Stateswoman: The Shin Kong heiress inherited an empire founded by a rags-to-riches industrialist
Cynthia Wu (吳欣盈), the running mate of TPP’s presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in Taiwan’s 2024 elections, has been referred as the Shin Kong Princess (新光大公主) due to her stature as an heir apparent to the Shin Kong Group (新光集團), a multi-enterprise conglomerate straddling financial, energy, security, real estate, manufacturing, healthcare, and consumer services. This is the story of her grandfather, the entrepreneurial Wu Ho-su (吳火獅, 1919–1986) who started his business empire to lift his family out of poverty. Alongside the likes of Formosa Plastics (台塑) co-founder Wang Yung-ching (王永慶, 1917–2008) and late billionaire Tsai Wan-lin (蔡萬霖, 1924–2004), Ho-su was among the first-generation of homegrown industrialists with only an elementary school education (十大國小) whose confidence and ambitious drive reshaped Taiwan’s economy.
Wu Ho-su’s siblings were elder brother Chin-lung (“Golden Dragon”), younger brother Chin-hu (“Golden Tiger”), elder sisters Ying (“Bright Sunlight”) and Yu-kan (“Citrus”), and younger sister Pao-chu (“Precious Pearl”).
Wu Ho-su grew up as the enterprising, dutiful second son of an impoverished family in colonial-era Hsinchu when Taiwan was under imperial Japanese control. His father Wu Hua (吳化), a “coolie laborer building a railroad line,” was considered a young man of outstanding character and bright prospects until he was crippled in a workplace accident; an awry gravel cart busted his aspirations for the future but his fiancée Lin Wang-shih (林罔市) honored their agreement and they worked hard to raise their three daughters and three sons. The father would do odd jobs and chores at home, and became the moral center of the Wu clan by passing down “Chinese historical stories portraying loyalty, filial piety, and chastity.” The mother was the breadwinner and “often rummaged through the food remnants of wealthy families for still eatable rice grains and pickled melon.”
“Economically hard-pressed families, like ours, had difficulty even figuring out how to keep body and soul together back then, so getting a chance at an education was even more difficult and precious.”
Sharpened by the circumstances of his birth, Ho-su grew up with an aptitude for identifying veiled opportunities and making ends meet. He was helping out at a grocery store by the time of third grade, cooking gruel over an open stovetop that he could only access by standing on a stool, before going to class. He also offered his services to landowners during harvest season, so while other kids his age were tilling the empty fields for leftover produce (a permitted practice stemming from the prudence and goodwill of villagers in Taiwan at that time), he brought home a sack of commercial-grade potatoes in exchange for his labor.
“Family expenses were extremely heavy because Father’s health was poor. After his accident, he couldn’t return to work; moreover, several years of medical treatments had no effect on his chronic ailments, so he finally resorted to smoking opium to escape his pains.”
Having joined a Japanese textile distributor in 1935 Taipei as a lowly apprentice, Ho-su worked his way up the corporate hierarchy and became the 20-year-old manager of his own store called Ogawa’s. In “Business as a Vocation: The Autobiography of Wu Ho-su,” he recalled pitching the idea of starting a second branch to sell cheaper fabrics, thereby diversifying Hirano’s elite customer base and greatly contributing to the multinational company’s income. Ho-su took it upon himself to travel to Japan by ship or plane to source for favorable deals, even later during World War II when American submarines patrolled the Taiwan Strait.
“Whenever I wanted to pick out goods in Japan, I purposefully wore an old-style Western business suit, so I would somewhat resemble a little old man. Moreover, when asked, I reported my age as 26, instead of 20. Looking back, it’s really amusing.”
Now considered an eligible bachelor, Ho-su sought to get married after friends convinced him that it was the proper move and his new wife could take care of his elderly parents while he was away on two-month business trips to Japan. Unfortunately, Wu Hua passed away in October 1941, and the wedding was moved forward to coincide with the same day as the funeral so the bride could partake in the final rites as expected of her. Thus Ho-su bade his dad goodbye on the same day he welcomed Liang Kuei-lan (梁桂蘭), his “help-mate in business,” to the Wu household.
“Fate is really up to the one in the heavens, and fate doesn’t conform to people’s wishes!”
His wife’s brother Liang Ching-jui (梁敬睿) actually once trained to be a kamikaze pilot, yet “the day before he was to depart for Okinawa to execute his suicide mission, the emperor’s announcement ended the war.” His brother-in-law eventually moved to America.
In another twist of fate, he began retrofitting new property purchased on Taipei’s Nanjing Road in 1947, having taken down the original stone gates with plans to install glass doors for the new storefronts. A friendly reminder — “you’re really crazy; businessmen in the mainland wouldn’t dismantle their security doors!” — led him to install “thick, heavy iron doors that were used in jails.” So in the chaotic wake of the February 28 Massacre that swept through Taiwan shortly after, Ho-su even housed almost 100 hometown acquaintances from Hsinchu who were stranded in Taipei at that time: “With its iron doors, my building was the safest place around, and we didn’t have to worry about being robbed.”
