In 1989, he was an officer who had fought the Vietnamese and had just left the army. He had no money but was bursting with ambition. Today, Sun Guangxin is the richest and most powerful man in the far west region of Xinjiang and the eighth richest person in China, with a personal fortune of US$500 million. He controls more than half the property market in Urumqi, the regional capital.
Mr Sun, 40, is a controversial figure. The regional government treasures him as one of its few big-scale entrepreneurs and the employer of thousands in one of the poorest parts of China. To his enemies, Mr Sun is a carpetbagger who acquired dozens of state assets on the cheap which he used to create his property empire, a man who cheated thousands of workers of their due, in league with officials on his payroll, and who borrowed millions of yuan he cannot repay.
He is a symbol of the new 'post-socialist' China, similar to the millionaires of post-1991 Russia, who took advantage of the state's desire to dispose of ageing and unprofitable companies and put economic growth above social equity.
Mr Sun bought 29 state firms, acquiring at the same time their land, their debts and their workforces. The most contentious purchase was the October Tractor Plant, established in 1950 with Soviet help as the biggest tractor factory in northwest China by General Wang Zhen, the principal architect of Han Chinese settlement in a region where minorities accounted for more than 90 per cent of the population in 1949.
These farms and factories became important parts of the region's economy, binding it to the rest of China.
But by the 1990s, the tractor plant was losing money and could no longer compete with new, modern factories in the east. The Xinjiang government was eager to dispose of it.