He escaped poverty to build the $33b JD empire. Will a rape allegation end his rise?

Photo credit: Richard Liu’s Weibo

Despite running China’s second-biggest shopping app and having a net worth of US$6.2 billion, Richard Liu is often overlooked by the media, which focuses on Alibaba’s Jack Ma and his folksy wisdom.

Here’s how Liu, 44, rose to the top with his US$33 billion JD ecommerce empire – and how his career and reputation are now in crisis.

Village boy

He was born Liu Qiangdong in March 1974 to a poor rural family in Jiangsu, a province outside Shanghai.

“From June until September, we were able to eat corn. Cornmeal porridge for breakfast, corn pancakes for lunch, and dry cornbread for dinner – cornbread so tough it made your throat bleed,” Liu said of his childhood. “The other eight months, we ate boiled sweet potato for breakfast, sweet potato pancake for lunch, and dried sweet potato for dinner.”

In 1992, he passed the entrance exam to Beijing’s prestigious People’s University of China. The youngster was unable to afford the trip to the capital, but relatives and neighbors in the village gathered together US$75 to support him. Some gave him eggs.

“I couldn’t take a chicken to Beijing, but I could take eggs. For the entire first week I was in Beijing, I just ate eggs,” Liu recounted.

It was a year of major changes in China – with McDonald’s opening its first store in the capital months before Liu arrived.

Liu enrolled in a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Worried about a lack of job opportunities, he spent his spare time learning computer programming.

While in college, Liu tried his first entrepreneurial venture. He opened a restaurant but it failed within a few months, wiping out his earnings from freelance coding and leaving him in debt.

Right after graduation in 1996, he got a job at insurance company Japan Life. Over two years, he took on various roles that covered business, logistics, and computing.

He later reflected on this period in his life. “During the two years there, I gradually understood that the restaurant bankruptcy was my fault because I had not established management structures, done oversight, or established financial systems and procedures.”

From early failure to first success

Upon leaving the insurer, the young entrepreneur started a shop named Jingdong with just RMB 12,000 – US$1,700 in today’s money – as capital. Liu’s store sold CD-ROM drives and other such equipment in Beijing’s bustling, tech-focused Zhongguancun district.

Within five years, he opened 11 more stores across four cities. And he made his first million – in Chinese yuan, anyway.

Gaining ground

Controversy