"So What If You've Climbed Everest?" The Making of a "Mature" Wang Shi | "Ten Years" ⑦

In ten years, Wang Shi's nation and his company changed beyond recognition. So did his confidence

Wang Shi began to "mature" at 57.

Before that, Wang Shi would say, "I'm a famous entrepreneur — I've been to the top of Everest." To many people, 2008 was the turning point in China's fortunes: the Wenchuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympics and the great-power rise behind them, and, in the give and take between them, a global financial crisis that added still more to China's inexplicable confidence. That year, Wang Shi was 57, and he has said again and again since that it was his darkest hour.

That year, what he said about the Wenchuan earthquake and the giving that followed offended a great many people.

So-called maturity, like everything people say about a boy leaving adolescence, means no longer saying whatever comes to mind, learning to compromise, moving from what you "want" to do to what you "should" do…

One of China's most famous entrepreneurs has "matured." What does that actually mean? Ten years on, Wang Shi is still deep inside it, and may not yet have had time to look at it whole and calmly.

Some words have come to nothing. Wu Xiaobo once wrote a preface to one of Wang Shi's books: "No longer seeing the self as an appendage and a parasite of the government, and being able to take part in rebuilding society in a more active and modern way… is one of the most important public events in Chinese society."

By the time of the Baoneng affair that followed, that persona, and those hopes, were finished too.

"I'm a famous entrepreneur, I've been to the top of Everest" — going up is one thing; coming back down is not easy.

An entrepreneur, a public figure, a motivational idol of unusual achievement, plastered with the labels of the strong: confidence had become instinct for him, to the point of looking through other people.

In our conversation he showed a fierce urge to speak, though he hardly lacks chances to speak; a hurry to get his views out, though the views are a little too correct. He reaches often for the rhetorical question. The force is on his side.

"Do you think I'm someone who doesn't want to talk now, who weighs every word?"

"Say too much and you're bound to slip; you get shot even lying down — am I like that?"

"If I were that clever, would I have had to go through all that?"

"In this conversation, do I sound pessimistic or optimistic? Do you really still need an answer?"

"Without worry — is that a life?"

"It isn't that I can't adjust to retirement. How could I not adjust?"

"China's reform has always been top-down, so the future will be top-down too. Why not be optimistic?"

For this Ten Years series we contacted several public figures who were prominent at the time of the Wenchuan earthquake, and nearly all of them declined; some backed away at the mere mention of Wenchuan.

Wang Shi did not dodge it, and is rather proud of speaking freely.

But the fact is that Wang Shi is no longer as "free" as he once was.

He tries not to talk about other people. About the future he has plenty of worries, but he will not say what they are; "cautiously optimistic" is the closest answer you can get.

On May 23, 2018, we met Wang Shi at Vanke's headquarters in Shenzhen, a 380-meter-long building designed by the architect Steven Holl and known as the "skyscraper lying down." Wang Shi, 67, sat in his office in a blue suit with a white pocket square.

In ten years, Wang Shi's nation and his company changed beyond recognition. So did his confidence.

In 2005 I published a book, and in the afterword I wrote this: "In 2004, when Vanke turned 20, Vanke would have no more stories. Why? Great companies have no stories. What story does Coca-Cola have? What story does M&M's have?"

Of course Vanke isn't a great company, but it was close, and close means no more stories. In fact you find the story had only just begun. All I can say is that I was arrogant and full of myself. Vanke is 34 now, another 14 years have gone by, and looking at it today — damn it, we're still a long way from great.

These past ten years have been full of meaning. The film about Churchill in the Second World War is called Darkest Hour, and I think my darkest hour was 2008. Many people ask whether the Vanke–Baoneng fight of the past two years was my darkest hour. I say no. It was 2008.

I started out in Shenzhen in 1983 and 1984. That experience was worse than death; you didn't really know whether you'd get through tomorrow. Nothing has ever cut deeper than that year. But it was not my darkest hour.

Because not getting through tomorrow doesn't mean you can't get through your life.

