Newswoman Changes Career

Hu Shuli (CFP)

Hu Shuli, founding editor of China's most influential business publication, Caijing, has resigned from the biweekly. A spokeswoman for Caijing confirmed Hu's resignation on November 9, but didn't provide specific reasons.

Earlier media reports said Hu and the management of the Stock Exchange Executive Council, Caijing's parent company, were divided over the magazine's development strategy and income distribution.

According to Guangzhou-based Information Times, Hu will take up the post of dean of the School of Communication and Design at Sun Yat-sen University and serve as a professor and doctoral tutor at the school in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Despite this, there are also rumors that Hu and most of her subordinates at Caijing plan to launch a new business magazine.

Hu, 56, started her journalistic career in 1982. After spending 16 years at Workers' Daily and China Business Times as a reporter and editor, she founded Caijing in 1998 under the Stock Exchange Executive Council, a Hong Kong-listed media group. Caijing has since won widespread acclaim at home and abroad, mainly for its exposure of a number of scandals in Chinese society.

New Richest Man

Xu Jiayin (CFP)

Xu Jiayin, founder and Board Chairman of Guangzhou-based Evergrande Real Estate Group Ltd., became the richest Chinese mainlander on November 5, the first day his company began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Shares of Evergrande rose more than 30 percent in its first day of trading, increasing Xu's net worth to $6.8 billion. Xu holds a 68-percent stake in the property developer along with his wife.

As a result, Xu overtook Wang Chuanfu, who tops this year's Forbes China Rich List with an estimated wealth of $5.8 billion, as the person with the largest fortune among all Chinese mainlanders.

Xu, 51, started Evergrande in 1996. The company, which focuses only on residential projects, has developed rapidly as a result of China's booming housing market over the past decade. It is now the country's fourth largest property developer by market value, having more land bank reserves than any rival company.

Poet Receives Award

Duo Duo (CFP)

Chinese poet Duo Duo, the pen name of Li Shizheng, was declared the 2010 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature on October 28.

The biennial Neustadt Prize, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma literary magazine World Literature Today, is one of the very few international prizes for which poets, novelists and playwrights are equally eligible. As part of the honor, the laureate receives a prize of $50,000.

Duo Duo is the first Chinese to win the prize, which was created in 1969.

Born in Beijing in 1951, Duo Duo started writing poetry in the early 1970s. He is a signature member of the "misty" school of Chinese poetry that flourished in the late 1970s. Since 2004, he has taught at Hainan University in south China's island province of Hainan.

"Duo Duo is a great lone traveler crossing borders of nation, language and history, as well as a resolute seer of some of the most basic, universal human values that have often been overshadowed in our troubled modern times: creativity, nature, love, dreams and wishful thinking," said Chinese poet Mai Mang, the pen name of Huang Yibing, who served on the Neustadt Prize jury.