Ｒｏｎｇ Ｙｉｒｅｎ ｉｎ Ｈｉｓ Ｙｏｕｔｈｆｕｌ Ｙｅａｒｓ

Ｓａｎｇ　Ｆｅｎｇｋａｎｇ

Born May 1st, 1916 Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, a coastal province in eastern China, Rong Yiren (1916-2005) was the fourth son of Rong Desheng, the founder of the Rong familys conglomerate of businesses. The fourth son received primary and secondary education in the schools founded and operated by the Rong family. In 1932 he entered St. John University in Shanghai. He majored in economics for one year and then switched to history and graduated as a history major.

His father Rong Desheng was a prominent industrialist in the first years of the countrys industrialization. While going on with his school education, Rong Yiren spent his winter and summer breaks in his fathers flour factory, working as an intern acquiring the hands-on experience of production procedure. He married Yang Jianqing, a girl from an influential family also in Wuxi. In 1937, Rong Yiren graduated from St. John and came back to Wuxi. When asked what he was going to do, Rong Yiren replied that he wanted to get into family business and contribute to the economic prosperity of the motherland. Rong Desheng was overjoyed.

Young Industrialist

He was appointed an assistant manager at Wuxi Maoxin Flour Company, where he learned management under his fathers guidance. The number one flour factory of the company was totally destroyed in the war and the number two flour factory was seriously damaged. He worked hard to get the two factories back on the right track. In these years he hated going to the railway station. The railway station was guarded by Japanese soldiers and every Chinese must bow to Japanese there. Rong Yiren avoided bowing to them by riding his own companys trucks that shuttled between Shanghai and Wuxi.

Rong Desheng set up Tianyuan Corporation after the war, with its mission to restore and rebuild the familys business. In 1947, flour factories in Shanghai and Wuxi formed a production league. The 31-year-old Rong Yiren was appointed the deputy director in charge of purchasing and distributing wheat and selling flour.

As one of the promising second-generation entrepreneurs of the Rong family, Rong Yiren worked with his two younger brothers to restore the flour factories. He was not only the factory manager of the number one flour factory but also the production manager of the administrative office of the factory. Under his leadership, the factory came back. In 1948, the number one flour factory became operational again. With manufacturing machines imported from America and Britain, the factory was able to produce 5,000 bags of flour a day.

At that time, the Rong family represented the 25% of the flour production capacity in the area under the rule of the KTM.

The Mildewy Flour Case

After the war, the KTM government adopted policies to squeeze the space of national businesses. An act issued in 1948 led to tight control over food. The flour factories in the Rong family ran into financial difficulty and quality control problems. Rong Yiren attacked the governments unfair policies at a seminar held by the Shanghai-based Food Daily on August 20, 1948, saying that the policies put the national flour businesses into a dilemma in which they either lacked capital to grow or were incapacitated to provide adequate supplies to consumers.

After World War Two, American flour flooded into China in the name of economic aids, which rendered Chinese flour mills to have nothing to process. The national flour mills association called the government food minister for stopping the practice and importing wheat for Chinese mills to process. The government responded favorably. In November 1946, Rong Yiren signed a purchase contract on the behalf of the government to import and store 3,000 tons of wheat on the part of Maoxin Flour Company.

Following the instruction of the food ministry, the wheat was processed into two kinds of flour, one for civil consumption and the other for military use. As the civil war went on, the food ministry gave orders to reprocess the consumers flour back for military use. All the 3,000 tons of flour were made into more than 500,000 bags of flour and passed quality inspection. Then, under confusing orders of the food ministry, the production and sales of Chinese flour and American flour got mixed. After a year, mildew occurred in the repackaging, storage and transportation. Rong Yiren was accused of seeking profit in inappropriate ways. A KTM supervisor even blamed Rong Yiren for the national governments military defeat in the North East. In May 1949, the government brought a lawsuit against Rong Yiren for the moldy military flour. The case came to nothing as the defeated KMT retreated hastily to Taiwan.

Stay on the Mainland

When the KMT was about to crash in early 1949, some people fled to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Rongs wife bought a house in Hong Kong for Rong Yiren, but Rong Yiren and his father decided to stay on the mainland.

Two days before Shanghai was liberated, some KTM soldiers deployed machineguns outside the Rongs residence and threatened to seize the house for military use and drive the Rong family out. Rong received the emergency call in the factory and rushed back home. He paid 500 silver dollars and the soldiers went away. After the assault, the Rong family lived on fear.

On May 25th, the PLA soldiers came into Shanghai. It was the day scheduled for Rong to appear in court to face the trial of the moldy flour case. The lawsuit vanished. And he did not need to worry about KTM soldiers. It was also a day when Rong Yiren was shocked to see that PLA soldiers camped in the streets without causing any trouble and inconvenience to local residents.

The day changed his life. He grew from a young industrialist to a great patriot, a communist and vice president of the Peoples Republic of China. □