers before it were Bill Gates's The Road Ahead (1996) and Chen Huixiang's Why Lenovo (《联想为什么》, 1997) — Chen was then being called "China's first empirical researcher of enterprises" and "Mr. Why." But none of those books took marketing as seriously, or spent as much on it, as Rich Dad Poor Dad did.

The timing helped. Rich Dad Poor Dad came out in 2000, in the middle of China's sixth bull market. The Shanghai Composite Index climbed from 1,047 points on May 19, 1999, to a record 2,245 on June 14, 2001. Then came a bear market of more than four years, down to 998 points in June 2005, and after that another bull run of more than two years that carried the index to 6,124 points in October 2007. After 2000, as China's real-estate industry took off, the old habits of buying goods to hold value and saving to manage money broke down too.

In a sense, the Chinese love of money, and the Chinese attention to investment returns, started at scale in these years.

3

After it came out in China, Rich Dad Poor Dad sat at the top of several bestseller lists and sold more than 2 million copies. In under a year Tang received over 10,000 letters from readers of every age, from all over the country.

"Shocked" was the word that came up most often in them. "They found that they could do something, learn something, find a way to change themselves," Tang told QDaily.

The book changed Tang's own life too. He moved into publishing, going on to put out Who Moved My Cheese?, The Pyramid Principle, Road to Heaven (《空谷幽兰》), The Character of China (《中国的品格》) and The Lost Martial Arts World (《逝去的武林》), and founded the Financial Quotient Group to run financial quotient courses.

The "Rich Dad" franchise was too valuable to waste, of course. Kiyosaki went on to publish more than twenty further books in the series. By 2012 it had been distributed in 109 countries and regions and sold more than 30 million copies.

In China, Tang brought in almost the whole "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" series. Add up their Chinese sales and the total runs to "tens of millions of copies," with "about half of them selling over a million each." For comparison, Keigo Higashino, probably China's hottest-selling author today, has sold 19 million copies across his 47 books in China.

Two books in the series were co-written with Donald Trump, then a real-estate mogul and now the president of the United States: Why We Want You to Be Rich (《让你赚大钱》) and Midas Touch (《点石成金》). Even the terms we now take for granted — "financial quotient," "financial freedom" — come out of this series.

In the United States, Rich Dad Poor Dad stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for six years and got Kiyosaki onto Oprah's talk show. Its main readers were the American middle class.

As Kiyosaki saw it, they were stuck inside the banking system for life. They worked, drew salaries, took out loans, paid credit card bills, bought insurance, funds, pensions — small screws in a money machine run by a handful of rich people. Wall Street's rich and the U.S. government, through taxes, funds, pension insurance and wealth-management products, stripped away the wealth the middle class had saved, step by step. The middle class grew poorer and thinner on the ground, and the gap between rich and poor widened.

The idea hit hard at what the American middle class believed. Having hit it, Kiyosaki offered his own way out: raise your financial quotient through financial education. To Americans, who have always prized individual striving and the American Dream, that was simple, forceful and very much to their taste.

China at the time was also in a period of fast economic growth and change. Look at annual growth in GDP per capita and 1999 turns out to be the turning point; after it came more than a decade of rapid growth. By 2001, when Rich Dad Poor Dad was published in China, Chinese people were keenly aware of how fast the wealth of the people around them was changing. Yang Baiwan, the Dialogue guest mentioned above, was a case in point: he was seen as a textbook beneficiary of China's market economy. On the show, question after question from the audience came back to how to make money. One woman asked Kiyosaki to talk her father into letting her go all out and make real money, instead of living by the rules as she did then.

"China is the best place to invest. If you don't grow your knowledge now, you will miss the biggest opportunity in history. You live in the best country, the best place. If you want to get rich, now is the time," Kiyosaki said on the program.

Plenty of Chinese people believed him, filled with a kind of optimism as they started investing and going into business. Tang's view was that many Chinese people had thought "whether you make money or not mostly comes down to fate," while Rich Dad Poor Dad offered "a scientific method" — a way to "train yourself so you don't stay this poor."

You might call this a textbook case of success-worship logic. And in fact Rich Dad Poor Dad belongs to the self-help genre and carries a strong inspirational streak. It pins the solution to the problem on individual effort alone — study hard and anyone can succeed, and make life and the future better — and leaves out institutions and culture.

But the popularity of such books in both China and the United States is no accident. The gulf between rich and poor that Rich Dad Poor Dad set out to address is exactly where the two countries resemble each other. By the Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality — the higher the figure, the wider the gap — both China and the U.S. sit above 0.4, while the major developed countries of Europe fall between 0.24 and 0.36. So it is not hard to see why self-help titles make up 34 percent of China's print book market, against 5.7 percent in Germany. And 37 percent of those Chinese self-help books come from the United States, a big exporter of the genre.

In a China growing fast and changing hard, with a widening wealth gap and limited social welfare, then, Rich Dad Poor Dad selling as it did was no surprise. Economists' research finds that the income gap between the children of high- and low-income Chinese families comes mainly from differences in education, work experience and the type of employer — which makes educational fairness one route to narrowing the wealth gap, and the single most effective and important factor in social mobility. China's lack of an inheritance tax is another reason the gap persists.

Kiyosaki's own answer was education too — financial quotient education in particular. Financial quotient, in his view, is the secret to getting rich, and the lack of it leads to poverty. Financial quotient education is the key to raising it, and the existing school system, he argued, cannot provide it.

Even Tang doesn't entirely agree with him. "I think the best relationship to have with money is a partnership. Kiyosaki wanted to be money's master. But a lot of people who say they're money's master are still money's slave. If you spend every day thinking about how to make money breed money, handing money assignments, you're still working for money." Tang said this in a media interview after twelve years on the bestseller lists, and after building a fresh round of business on "financial quotient."

Books planned for this series:

The Ugly Chinaman (《丑陋的中国人》, 1986)

China Can Say No (《中国可以说不》, 1996)

Rich Dad Poor Dad (2000)

Who Moved My Cheese? (2001)

Jack: Straight from the Gut (《杰克·韦尔奇自传》, 2001)

Unhappy China (《中国不高兴》, 2009)

Wild Fire (《野火集》, 1988)

The Birth of Tragedy (《悲剧的诞生》, 1986)

Tolerance (《宽容》, 1985)

The Path of Beauty (《美的历程》, 1981), and others

Cover image source: Douban