I might have failed, packed up and gone home, maybe not even managed to stay in Shenzhen and gone back to Guangzhou — all of it was possible. But on that road I wasn't passive. Before I came to Shenzhen at 33, my life had basically been chosen for me. Jobs were assigned; you didn't do what you wanted, you did what you were given. The army too — you had no idea where you'd be posted. Everything was passive; society arranged it.

But the first time I quit and came to Shenzhen to start a company, that was my choice. If I chose it and failed, I had no complaints; if I did everything I could and still failed, then it failed, and I'd do something else. Even that kind of hardship never made me feel my life couldn't go on, because at least there was no moral judgment pressing on me. What is a darkest hour? It's 2008 — the whole thing was a moral verdict on me. So what if you've climbed Everest?

I remember at the end of 2008 a documentary crew asked me, "What's your strongest feeling about this past year?" I said: "Three thanks — not gratitude, thanks. First, during the Wenchuan earthquake, the way I behaved brought down a landslide of fury and abuse from millions of netizens, and it made me see myself again. Put positively, I realized my own influence was bigger than I'd imagined, and Vanke's influence was bigger than Vanke's management team had imagined."

Since it was bigger than we imagined, and I said something inappropriate, being condemned like that was only to be expected.

Put negatively, it knocked me flat on the ground and sent me back to zero, so you learn where you actually rank. I used to be a famous entrepreneur, I'd been up Everest, and still I had to define myself again. I never said, ah, who knew society was like this. I didn't.

But more than anything it showed how stubborn I am. During the Wenchuan earthquake another well-known entrepreneur said something similar after me, and the landslide of abuse aimed at me shifted onto him at once. But he wasn't stubborn: his PR handled it inside three days, and then the whole thing came rushing back onto me. And I still said, "I did nothing wrong, I said nothing wrong. Why should I compromise? Why should I apologize? Why should I explain?"

You can also see from it how weak Vanke's public relations were. After all those years, Vanke shouldn't have been like that.

It wasn't a bad deed in itself, something we wanted to hide and were afraid of having exposed — it wasn't melamine coming to light. It was simply that I said something people didn't want to hear. It wasn't a question of right and wrong, it was a question of timing. And with no emergency PR at all, the company looked very immature, especially in the internet age, where one careless move can lose you the whole board.

Looking back over these ten years, the affair mattered even more for the growth of the Vanke team.

My remarks set it off, but the Vanke team handled all of it, since I was already an executive chairman and stayed out of the details. In the end we decided to concentrate on Zundao, in Mianzhu — money, earthquake-resistant buildings — and we built a very close relationship with the place.

By the Ya'an earthquake later on, we had moved from pure passion and disorder toward reason and order. We had grown up a lot in the way we responded to disasters.

If another earthquake like that happened, would I say something similar? No, because I've improved. Second, even if I did say something similar, netizens wouldn't treat me with that same extreme, unforgiving attitude, because society has moved on.

The affair also made us see that Vanke was too high-minded, too sure of itself. But was that settled once and for all in 2008? No. The Vanke–Baoneng fight showed it again: we were still too high-minded, still not down on the ground. So in a sense, rather than call it an equity crisis, you may as well call it a crisis in dealing with people. We simply had no idea how the outside world saw us, or how we ought to handle it.

Even so — do you think I'm someone who doesn't want to talk now, who weighs every word? Or someone who thinks, well, I'm mature now, I'll say nothing, since saying too much means slipping up and you get shot even lying down? Am I like that?

On January 23 this year, after stepping down from Vanke, I gave my first public speech, at the Water Cube. The venue I picked is a showy one, isn't it?

The director asked whether I could choose a song I liked to set the mood. I said "Blue Lotus." The theme of "Blue Lotus" is the longing for freedom and the pursuit of it, the blue lotus that never withers. That's the song I chose.

Tell me: is that a fairly confident, even brash gesture, or a timid and careful one?

My biggest change over these ten years is what I take freedom to be. What is "freedom"? Freedom is doing what you want to do. For all sorts of reasons you can't do what you want, so the highest state of longing for freedom is doing what you want.

