IF CHINA has a John D. Rockefeller, it is Sun Guangxin, 39, a former soldier who is the ninth-richest man in the country and owner of 70 per cent of the machinery industry and the biggest construction firm in the far west region of Xinjiang.
Not content with a personal fortune of 3.6 billion yuan (about HK$3.37 billion), Mr Sun has launched his most ambitious project - investing eight billion yuan to transport liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Xinjiang to east and southeast China, in competition with a 4,200km state-owned pipeline to Shanghai that will also deliver the gas.
The Xinjiang Guanghui Group, of which Mr Sun is chairman and owner, is the first private company in China to obtain a licence to do business in natural gas, breaking a 53-year state monopoly. He plans to sell it to customers in Fujian, Guangdong and other parts of south China.
He plans to make his first deliveries of LNG next year, two years before the state pipeline is finished, and by 2010 to deliver three billion cubic metres a year, compared with the 12 billion planned capacity of the pipeline.
The significance of the project is that Beijing has allowed the private sector into one of the last remaining state monopolies. If Mr Sun pulls it off, he will climb further up the ladder of China's richest men, as did the oil barons in the United States at the end of the 19th century.
But the project is full of risk - financial, logistic and, greatest of all, policy - whether the giant state oil and gas companies will allow this upstart to prosper in their territory.
