When fund-raising is a crime
A death sentence for a young businesswoman chills entrepreneurs. If any point is beyond dispute, it is that Ms Wu was a dynamo. She dropped out of secondary school and started a string of beauty parlours whose primary product was the use of animal-placenta injections to achieve the same sort of skin-smoothing effect for which collagen is used in the West. Within a few years she was reported in China Daily to have assembled a business empire that spanned spas, hotels and property. Her net worth was then said to exceed 3.8 billion yuan ($576m).
It all began to crumble when Ms Wu was detained in 2007, but a conviction did not come until December 2009, a particularly long delay that many believed was caused by efforts to broaden the investigation to include other prominent people. Ultimately, she was convicted of “illegal fund-raising” for, the court concluded, raising 773m yuan from illicit sources.