Moreover, Ho-su bought up many properties while news of an imminent Allied attack on Taiwan led many households to sell their assets. “A two-story building became worth less than a bike with which one could flee. If one had 2,000 to 3,000 Taiwan dollars, one could buy a good two-story building.” He eventually established Shin Kong with “about 100,000 in cash” in 1945, and grew his enterprises by carefully navigating the geopolitical realities of Japan’s 1945 handover of Taiwan, the Nationalists’ 1949 retreat from China, the Nationalists’ 1971 exit from the United Nations, and the enforcement of martial law on Taiwan from 1949 to 1986, the year of his death.
“I thought to myself: Sooner or later the government will have to retreat … Yet Taiwan is a very small place with limited resources; thus, the evacuation of so many people to Taiwan will certain further fuel inflation.”
It should be noted that transactions prior to 1949 were conducted in old Taiwan dollars. For reference, Ho-su’s starting apprentice wages at Hirano’s textiles store in 1935 was “a monthly of three old Taiwan dollars. A bowl of plain noodles was only two cents, but taking the train from Taipei to Hsinchu cost 1.21.” By 1949, when the Nationalist government began issuing the New Taiwan (NT) dollar to combat hyper-inflation, “40,000 old Taiwan dollars were exchanged for 1 NT, and 1 US dollar was worth 5 NT dollars.”
All of these people — the loan sharks as well as the bumpkins — later fell victim to inflation’s bitter fate.”
Driven by a mercantile spirit and a desire to provide for his “cadres” — the serial entrepreneur’s word for his employees — and their households, Ho-su’s business kingdom was grown through trial and error. He once owned several ships and started a deep-sea fishing company that recruited extensively from east coast Indigenous communities but lamented that “most of the mountain people wasted their money drinking and dancing while in port during the two long years at sea” instead of investing their wages in land or business. When this venture failed, Ho-su chalked it up to incompatibility with the ocean itself, given his name literally meant “Fiery Lion (火獅).” He abstained from water-related investments thereinafter.
Back in the days when Taiwan did not hold any foreign reserves, Ho-su teamed up with 9 other investors to purchase the Taiwan Pineapple Company so he could earn foreign exchange to fund textile purchases from Japan; without Japanese cash, he once had to barter with Taiwanese bananas. His Shinshin cannery also became “the sole supplier of canned fruits to the U.S. military stationed in Taiwan” and even processed local produce like loquats, mushrooms, lychee, citrus, and mangoes before ceasing operations in 1980 due to eventual unprofitability. Ho-su constructed and sold residential buildings on the cannery site instead.
The Shin Kong founder also claimed credit for introducing specialty crops like Japanese muskmelons, seedless watermelons, and asparagus to Taiwan, which were not widely farmed on a commercial level in the past, as well as eels, which he identified as a profitable fish that could be grown here to meet Japan’s unagi demands. After visiting New Zealand, Ho-su even once dreamed of starting a deer farm in Taiwan, given how the meat and pelt are commercially attractive while other deer parts are prized by traditional Chinese medicine. He did start a farmstead that encompassed husbandry and food production, and the Chaofeng Ranch in Hualien is now open as a recreational resort to visitors interested in meeting dairy cows and plucking fruit.
“The fact that some of my other enterprises have been able to stand firmly for more than 40 years is only partially due to my own determination to struggle and my clever, sharp judgments. A considerable share of the credit also belongs to the intentionality in the heavens. There is a popular phrase that highlights the keys to success or failure in business: ‘Heaven’s timing, earth’s benefits, and people’s harmonious cooperation.’ And you cannot be lacking in any one of the three.”
Of the many adversities that confronted the businessman, several stemmed from trade and investment barriers erected by various governing authorities on Taiwan, as well as the preferential treatment offered by the Chinese Nationalist government to “mainland industrialists” new to the island. Ho-su resorted to a combination of cunningness and great determination to push through the bureaucratic red tape.
For example, he registered several extra firms “and applied for import permissions for many companies instead of just one” to circumvent Japan’s import regulations. He also got around prohibitions against importing entire textile-spinning machines by having his contacts in Japan dissemble the desired machinery into thousands of individual components, so they could be imported as “spare parts.”
“This might sound easy, but only those with personal experience will understand the difficulties. To install these machines, I then employed over 100 workers who labored in shifts until an hour or two after midnight every day. Even then, it still took over four months before the machines were finally fully reassembled and installed.
This is how we assembled and installed 50 machines.”
Ho-su strategized well, taking into account cultural developments and religious sensibilities in his extensive marketing campaigns. “Going to the movies was among the most popular entertainments in the 1960s” so he ran 5-cent ads at different cinema houses that offered the number of an agent local to that area. He used the “good name and image” of a close friend who was a quite established midwife to sell “several million New Taiwan dollars of life insurance in Taipei.” He would also pay traditional performance troops to incorporate halftime-esque Shin Kong ads in their temple plays.
