Fu Yuning

Fu Yuning was born in March 1957 and holds a doctorate in marine engineering from Brunel University in the United Kingdom; he was among the first group of government-sponsored students sent abroad after reform and opening up. After returning to China in 1988, he joined China Nanshan Development (Group) Co., Ltd., which is described as China’s first joint-stock enterprise; it was the first to adopt a system in which the general manager was responsible under the leadership of the board of directors, and it built its corporate governance structure and distribution mechanisms on market-oriented lines. He subsequently worked at companies in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, serving successively as chairman of Chiwan Port and Shipping Co., Ltd., executive deputy general manager of Shenzhen Chiwan Petroleum Supply Base Co., Ltd., chairman of Union Bank of Hong Kong Limited and general manager of China Nanshan Development (Group) Co., Ltd., before joining China Merchants Group Limited, where he served successively as vice president and president.

In 1998, Fu Yuning was transferred to China Merchants Group. As he later recalled, during the Asian financial crisis, China Merchants Group’s diversification strategy was chaotic and disorderly and its organisational structure loose and bloated, which ultimately led to serious liquidity problems; he oversaw the reformulation of the group’s industrial policy, focusing on three core businesses, namely ports, real estate and banking, and gradually defused the company’s financial risks. According to relevant accounts, during the 2008 financial crisis, China Merchants Group under his leadership acquired a batch of high-quality overseas ports at low prices, helping the group develop into a world-class integrated port service provider.

From August 2010 to April 2014, Fu Yuning was chairman of China Merchants Group Limited, its 23rd head, and during that time also held several concurrent posts, including chairman of China Merchants Bank, China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone Co., Ltd. and China Nanshan Development (Group) Co., Ltd., chairman of China Merchants Holdings (International) Co., Ltd., and director of the Hong Kong Port Development Council. In 2014, the chairmanship of China Merchants Group Limited passed to Li Jianhong.

In 2014, Fu Yuning joined China Resources Group, succeeding Song Lin as chairman. As he later recounted, he pointed out at the time that corruption among the group’s management was not simply an economic problem but a matter of misplaced values and a lack of ideals and convictions, and he reshaped China Resources Group’s cultural understanding around the core principle of “creating wealth by proper means, pursuing wealth with responsibility, becoming rich by proper means, and keeping wealth with stability”. Fu Yuning was chairman of China Resources during the equity battle between Vanke and Baoneng; financial writer Qin Shuo once asked Fu Yuning about the Vanke issue in a class at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. Fu Yuning later said that the only thing he had said about Vanke was that “Vanke is a good company, but there are problems with Vanke’s corporate governance”, and he believed that his values differed from those of Vanke’s management. In the Baoneng-Vanke dispute, he considered that Vanke management’s bypassing of the board in the process of bringing in Shenzhen Metro crossed the bottom line of corporate governance; Vanke responded at the time that it had reported the idea when briefing China Resources earlier, and that the move was not a board matter and could be decided by management. In a 2018 interview with China Entrepreneur magazine, he said that the partnership system in real estate was not suitable for many central state-owned enterprises, that such a system depended on the institutional arrangements between shareholders and managers, and that the same problems could equally be solved through other equity incentive mechanisms or market-linked incentive mechanisms. China Resources ultimately sold off its entire stake in Vanke in January 2017 at 22 yuan per share for a total of 37.2 billion yuan, ending a 17-year relationship as major shareholder.

In 2020, Fu Yuning retired from China Resources Group. In September 2021, as a member of the Standing Committee of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and former chairman successively of China Nanshan Development (Group) Co., Ltd., China Merchants Group Limited and China Resources (Holdings) Co., Ltd., he gave a talk titled “Reflections and Practice from Forty Years of Chinese Enterprise Development” at an online sharing session held by the GSFD programme of the PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University. From going to the countryside as an educated youth in Luancheng County, Hebei Province, in 1975 until his retirement in 2020, he worked for 45 years.

On wealth, Fu Yuning advocated “create wealth by the right way, pursue wealth with responsibility, become wealthy by the right way, and hold wealth with steadiness”. On incentive mechanisms for managers of state-owned enterprises, his core view was that their pay should not be excessively market-based, that incentives should be matched with constraints, and that a sound system should be built on that basis.