Business magnate's Chinese roots key feature of new book

While addressing a gathering at his book launch in Tsinghua University in April, Mochtar Riady, a Chinese-Indonesian tycoon, said that even at 87, he still follows developments in the world of e-commerce and technology and is willing to share his insights on the subject.

The founder of the Jakarta-based Lippo Group was in Beijing to release his autobiography and witness the opening ceremony of Mochtar Riady Library, his philanthropic project in the university.

"My childhood dream was to become a banker, and I made it," says Riady.

He built a conglomerate from scratch and made friends with world leaders, including former US president Bill Clinton. Riady and his family were ranked the sixth wealthiest in Indonesia on a Forbes list earlier this year, with a net worth of $2.2 billion.

But he remains a generous giver who supports education not only in his home country, but also in China, where his family roots lie.

"My mother died when I was 9, and my father left after he was arrested for anti-Japanese activities when I was 11. My schoolteachers played a big role in taking care of me then," he says.

When still young, Riady was fascinated by a building in Malang, Indonesia, where he saw no commercial goods and the staff dressed smartly. It was his teacher who explained to him that the building was a bank, and it earned money by lending money. The idea impressed him.

The Chinese version of Riady's autobiography, Autobiography of Dr. Mochtar Riady, has been published by Tsinghua University Press, and talks of his faith in education, strengthened both by families and schools.

In the book, he divides his life and career into four 20-year periods. Besides the accounts of his professional ups and downs, the book has a large section on how he and his wife nurtured their children and grandchildren with the family's core values, handed down by Riady's father and rooted in traditional Chinese wisdom.

"My biggest pride and comfort in life is that my children have surpassed me and are stronger than me, and my grandchildren are even stronger," he writes in the book.

He talks of leaving his sons alone to cope with failures and to learn from their mistakes just as eagles teach their babies to fly.

"Most autobiographies seldom dedicate so many pages or chapters to the writer's children or grandchildren, but Dr Riady has done so," Minny Riady, general manager of Lippo Group's Shanghai division, and the youngest daughter of Mochtar Riady, tells China Daily.

"I believe when he wrote his autobiography, he had in mind a concept he often spoke about - a strong family or even a strong country is created from strong descendants," she adds.

He has tried to share with the reader his life's journey and wisdom, so as to inspire them to achieve more than what he achieved in business and society, the daughter says.

She says it was difficult for a Chinese descendant like her father to achieve remarkable success in Indonesia.

But Mochtar Riady says that hard work and prudence, plus the idea that "I know I do not know", are the reasons behind his many achievements.

Born and raised in the Indonesian cities of Batu and Malang in a family from East China's Fujian province, he received his higher education at Nanjing's former National Central University in the 1940s. He moved to Jakarta in 1954 to pursue his dream of becoming a banker. He first ran a small bank and later Bank Central Asia, one of Indonesia's largest.

He established the Lippo Group in the 1980s, making it an international company in the following decades. He had also predicted in the 1990s that China would rise again.

"What I did back then was invest in China, mainly as a person of Chinese origin," Mochtar Riady says. "Now I'm keen to introduce Chinese industrial capacity-building to other countries."

In a chapter on the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, he says China will devote its time toward a shared prosperous future with other countries.

Wang Qiaozhen, editor of the Chinese version, hopes the book not only works as a case study for management students, but also appeals to general readers.

meijia@chinadaily.com.cn