http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-11-02-chinese-billionaires_x.htm?csp=34

SHANGHAI -- Forget Chairman Mao's workers' paradise. China is taking a great leap toward huge private fortunes.

Forbes' annual list of the richest Chinese out today includes a record 15 billionaires, up from 10 last year and just three in 2004.

That's chump change in the USA, where all 400 on Forbes' list of richest Americans are billionaires. Still, a country that once persecuted disciples of free enterprise is now barreling down the capitalist road.

China's new billionaires have profited from enterprises ranging from selling TVs to recycling paper to building condos. "Chinese are born with entrepreneurialism in their genes," says Russell Flannery, who compiled Forbes' list.

The combined worth of China's richest 40 jumped nearly 50% from last year to $38 billion. The minimum fortune to gain entry to the exclusive club: $514 million.

Topping the list is electrical appliance king Wong Kwong Yu, 37, whose worth is estimated at $2.3 billion. That's 4% of the value of the world's richest man, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

China's recent surge in mega-wealth is "comparable to the U.S. at the end of the 19th century, when you had the Rockefellers and Carnegies," says Rupert Hoogewerf, CEO of Hurun Report, a rival list of the rich.

The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping paved the way for today's billionaires in the 1980s, when he freed the economy from the straitjacket of central planning imposed by Mao Zedong, the revolutionary founder of the People's Republic of China.

The percent of households with large fortunes in a country of 1.3 billion is still tiny. Los Angeles County has 263,000 millionaire households, about the same number as all of China, according to an April 2006 survey by the research firm TNS Financial Services.

The prospect of many more millionaires in coming years has lured representatives of companies that peddle high-end goods to Shanghai this week for China's Luxury Summit. They are talking about how to cash in on China's burgeoning wealth.

Tom Murry, president of New York-based Calvin Klein, says on his first visit to China in 1974 that he saw "dirt roads and everybody wearing the same clothes."

Today, Calvin Klein has 43 stores in China. In March, it plans to open its first Calvin Klein Collection luxury store in Beijing. China, Murry says, has undergone "a radical change, the biggest transformation in any country I've ever observed."

Bill Hutchinson, general manager of Simpson Marine, a yacht dealer based in Hong Kong, agrees. "The wealth and speed of growth in China is staggering," says Hutchinson, who predicts boat sales will soon rival those in the USA. "The lure of China's riches are profound for all the luxury goods purveyors. We're like chickens sitting on an egg. When it hatches, it's going to be a big chicken."