The Rong family's mills passed to the state in the 1950s, and the son who stayed became China's vice president and his son a billionaire

Rong Zongjing and Rong Desheng built a flour, textile and machine-making business from Wuxi and Shanghai and invested in banks. After 1949 Rong Desheng's son Rong Yiren took charge of the whole family business and stayed in China. In 1955 he turned the Rong companies into joint state-private enterprises. In January 1956 he walked Mao through a Shanghai mill, and Shanghai's mayor called him China's "red capitalist". In the Cultural Revolution his property was seized; it was restored in 1972. In 1978 and 1979 Deng Xiaoping chose him to found the China International Trust and Investment Corporation, CITIC. He was vice president of China from 1993 to 1998 and died in 2005, aged 89. His son Larry Yung had been sent to hard labour on farms in the Cultural Revolution. He moved to Hong Kong in 1978 and made about $50 million on a California software company. In 1987 he took over CITIC's Hong Kong arm. In 1996 he led a management purchase of 15.5 percent of CITIC Pacific at a 28 percent discount and took most of it. In 2008 the company lost about $2 billion on currency contracts^†. Yung resigned on 8 April 2009. On 10 April 2017 Hong Kong's Market Misconduct Tribunal found that he and four other former directors had not committed market misconduct.