Li, who escaped from the Tiananmen Square massacre, learned English in a year, and founded a small investment empire in the USA, has a breathtaking life story.
In the spring of 1989, a train full of students arrived in Beijing. As soon as those in the fish-stacked wagons arrived in the capital, they took to the streets to join the protests that started after the death of a popular reformist leader. One of the passengers was 23-year-old Li Lu.
Li, who was studying at Nanjing University, mixed with the crowd and proceeded to Tiananmen Square. The crowd was demanding reform. Some were willing to die of hunger for this cause. The demonstrations would last for months... Li was born in April 1966. Shortly thereafter, as a result of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, his parents were sent to a labor camp. He spent his childhood between caregivers and an orphanage. When he was 10 years old, he survived the Tangshan earthquake, in which 240 thousand people died. Among the dead was his adoptive family.
Li Lu (born April 6, 1966) is a Chinese-born American value investor, businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder and chairman of Himalaya Capital Management. Prior to emigrating to America, he was one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests. In 2021, he also co-founded The Asian American Foundation and serves as its chairman.
Returning to Tiananmen Square... Wang Juntao, one of the organizers of the protest, immediately noticed Li, who remained silent at the rallies. According to Juntao, Li also knew how to approach the right people. He immediately became friends with Wang Dan, a student leader from Peking University, and impressed Chai Ling, the commander-in-chief of the student group called Tiananmen Square Defense Headquarters. Chai made Li his deputy.
Li also played a key role in organizing the six-day hunger strike in mid-May. The strike enraged the government. As the demonstrators' morale began to deteriorate, Li proposed to his girlfriend in the presence of everyone and a symbolic wedding took place. By the end of May, 1 million people had gathered in the square. In the early hours of June 4, military units entered the square and opened fire on protesters. Tanks crushed the tents where protesters were sleeping and blocked the exits. Soldiers arrested those who tried to escape. While the authorities claimed that 200 civilians died, according to student leaders, the number was up to 3,400.
After the massacre, the government announced that they were looking for 21 students who were the leaders of the rebellion. Photos of Li appeared in state media. He managed to escape via the smuggling route established to bring Western goods from Hong Kong, which was a British colony at the time.
At the end of 1989, the United States granted Li asylum. New York was a difficult place for someone who had never left communist China in his life. Li, who had no money and no English, made ends meet thanks to the human rights community. Robert Bernstein, CEO of the giant publishing house Random House, helped Li establish a new life in the USA. Activist Trudie Styler brought second-hand clothes. The clothes belonged to Styler's husband, rock star Sting.
After learning English in his first summer in New York, he entered Columbia University and was very successful. At school, he received a crash course in American capitalism: After a seminar given by Warren Buffett, he began investing his student loans into the stock market and earning serious income. After his graduation, Wall Street companies lined up to give him a job. But within a year Li had founded his own hedge fund company.
Hedge funds boomed in the United States with the wind of economic growth in the 1990s, and they increasingly turned to more creative and risky investment strategies. But it was unheard of for a recent college graduate to set out on his own. Li's hedge fund, called Himalaya Capital, did not do well at first. Following the 1997 financial crisis, the company lost 19 percent of its value in its first year. Shortly after, one of the largest investors withdrew. Li recovered by buying shares from the crisis-hit Japanese and Korean stock markets. By the mid-2000s, he was now managing nearly $100 million. He started hiring staff.
But, as a newspaper at the time put it, his “transformation from freedom fighter to white-collar Manhattanite” aroused suspicion. He was now articulating his long-term strategy to invest in China's growth, extolling the democratizing impact of the nascent internet. Meanwhile, he had begun to establish contacts with Chinese immigrants. One of them was real estate giant Xiong Wanli, whom he met in Los Angeles in the late 1990s...
In 2003, Li was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner in Santa Barbara. Buffett's right-hand man, Charlie Munger, was also there. Munger and Li's stock market conversation lasted for hours. This is how the partnership that would last 20 years began. “He chose to do his own thing rather than work for someone else,” said Munger, now 99 and still a Berkshire vice chairman. Of course, I understood this immediately, I am that kind of person too. "I tried to get him to Berkshire, but it was against his nature," he says. He merely suggested that Li turn into a Buffett-style investor. This meant leaving the buy-sell business and moving into long-term “value investing”.
When Li established a new fund in 2004, Munger entrusted him with $88 million of the family fortune. This money brought great relief to the young Chinese investment manager. Munger: “We won very well. "The initial amount of 88 million dollars has quadrupled or quintupled," he says. For example, Li purchased the distilled spirits brand Kweichow Moutai early on. The brand became the official national drink shortly after the Communist Revolution. After the growth in China, it became the drink given as bribes to high-level bureaucrats. This move by Li was like buying Apple shares in the late 1990s.
At the same time as China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, the idea that free market capitalism would democratize China was popular. Although Li was still a political exile in Beijing's eyes, he seemed to be a natural bridge between the United States and China with his success in the business world.
In 2002, he invested in BYD, which was not yet a well-known electric battery manufacturer at the time. Although he was prohibited from visiting the company's factory in Shenzhen, Li believed in China's manufacturing prowess and purchasing power in the country. He also convinced Munger, and Berkshire bought a 10 percent stake in BYD in 2008. “It is difficult to make a fortune in this industry,” Munger said. But things went very well. “The early investment in BYD was a minor miracle,” he says. Last year, the company dethroned Tesla and became the world's best-selling electric car manufacturer.
At the end of September 2010, a blurry photo taken at the BYD facility in Shenzhen appeared in a Hong Kong newspaper. The company's uniformly dressed executives and Chinese government officials lined up behind their famous guests from the United States. In front were Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Buffett, and Munger in their casual clothes. Sitting at the end of the row was Li, wearing dark sunglasses. Although Buffett's photos were the most prominent in the news about the visit, Chinese state media confirmed the information about Li's presence. It was the first time that one of the exiled students, who was on the government's list of 21 people, was allowed to enter the country.