But that's no longer my definition. For me, freedom is doing what you should do. What should you do? What society needs you to do, which may be something you don't enjoy. Take philanthropy. Society needs philanthropy pushed forward, but there are many kinds. I can pick the environment and ecology, which I love — protecting animals on the edge of extinction, giant pandas, snow leopards, Siberian tigers. I was born in the year of the tiger myself, and I like that work.

Sorting garbage, disability — do I like those? Honestly, not necessarily. But society needs you to do them, so I chose the "should." I didn't decide this from the angle of social or political change at all. I decided it by thinking about my own growth.

Reform and opening has been going 40 years. I founded Vanke 34 years ago and came to Shenzhen 35 years ago, and all that time I've been in a state of wanting freedom without being free, struggling, struggling, pushing forward.

Through all of that I was thinking about myself, doing the things I liked. That's why so many things ended the way they did: because I wouldn't compromise, which is exactly how 2008 happened. If I went on doing only what I wanted, that wouldn't be impossible, and it would be a fine life — but wouldn't it be too selfish?

Look at China today: am I a beneficiary of the system? Am I a very successful beneficiary? Does China need to move forward? Does it need reform?

If all I saw was doing what I want, wouldn't that be too selfish? Shouldn't I think more about what society needs? From what you want to do to what you should do — that is my newer understanding of freedom. Put another way, freedom and restraint are of a piece. Freedom without restraint is a serious problem.

In 2008 I was 57, no longer young. What did 50 feel like? At 50 I was extremely active, a regular on CCTV. I'm rather snobbish about it — these days I don't go on CCTV for just anything, but back then, if CCTV asked, I went.

With one program, the moment I walked in I knew I'd agreed to the wrong thing: it turned out to be Sunset Red. The audience was a room full of old men and old women. I thought, I've come into the wrong studio, what does this have to do with me? I told the director I'd made a mistake. I said, one day I'll be sunset red, but not today.

It feels like yesterday, and this year I'm already 67.

In 2000 Wang Shi was 49. From that year on he published a book nearly every two years, on the founding of Vanke and on his own climbing trips. The contents and the covers all displayed the same side of him: daring, flamboyant.

Running his image this way made Wang Shi one of the few entrepreneurs to endorse companies other than his own. He has endorsed no fewer than 10 brands, and each had to fit the image he had built; anything to do with top-end luxury he turned away.

Wang Shi's personal heroism shaped his public image, and it also decided most of the course of his life.

Before 1983 every choice in Wang Shi's life was made for him — an assigned job, conscription — until at 32 he resigned in Guangzhou and went to Shenzhen to found Vanke. He began to pursue what he could make of himself, and he won the first round. In 1991 Vanke became one of the first companies in mainland China to list publicly; in 1998 it became the largest property company among China's listed firms.

Wang Shi was labeled from the very start.

Then came 2008 and the donation scandal he calls his "darkest hour." "You might not get through tomorrow. How could that not be a darkest hour?"

On May 12, 2008, Vanke announced a donation of 2 million yuan to the disaster zone in Sichuan. Netizens agreed the figure was indecently small.

In the early hours of May 15, Wang Shi replied on Weibo: "Of course I admire companies that donate more than 10 million. But as chairman I believe the 2 million Vanke gave is appropriate; it is the largest single donation the board has authorized management to make. Even if the authorization were larger, I would still consider 2 million an appropriate amount. China is a country with frequent disasters, relief giving is a constant, and corporate donations should be sustainable rather than a burden. Vanke's internal fundraising drives carry a notice: in each drive, an ordinary employee's donation is capped at 10 yuan. The point is not to let charity become a burden."

The post drew a flood of criticism and mockery, and Wang Shi became the target of everyone's anger. Recalling that day in his own book, Wang Shi wrote: "Netizens across the country joined in denouncing me, condemning me in words; then the feeling fermented and burst, and it became the largest public-opinion crisis in Vanke's history."

Wang Shi has always held that charity by the majority can turn into violence by the majority. To this day he does not think he said anything wrong.

