Beijing philanthropist gives $2 billion for wildlife conservation in biggest ever personal amount

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Bloomberg News


PUBLISHED 25 MIN AGO

BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) - This Saturday (Oct 14) in Monaco, He Qiaonv will announce the first step in a US$1.5 billion (S$2 billion) plan that may represent the largest-ever personal philanthropic commitment to wildlife conservation.

The number isn't the only thing that's surprising about the announcement. The source might equally raise eyebrows: The donation isn't coming from a known Western conservationist like Paul Allen, but from a landscape planner-turned-environmental steward who's based in Beijing.

Madame He represents a new wave of self-made Chinese philanthropists unafraid to spend; her seven-year pledge stands at more than a third of her current US$3.6 billion net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

With the emergence of Chinese leadership in this area, Kaplan says Qiaonv's pledge stands to change the face of cat conservation forever. "One day this event may be seen as a watershed."

Read more: http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/beijing-philanthropist-gives-2-billion-for-wildlife-conservation-in-biggest-ever

[Tanuki]

1. Well done, Madame He!

[burrowowl]

2. Good on her!

Were some U$A philanthropists be so generous!

[Nevernose]

3. Smoke em if ya got em

China is very, very new to money, and even rich Chinese have little true understanding of wealth. Older Chinese remember just ten or twenty years ago, when if you went to the store and there were two phones on the shelf, you bought the one you wanted, You didn’t wait to see if a better phone would become available, because odds were there would be NO phones on the shelf the next day and you had no idea if you’d still have money by then anyway. Hence: smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

They’ll blow through all their money in a day if they want to. Except, unlike here where it would be nothing but tears and self-pity, here it would par for the course and there would be zero tears.

I’ve been the tertiary beneficiary of the one child policy. My spouse’s closest Chinese friend had several aunts and uncles, but most of them couldn’t or didn’t have children of their own, Familial largesse was occasionally passed to the niece (family friend), which was passed onto us. I’ve eaten at restaurants that most people can’t even imagine, been in rooms where I was outnumbered by billionaires, met very high ranking officials in multiple communist parties. Very weird. The only reason I went back for more — besides outrages bar tabs and restaurant bills — was the fact that Chinese billionaires respected me, a humble-yet-devoted schoolteacher as if I was more important than they were. There was this sense of “Oh, we just make money. THESE are the people who made that possible, though.”

As I posted in another China thread, too: Marxist thought is making a comeback. What good is billions of dollars if you don’t use it to make the world a better place? The difference between a human and an animal is that both animals and humans will do whatever the fuck it takes to survive, but humans also want all the others to succeed as well. It’s not a threat to them, it’s a compliment

My family, largely made up of semi-, quasi-, and actual Asians all call it the Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em philosophy.(Of course we’ve also got Jews, a prison Nazi, a Civil War re-enactor and his kids every other weekend, and the guy I learned how to grow weed with decades ago. So: not normal)