Before coming here, Chu Ge had actually done a little homework.
But when it came to "big shots," publicly available information could hardly be all that accurate or detailed, and he had not asked his mother about the inside story.
All he knew was that the Great Tang Group had risen in less than ten years, and its founder, chairman, and president, Tang Jinyan, was only about thirty-six or thirty-seven this year. Nobody could really explain his rise. It always felt as though he had shot up like a rocket, and at some point, without anyone quite knowing when, he had become capable of taking on the major conglomerates.
He did not seem to have started in entertainment. Had he begun in foreign trade? An encyclopedia entry also said he had sold pork, though who knew whether that was true. Later, he apparently caught the wave of large-scale development on Jeju Island and built a massive film studio complex and tourist destination, after which his business entered the fast lane. He then used that to make sweeping inroads into entertainment, coming to dominate half the industry.
Finally, through some unknown maneuver, he swallowed up Hanjin Shipping. After gaining control of the lifeblood of South Korean shipping, he had finally joined the ranks of the chaebols.
Overall, it was a major group spanning multiple industries, including trade, infrastructure construction, tourism, entertainment, and logistics.
Of course, it could not compare to established chaebols like Samsung. Yet for some reason, Samsung and CJ, those two bitter enemies, both had remarkably close relationships with him, sometimes even giving outsiders the impression that they were thick as thieves. By rights, that should have been impossible, especially for someone of Chinese descent... It really was like looking at flowers through fog, impossible to make sense of.