23-year-old CEO Dong Siyang worth 300 million yuan?

Chongqing Times
November 21, 2008

A woman named Dong Siyang (董思阳) made the front page of today’s Chongqing Times. According to the report, Dong is a successful 23-year-old entrepreneur. Yesterday, she went to Chongqing Technology and Business University to have a talk with the students about how to start up and be successful.

Dong’s bio does seem to be very impressive at first glance. She studied at a university in Singapore and earned her MBA at an American university. Then she went back to China and built her own business from scratch, which has developed into a multinational company in just three years. Dong’s personal net worth is estimated to be 300 million yuan.

So Dong is young, beautiful, talented, and rich. But how much of it can we believe?

Since she appeared on the national stage a few years back, Dong Siyang has been the subject of heated debate. Netizens, always eager to uncover a scam or an overhyped, engineered media phenomenon, picked apart her record.

The American university the article translates as “美国民族大学” (or American Nationalities University) is identified in articles across the Chinese-language Internet as the “Nation University of USA,” an essentially unaccredited California-based institution that uses the phonetic 美国内申大学 for its Chinese name. It advertises its 27,800-yuan MBA course on many Chinese websites, claiming that you don’t have to go abroad to get your American degree.

Netizens also investigated her Hong Kong-based multinational company, Fengbohk (香港凤博国际集团), and found that the URL was only registered in 2007 and doesn’t even host a website.

It’s all pretty suspicious, but no one’s been able to make anything stick. Dong has appeared on well-regarded interview shows and travels the country giving lectures to aspiring entrepreneurs. She also has a new book out, “A CEO at 21.”