But at Vanke's shareholder meeting on June 5, 2008, Wang Shi apologized anyway. The meeting opened with his apology and closed with his apology, and it resolved to add 100 million yuan to the donation.

After 2009 Wang Shi began teaching business school courses at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and at Peking University, while serving as chairman of the Alxa SEE Ecological Association; in 2011 he also became chairman of the One Foundation.

"Philanthropy" gradually became a third label, after Vanke and mountaineering. Wang Shi now advises more than 40 philanthropic organizations; ten years ago the number was 4.

Around this time his personal heroism began to fade and altruism showed up more often in his life. Wang Shi counts this as one of his biggest changes of the past ten years. "But altruism has a precondition. Being altruistic as a plain duty before you're famous — many people can do it; I couldn't. Back then I was a self-interest that did no harm to others: on the premise of self-interest, I could also serve others."

When Wang Shi left Guangzhou for Shenzhen in 1983, he had no idea what the new special economic zone would become. He treated Shenzhen as a gap year, planning to go and study in California two years later. After founding Vanke, he never returned to the idea.

Only at 50 did he realize that the plan to study abroad was still unfulfilled.

At a thank-you dinner for the Harvard China Fund in 2010, the fund's executive director invited Wang Shi to Harvard as a visiting scholar, and he accepted on the spot. Inside Harvard, though, there was no small argument about whether a Chinese entrepreneur should be invited; three months later, after a small "interview," Harvard sent the formal invitation.

Before Harvard, Wang Shi embraced Western culture almost without reservation. "My operating and management ideas were always 'take what's useful,' because modern industry and modernity are products of Western civilization," Wang Shi says.

Accepting and learning from the West posed no great obstacle for him. There were no intellectuals in his family; the Cultural Revolution began when he was in his second year of junior high, and he never had an orthodox Chinese education, so there were no two sets of ideas colliding inside him.

He even felt relieved by that. "I always took it as an advantage. In my own mind I had always kept traditional culture at a distance," Wang Shi says.

I embraced the West completely. But you find that in all the years since New China was founded, the industrial system we built runs along with human civilization and Western industrial modernization. We had a planned economy, a different system, yet in many places there was no contradiction. Manufacturing and craft are the shared wealth of humankind; what differs is how the wealth is distributed, how markets run, how competition works. The market economy that came with reform and opening is also guided by the modern Western spirit of contract.

So when I got to the United States I didn't feel like a blank slate. I already had plenty behind me, because in many respects what New China built runs in the same general direction as human civilization.

Second, compared with the West, we were obviously critical of traditional Chinese culture — and seen from now, that criticism was empty. What is criticism? You have to know why a thing is bad. The education we got produced a nihilistic kind of criticism: we didn't understand the thing and we rejected it anyway. That is nihilism.

I was always pleased with myself about that nihilism; I thought it was my advantage. Why? Because I was uncontaminated. The Cultural Revolution started when I was in the second year of junior high, and afterward I got almost no education. It was "criticize Lin Biao and Confucius," "smash the shop of the Confucians." From the May Fourth Movement right through to now, my education is a blank.

So once I reached Shenzhen I devoured Western knowledge. Before that I read novels and literature, watched the few imported films we had, and looked up to the West and longed for it.

But once I actually got to the West, what I came to understand was not the West on its own terms. It was mostly comparison, because I'm still Chinese, Eastern to the bone. I was an engineering student and never had systematic training in logic. At Harvard I took in the Western way of reasoning, and I'd compare good and bad by one and the same logic — and the moment I compared, I found there was no comparing them.

I used to think I didn't understand the West well enough. It turned out I didn't understand my own culture well enough either. Even if our culture is bad, fine, but you have to know why it's bad. You can't just say emptily that it's bad, that it's feudal, that it's dross.

Before Harvard I was already teaching at the HKUST business school and at Peking University's Guanghua School, lecturing on corporate culture. My first lecture was on entrepreneurial spirit, and I said China has no entrepreneurial spirit.

Then at Harvard I talked with a professor who said China had the well-field system, egalitarianism. Each household got a plot, with a common plot in the middle, and it was contractual in nature. Right after Liberation there were still land deeds, which were burned later on. Is a land deed a contract? Of course it is. Without a spirit of contract, how could land deeds have carried on through so many dynasties, right up to Liberation?

