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. In December 2000, Mr Sun paid 120 million yuan for the plant and all its assets. He sold the machinery to rural enterprises and used the land to build the Red October Garden, an upmarket housing project. Angry over their compensation, hundreds of the plant's workers took to the streets in late 2001 and early 2002 to demand better terms. 'After Sun bought our plant, he stopped the production and all of us, 3,000 workers, had no jobs,' said a member of the plant's sales office, the only part of the firm still operating. 'Then we were put to work selling his apartments or washing the floors. We were paid less than before and received no subsidies. We had no choice. This was backed by the government, so what can we say?' A former manager of the plant, who declined to be identified, said Mr Sun paid the workers of the tractor plant 800 yuan for each year that they had worked there, as a one-off payment, with no pension or medical benefits in future. The company official refused to comment on the claim. 'Mr Sun paid salaries to government officials as advisers and has built up a strong network of support,' the former manager said. It was the same story with the other plants. What Mr Sun wanted was not the equipment and product but the land they stood on, which he used for 37 housing estates and seven skyscrapers, making him the biggest landlord in Urumqi. The response of Mr Sun's company to these charges is that the factories were on the verge of bankruptcy and full of corruption 'When we took it over, it had a debt of 120 million yuan,' the company official said. 'We invested 500 million and, a year later, an audit found that the debt had risen to 170 million. It was when we started an investigation as to where the money had gone that the street protests began. Several people were later arrested.' The official said that the company had not laid off a single worker it inherited from the state firms. Real estate is one of several pieces of Mr Sun's empire. Another is one of Xinjiang's biggest construction materials firms, which he listed in Shanghai in May, 2000. His other companies are involved in foreign trade, produce, chemicals and plastics and one is investing 2.6 billion yuan in a distribution centre in Urumqi. His critics say that more than half the apartments he has built in Urumqi are empty, because local people cannot afford to buy or rent them, and that he has loans outstanding in the cost of construction and maintenance of them. Mr Sun's most ambitious project, involving investment of 800 million yuan, is to transport liquefied natural gas from Xinjiang thousands of kilometres to cities in eastern China using a fleet of 300 Benz trucks modified to carry such cargo. This will compete with Xinjiang gas being carried by a pipeline being built by state companies. Mr Sun negotiated with the Ministry of Railways for more than a year to arrange transport by rail, but could not reach agreement and so is having to use trucks. Economists are sceptical of the viability of his project, especially as it is competing with a government pipeline in a sector that is highly regulated. The company official said the LNG project was going well but declined to give details. She also declined to give figures for the company's debt. Mr Sun was born in 1962 to a modest family in Pingxi city, Shandong. He joined the People's Liberation Army and took part in the invasion of Vietnam. He studied at a military academy in Anhui and became an officer. Assigned to work as a teacher, he found the job dull and volunteered for service in Xinjiang, then facing border tensions with the Soviet Union and low-level separatist disturbances. He left the army in 1988 and went into business. He helped a Japanese cotton trader arrange hard-to-obtain rail shipments and in return received US$50,000 which he used to open the first seafood restaurant in Urumqi. He went on to open the first karaoke bar, disco, swimming pool and bowling alley in Xinjiang. From the end of 1990, he moved into the import of oil drilling equipment and construction materials, especially granite, of which Xinjiang has one-sixth of China's reserves.