“In one particular performance when two armies were entrenched facing each other, a general emerged from each side prepared to give the signal to begin battle; yet, while waiting to engage, one general shouted, Temporary halt! When the opposing general asked the reason for the delay, the first general replied: ‘Wait until I go to Shinkong Life Insurance Company to invest in some life insurance. When I return, we can get on with it.’”
To get the raw material import permits denied to him (raylon was considered a “luxury good” not prioritized by the government at that point) for his newly constructed 120,000-sq-ft factory in Taipei’s Shilin district, Ho-su embarked on a campaign of beautification in 1954. On his orders, roses and chrysanthemums were planted around the property, working quarters were made bright and spacious, and female workers dressed in neat uniforms were given flower-arrangement and beauty lessons so they became “the kind of young women who would be actively sought after by matchmakers on the look out for good brides.” Then he invited the Americans over.
“Having earlier prepared persuasive words to move his heart, I said: ‘I’m just a local Taiwanese with a dream of being an industrial entrepreneur and operating a factory in which these women could work, but I can’t get my hands on the basic raw materials.’”
After the Shilin tour, officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development rendered the assistance needed for that rayon factory to begin operations. The Shin Kong magnate was able to more than double his money by selling his fabrics at NT$30,000 when the cost of production was NT$12,000 per unit. The productivity of his laborers, according to himself, was bolstered by fair working conditions and benefits like company dorms.
Even the origin story of Shin Kong Life Insurance, the trump card of the Taiwanese conglomerate’s business portfolio, is characterized by his intuitive ability to exploit legal loopholes without actually breaking the law. In 1963, after securing the necessary paperwork but not yet having formulated a strategy for selling life insurance to the then-conservative people of Taiwan, Ho-su was issued an ultimatum — start the business now or lose your permit. The Nationalist government also announced that it would no longer issue licenses for life and business insurance after July 1963.
Since Ho-su did not want the public to discover that Shin Kong was going to sell life insurance until he had a proper plan, he devised a way to hold a grand opening for an extremely limited amount of folks. He borrowed sofas and tea tables from nearby stores, purchased 20 congratulatory flower wreaths to send to himself, and had his cadres and acquaintances dressed as guests at the July 30, 1963 opening.
“With such uncertainty, we didn’t dare publicly announce we had a life insurance business. Still, we were obligated to have at least a formal opening ceremony.
To meet the Finance Ministry’s minimum requirement, we issued one lone invitation.
That one card invited the head of the Ministry’s Department of Currency, Mr. Chin K’o-ho, to come attest to our opening.
Director Chin arrived punctually, took a look, and said, Okay.
This was all there was to the formal opening ceremonies of Shinkong Life Insurance.”
The tycoon had largely two non-Shin Kong regrets: the lack of opportunity to pursue a formal education beyond the elementary level, a disadvantage he overcame by self-studying, reading the news, and consulting a rather formidable range of decision-makers within his network; and not being by his mother’s side when she died in Taiwan. He had just arrived in New York to receive an honorary doctorate from St. John’s University.
“In recognition of his distinguished achievements in industry and business, his valued contributions to the economic growth of the Republic of China, as well as his sustained interest in the University’s intercultural programs, St. John’s University derives great pleasure in conferring upon this esteemed entrepreneur, Ho-su Wu, honoris causa, the degree of Doctor of Commercial Science.” (May 22, 1977)
Ho-su first declined the honor, citing his lack of higher education, but eventually relented. That night at New York Sheraton, already worried over the news of her declining health throughout the year, he dreamed of his mother calling. The very mother who was raised with virtuous bound lotus feet, but “unleashed” her feet bindings upon marriage to “do her work more conveniently.”
“Even though I am unable to comprehend fully my mother’s own feelings about ‘liberating her feet,’ her example patently awakened me to the principle that in order to be a person, one has to struggle and be fearless while undergoing hardships.”
Then the call came.
“It was my son, Eugene, calling from Taiwan to tell me that his grandmother had passed away. The time of her passing had been about the same time as my dream of her calling out my name.”
Ho-su’s eldest Eugene Wu (吳東進), “born to the sounds of air-raid sirens and constant bombing” in the 1945 Allied bombings of Taiwan, is father to Cynthia Wu. He would go on to inherit the Shin Kong chairmanship.
This feature is based on 《半世紀的奮鬥》, meaning “My Half-Century of Struggle,” the official Wu Ho-su memoir published by his family in 1988. Its Mandarin text was written by Harvard-trained Taiwanese historian Chin-Shing Huang (黃進興) of Academia Sinica. A Japanese version was released in 1992 as 《臺灣の獅子》, or “The Taiwanese Lion.” It was released in English as “Business as a Vocation” in 2002.
The English quotes used here were not translated by me. They were taken from the 2002 Harvard University Press edition translated by scholar Hoyt Cleveland Tillman (田浩) from the Department of History at Arizona State University. The autobiography’s English title chosen by historian Huang, whom interviewed Ho-su from December 1983 through November 1985, is a reference to German social theorist Max Weber.
Next up: The Shin Kong philosophy