China's contract tradition is not the West's. It has its own defects, of course. In China a business is a jointly liable party: the two of us sign a contract with a guarantor in the middle, and if something goes wrong on your side, there's still the guarantor. It runs on joint liability. Why does China say "the father's debt is repaid by the son"? The West doesn't have that, because the West has limited liability, and limited means that if you can't pay, your wife is your wife and your children are your children; it has nothing to do with them.

That is the modern Western spirit of contract, and that step forward brought prosperity and growth. In China it doesn't work. You still find cases today where liability is plainly limited and you no longer have to bear it, and yet the father's debt is repaid by the son.

Another important thing in China's spirit of contract is sympathy for the weak. Where is the sympathy in the West? In competition, if you lose, you lose; nobody pities the weak. China not only has guarantors, it sympathizes with the weak.

Under an agrarian civilization, when land was divided evenly, who was the weak one? Certainly the one selling the land. The buyer was the strong one.

If you sold your field or your house and then want it back, or when the buyer wants to sell the land on, the original seller has first refusal. And not only first refusal: it must be sold back to him at the original price.

So you find China leans toward evening things out, and society then lacks the progress that competitive behavior brings — but at the same time, what it stresses is that everyone gets fed.

Once I saw that, I understood the principle by which the Chinese government handles problems: sympathy for the weak.

When a big company and homebuyers come into conflict, you have to be very careful. Don't assume that being in the right legally means society will side with you. A simple example: the market goes bad and you cut prices, and they make trouble, right? I'd think: you've bought your apartment, it's yours; whether I raise or cut the price on my new apartments is my business. When I raise prices you leave me alone, because you gain from it, right? When I cut prices you come and say, "Your price cut has cost me money, you have to compensate me." Do I need the government to stop them doing that?

Between the developer and the customer, who is strong? I am. So what do you do? Not cutting prices is not an option; the market forces the adjustment. But I can't do it with a righteous face. I say, "It's a holiday promotion" — surely that's fine? A price cut in disguise, and they won't make that kind of trouble. That's Chinese culture.

My careless words during the 2008 earthquake also produced the "inflection point" argument. Where did that come from? Wasn't it just me cutting prices? One price cut enraged everyone except the central government and the people about to buy. The central government wanted prices cut; my peers didn't; local governments didn't; would-be owners didn't; and people who had already bought didn't either.

Before Harvard, all of this made me furious. Those would-be owners who had bought but not yet taken possession were furious too, and they made trouble: they surrounded Vanke's sales offices so Vanke couldn't sell, and blocked the people who wanted to buy. "Compensate me or I won't let you sell."

We were worried, so we called in the police and said you have to keep order, this is a market economy, this is a society under law, you can't just do nothing. The police came. They did nothing.

Tell me whether I was furious. The police said: as long as nobody dies, as long as there's no brawl, we stay out of it.

Why? After I got to Harvard I understood. The principle of sympathy for the weak in traditional Chinese culture made me the strong one. But does that mean we drop the market economy, drop entrepreneurial spirit? No. The government had its reasons for handling it that way. Only by understanding Chinese culture better, by comparing East and West, did I learn what I should do in China.

What we learn from the West now is mostly technical. Their methods are ahead of ours and we take them and use them. We rarely think about it at this other level.

At Harvard I had two identities. One was a student honestly doing the work. The other was an imitator, copying how the teachers taught.

Why go back to books after a hundred battles? Because I knew education was where I could do the most, putting the experience and theory I'd gathered into order and taking it to students. In 2009 I accepted an invitation from HKUST to teach.

I already carried myself as a teacher, so at Harvard I wasn't only listening. I remember signing up for a course on the Arab color revolutions. I pushed the door open: one professor and one student. I thought I must have the wrong room. I went again for the next session, and it was just me. I asked, "Are you the professor?" He said yes.

Only at Harvard did I learn that required courses you must attend, and electives are the ones you pick. Many professors run electives under a rule that if three students sign up, you have to teach it.

