The Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world features four figures from mainland China this year, one of the biggest pool of Chinese honorees in the past four years.

Chinese president Hu Jintao is on the list for the third time since 2004, and is the only Chinese figure appearing on the list for more than once in recent years.

Also on the list is Mr. Liu Qi, Beijing Communist Party Secretary and the head of the city’s Olympic Organizing Committee. He was chosen for his important and challenging role in organizing the 2008 Olympic Games.

Zeng Jinyan, wife of environmental activist Hu Jia, is listed as one of the “heroes and pioneers” for her bravery of keeping blogging about she and her husband’s battle against government oppression.

Internet pioneer Pony Ma, inventor of China’s popular online communication service QQ, was selected, too. The online service has evolved into a 100-million-user network for online socializing and entertainment.[Full Text]

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There are only 10 known billionaires in China, and he is one of them. His name is Xu Rongmao, and he is no Donald Trump, Sam Zell or Mortimer Zuckerman. He’s bigger.

Xu Rongmao is said to be a secretive man. Little is known about how he earned his early fortune and developed his network of political allies.

Mr. Xu, who is the chairman of the Shimao Group, controls much more land than any private developer in America and builds luxury real estate projects that put even Mr. Trump to shame for their sheer scale and flamboyance. But unlike the ubiquitous Mr. Trump – who is never at a loss for words and goes out of his way to attract the attention of cameras – Mr. Xu almost never grants interviews and is highly secretive about his operations.

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Sometimes a single life can tell more about a country’s experience than a shelfful of history books. Many Chinese people of a certain age have such lives – rich in struggle, in suffering, in the consequences of man’s folly, but often enough, too, in a measure of redemption.

“I knew nothing about the United States, but I knew that if you wanted to learn science, the U.S. was the place.”

- XU TIAN

These are people today in their 40′s whose transition to adulthood was hijacked by the Cultural Revolution.

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Sometimes a single person’s life can tell you more about a country’s experience than a shelf full of history books. Among Chinese people of a certain age, such lives, rich in struggle, in suffering and in the consequences of man’s folly and often enough in a measure of redemption, come in abundance.

These are people who are today in their 40s, whose transition to adulthood was hijacked by the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution.

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The former senior Chinese diplomat Xiong Xiang-hui, who has died aged 86, played a vital undercover role during the final phase of the communist revolution, after the second world war, which may have tipped the balance in Mao Zedong‘s favour. Twenty or so years later, he was a key figure in the re-emergence of the country onto the international scene, attending secret meetings in Beijing with the US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and joining communist China’s first delegation to the United Nations in 1971.

Outside China, however, Xiong’s importance is barely known. His name does not appear in Kissinger’s memoirs or in recent biographies of Mao. The full extent of his exploits was only revealed in 1991, when he published Twelve Years Underground with Zhou Enlai, followed by several essays on his postwar career. But though the revelations attracted media attention in China, they went virtually unnoticed in the outside world.

Xiong’s involvement in politics began as a student in 1936. After secretly joining the Communist party, he managed to get onto the staff of Hu Zongnan, one of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s most able generals, serving as his confidential secretary for 10 years.

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They grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong’s brutal political campaigns in the 1960′s and 1970′s tore apart families, pitting children against their parents and husbands against their wives. Today, they are some of the most powerful deal makers in China, a group of rich and politically astute investment bankers who are helping transform China’s economy and restructuring some of its biggest corporations.

Every major investment bank now has a Chinese-born star banker: Goldman Sachs has Fang Fenglei; Merrill Lynch has Erhfei Liu; Morgan Stanley has Jonathan Zhu; J. P. Morgan has Charles Li; and Citigroup has Wei Christianson.

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Four years ago, Ziyi Zhang, who had literally soared to the attention of Hollywood as a nobleman’s beautiful daughter in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” arranged to meet Steven Spielberg. She knew he was interested in directing the best-seller “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and though Zhang is Chinese and geishas are Japanese, she recognized the scarcity of great parts for Asian actresses and wanted him to consider her for the title role. It was a peculiar meeting. Aside from the question of nationality, Zhang did not speak English. Ang Lee, the director of “Crouching Tiger,” had suggested that she learn the language, but she ignored him. Although she’s ambitious, at the time she was not concentrating on the West. “In China, they don’t care about American films,” Zhang reasoned. “And no one thought ‘Crouching Tiger’ would be so successful.”

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At 14, Zhang Ye furtively learned her ABCs while herding sheep in frigid Inner Mongolia during China’s Cultural Revolution, a humble start on her path to a masters degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

Now 50, Zhang is country director for the Asia Foundation in China, where her suffering under communism run amok inspires her work helping vulnerable female migrant workers survive the upheaval of China’s head spinning capitalist revolution.

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