Chinese billionaire lives modestly

BEIJING, April 29 (UPI) -- China's richest man lives in a small apartment and shuns high life and expensive hobbies.

Huang Guangyu, majority stockholder in Gome Electrical Appliances, has acquired a fortune of about $2 billion since he arrived in Beijing 20 years ago as a poor 16-year-old, The Los Angeles Times reports. He got his start peddling electronic appliances from a stall.

"We have so many mysterious rich people. Others admire their money but they question the morality of it," Victor Yuan, a senior analyst at Horizon Research Group in Beijing, told the Times. "You've got to be rich silently."

Huang's timing was fortunate. After growing up in a poor Catholic family in Guangdong Province in southern China, he arrived in Beijing when the Communist Party leadership was starting to encourage private enterprise.

The Gome group was ranked eighth in the Hundred Giants of Retail Chain Stores in China, and first in the home electrical appliance retail sector, in 2001.

China's explosive economy has created thousands of billionaires. But the boom has also left many people behind, the newspaper reported.