He told me three students had signed up; after the first session the other two had run off, and now it was just me. Meaning: with a single student, you still have to teach. That left a deep mark on me. I used to think that as a famous entrepreneur I obviously had face, that 50 people would be the floor for one of my lectures and it ought to be two or three hundred, so I cared a lot about numbers. Only later did I see that what really shows your level is being able to go on teaching as the room empties. That's the level.

Examples like that were like having a skylight opened.

I took a course on new energy that I remember very well. Twenty-odd students. The professor produced a deck of cards and gave each of us two, one red and one black. He said, let's play a game: of these two cards, pick one.

Pick red and you get three points, and if everyone else picks red you get one more. Pick black and you get one point, but if the others pick black you get two more.

Interesting, isn't it? You don't know what the others chose, so whether you pick red or black depends on what everyone else does. Do the math: if you pick red you're ahead from the start with three points, two more than anyone else.

In the end I picked black, and it turned out black scored more.

The professor then explained two mathematical ideas: first the prisoner's dilemma, then Nash equilibrium. He said today's new energy policy is a prisoner's dilemma. Damn, how good is that?

If you asked me to explain how you calculate a prisoner's dilemma, I'd make it very complicated. Coming at it through new energy prices, it's about government subsidies: how much to subsidize, how the government weighs it, and why.

And I thought, damn it, holy hell, so that's what a master is. Really something.

After that he went on to the derivations, and it didn't matter whether you followed. I'd long forgotten my college calculus, so I went back and spent two months reviewing calculus.

But the instant you feel that excitement, the misery starts, because I still had the pressure of the assignments. A visiting scholar doesn't have to hand in work, of course, but I put the pressure on myself. Without pressure, how do you improve? I didn't copy classmates' homework; I borrowed their notes, because I couldn't follow what the professor was saying. My English was mute.

The way I curried favor with classmates was buying them meals. One classmate named Eric — I saw him in Beijing after leaving Harvard, and he asked me, "Do you know how many meals you bought me? More than 200." In two and a half years at Harvard.

At Harvard I was tense about everything, under enormous pressure, permanently on the defensive, strung tight. Doing the work was genuinely a stretch in purgatory. Even eating felt like lost time: 20 minutes to deal with a meal, then back to the assignment until two in the morning, and I could rarely say it was finished.

I am absolutely not clever. I'm the slow bird that has to set out early. If I were clever, would I have had to go through all that? What's a star student? I never was one, and it doesn't matter.

Wang Shi first went to Japan in 1986, and the visits that followed left him fascinated by how an island country no bigger than China's Yunnan province became a world industrial power. Vanke's management later drew on the model of postwar Japanese companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Toyota.

One question Wang Shi never resolved: China and Japan began their top-down westernizing drives at the same moment, so why did Japan succeed and China fail? What part did the merchant and manufacturing class of Japan's Edo period play in it? This became one of his research subjects at Harvard, and the subject of the two books he expects to finish this year.

I was at Harvard two and a half years, and I meant to finish my book on Japan, mainly on the Edo period, the 260 years from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the end of the nineteenth. First, universal education for the population; second, the groundwork laid by intellectuals for taking in Western culture; third, a comparison of Chinese and Japanese commerce and industry. What did that period mean for the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Meiji Restoration? I had mostly written it before 2011 and hoped to finish it at Harvard.

I'm a bit embarrassed about this: I put out a book roughly every two years, but what I mostly write is impressions. The Road and the Dream (《道路与梦想》) tells the founding of Vanke as annals, year by year, what happened each year. Some are about climbing, but they're mostly travel notes — a week in Israel and I could produce a book. Why embarrassed? Because it's a bit slapdash.

When I left in 2011 a new book had just come out, The Heights of Life (《生命高处》), the third of what I called the soul trilogy. The first was Let the Soul Catch Up With the Feet (《让灵魂跟上脚步》), the second The Wandering Soul (《徘徊的灵魂》), the third The Heights of Life. See, there's a logic to it, isn't there? (laughs)

Damn it, once I got to Harvard, nothing would come out. I wanted this book to be different, to carry a bit of scholarship after the training in logic, to be tighter and more systematic than before.

