Chapter 115: The land reserve war
The middle-aged man in the Ferrari 360 Modena was Liu Ping, secretary to Deputy Mayor Tao Changping. The young man in his twenties at the wheel was Tao Chuhong, son of the chairman of the Nanning Group.
Founded in Zhejiang in 1987, the Nanning Group operated in more than twenty sectors, including property development, construction, investment guarantees, department stores and supermarkets, rare-earth mining, and manufacturing. It was a massive conglomerate; calling it an aircraft carrier was no exaggeration.
In December 2001, while reunited with his family in London, Hurun had admitted that his 2000 list of mainland China's hundred richest people had been only twenty percent accurate. He could not say how accurate the 2001 list was, but it had certainly left out far too many people. The relatively low-profile Nanning Group, with its extensive reach, was undoubtedly among them.
No one knew just how much influence the Tao family possessed. But its ability to develop large property projects simultaneously in four prefecture-level cities across southwestern China and Jiangsu and Zhejiang, including city squares and industrial parks in two of them, showed that this conglomerate, straddling politics and business, had considerable power to secure resources.
Sichuan Airlines' launch of its restructuring plan was another strategic factor behind the Nanning Group's westward expansion.
And the Tao family's Nanning Group was hardly without the necessary connections. Rongcheng's current deputy mayor, Tao Changping, was Tao Chuhong's third uncle, an outstanding member of the Tao family's third generation.
Among the fourth generation, however, Tao Chuhong was not the most outstanding. On the contrary, one of his paternal aunts' sons was more favored than he was. This also had something to do with Tao Chuhong's wastrel tendencies within the family, and it irked him deeply. Although he was still