But after Harvard I found I could no longer write a book. I wanted to stand somewhere different, to raise it a level, and you find you can't go back either, and what you write is neither one thing nor the other. It's 2018 and the book is on its eleventh draft, 130,000 characters. One draft won't do, the next won't do, right up to now.

It isn't that I'm dissatisfied. It's that I find it unreadable. I'm trying to finish both books this year. I can't get them out, but it's the kind of stuck that comes with progress; I still feel I get better every year.

I gained an enormous amount at Harvard. After leaving I wanted to go back and didn't dare, and I didn't return until 2016 — and only then did I see that I cared far too damn much about myself. Why? I felt that after two and a half years I owed them a finished exam paper, that I had to complete that book of mine. Only later did I understand that I shouldn't be so full of myself. Who the hell takes you that seriously? Only you.

Cambridge afterward was an entirely different matter. At Cambridge I stopped doing assignments; I stopped forcing myself. The setting changed and I put down the tense, defensive state I'd been in. At Cambridge nobody knew I used to stammer like that. My English still stumbles now, but the old barriers were gone and I wasn't so tense.

At Cambridge I switched to the history of Jewish migration in East Asia. Many people, Jews included, found the choice very surprising: first, a Chinese businessman studying Jews is strange; second, Jews themselves study modern Jewish questions, which made it stranger still.

My reason was simple. I'd been working on Japan at Harvard, and in comparing the two I found that Japanese and Chinese views of Jews are very different.

Historically, after their last state was destroyed by Rome 2,000 years ago, Jews migrated across the whole world — a history of persecution, ending in mass murder and genocide.

Chinese people feel quite close to the Jews. First, because there was no anti-Semitism in Chinese history; Jews were pushed out everywhere in the world, but not in China. Second, we're both good at business. Third, we both care a great deal about the extended family. Fourth, we both take education seriously. And during the Second World War we took Jews in and supported them, letting more than 20,000 settle in Shanghai, which creates a feeling of kinship.

But once I got into the academic literature and into the history, I found I couldn't agree.

One story answers the question. Jewish communities in China go back more than 1,000 years, to the Northern Song, and there are community records from then. But what those records describe is not Jews; it's Hui Muslims. Nobody had any idea these people were Jews, so how could you have anti-Semitism? The public wouldn't allow churches to be built in China, but we had no idea Judaism existed. When it came to destroying places of worship, can you say we spared the synagogues and destroyed only the Protestant and Catholic churches? Is that our history? It isn't.

Wang Shi's visiting year at Cambridge was cut short by the fight with Baoneng. In August 2015 Baoneng Group became Vanke's largest shareholder, the first change in that position in 20 years. Four months later, Wang Shi announced that Baoneng was not welcome as a shareholder. Last year the war paused, with Shenzhen Metro becoming Vanke's largest shareholder.

The title on the door of Wang Shi's office went from "Office of the Chairman and General Manager" to "Office of the Chairman," and most recently to "Honorary Chairman of the Board."

The story isn't over.

On the day he stepped down as chairman, Wang Shi wrote on his WeChat Moments: "I've been at Vanke 34 years and spent 17 of them as a hands-off boss. Now I'm starting my own new 17 years. In another 17 years I'll only be 83!"

Wang Shi says a passage from Seneca best captures his attitude now:

"Disaster is the chance of the truly great man. We may fairly say that those blunted by too much good fortune are to be pitied — people who live an idle, untroubled life on an unruffled sea, and who are thrown by the smallest thing."

My biggest change between 2013 and 2018 still came in 2016. After the Baoneng fight broke out in 2015, more of my energy went back home, to company matters.

My energy used to go mainly to lecturing and to visiting scholarships on campus. After 2015 that basically stopped.

I stepped down as Vanke's chairman last July, and my basic split of time is 30-30-30-10: 30 percent philanthropy, 30 percent BGI, 30 percent Broad Group, 10 percent my own time.

Being chairman of BGI is nothing like Vanke, where I was only a spiritual leader. I have to actually do something. The companies take different amounts of time and the businesses are different. First I have to understand their industry; second, get to know the company; third, contribute ideas as it grows and go deep enough to handle real matters.

I have to be grateful for the age I was born into. We've entered a long-lived society and lifespans are longer than they used to be. In the old days, living to 70 was rare; at 60 you had no time left to take anything in, life was about to shut its door on you, so what could you do, what part could you play? Now I still have the chance to experience things, to raise my own cultivation and understanding, so the visiting scholarships have to continue.

This autumn I plan to go to the Hebrew University, and after that to Istanbul University in Turkey. When I went to Harvard in 2011 I remember setting a three-year plan, but I stayed at Harvard two and a half years, and the one year at Cambridge became two. I'm planning half a year at the Hebrew University, but I reckon it'll be two as well — and then I think I ought to spend a year in Iran too. One mustn't be too greedy.

The other thing: now that I've retired from Vanke, what does an entrepreneur do? I think there's a two-year adjustment, and one year has gone.

Leaving takes preparation. It isn't that I can't adjust to retirement. How could I not adjust? I've long been the hands-off type, long been a spiritual leader; I do philanthropy, things with nothing to do with Vanke. So my retirement from Vanke was a seamless handover.

I can put it this way: from the moment I started climbing and kept my distance from Vanke, I was preparing to retire. But the timing I'd prepared for wasn't last year — I retired early. So what does Vanke do after I go? And as an entrepreneur, what do I do after leaving Vanke? I still haven't worked it out. But it takes preparation, and the preparation takes two years.

Being optimistic doesn't mean I have no worries. Optimism and worry are two different things. How could there be no worries? Without worry, is that a life? That's just a wish. Worry is life. What the worry is doesn't matter; whatever happens, life comes with worries.

To be completely open about it: at the 30th anniversary of reform and opening, as one of its benchmark figures, my strongest feeling looking back over those 30 years was that I never expected me, my company, my people and my country to achieve so much — and that I was uncertain about the future.

I remember at Alxa SEE's annual meeting in 2012, my talk was titled "Facing an Uncertain Future, Correcting Yourself."

This year is the 40th anniversary, and I'd say the same thing, especially about the past ten years, which I never imagined would rise and fall so far, would be so sweeping.

Facing the future, I've moved from "uncertain" to "cautiously optimistic."

I am optimistic, but it's nothing like ten years ago. Ten years ago I was in trouble and I was uncertain, and that uncertainty ran all the way to 2012.

But by 2018, summing up the second decade of reform and opening, what do I worry about? I worry about plenty of things, and we won't go into them; they can't really be explained, can they? Which is why it's cautious optimism.

Where does the optimism come from?

Personally, the Vanke–Baoneng fight now has at least a rough outcome, but the story isn't over yet. I'm still watching, and I'm optimistic. And I've put myself into the environment; in a sense I'm one of the benchmark figures on the international stage on climate change.

Nationally: is our country a big polluter? We have the highest carbon emissions. Are we the ones pursuing growth without regard for environmental damage? The environment is a very large problem now — smog, food safety, and the rest.

Before the Paris conference, Obama and Xi Jinping signed a joint declaration in Beijing that laid the ground for the Paris Agreement. But after Paris, Trump, newly elected or not yet elected, said very plainly that if he won he would pull out.

Everyone was stunned. Who did all eyes turn to? China. China had reasons to pull out, but if China had pulled out, the show was over. Precisely because of China's position, many US state governments and many large companies have not fallen in line with the federal government. Tell me, shouldn't we be optimistic?

China's reform has always been top-down, so the future will be top-down too. Why not be optimistic?

The lines from Seneca, the ancient Roman, are my attitude to life now. A soldier risks his life to carry out a mission; facing death, threat, pain, struggle, what is his attitude? The general picked you for the job — that is your pride. If not me, who?

Cover image: sohu, flickr

Images in the article: qihoo, People's Daily Online, Vanke, CNBC, The Medic Portal