China’s Unlucky Tycoon: The ‘Canal Madman’ Keeps Finding Trouble

A SpaceX rocket that exploded last year left three of the world’s most ambitious entrepreneurs red-faced. Elon Musk tweeted about the failure of his launch vehicle, and Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook about the loss of his plans to expand the internet in Africa using the Amos 6 communications satellite on board. Wang Jing, the least well-known of the three, scrapped his plans to buy the Israeli company that owned the Amos 6.

For Wang, 44, it was another in a string of setbacks for projects around the globe. His plans for a $10 billion deep-water port in Crimea fell through after Russia annexed the region in 2014. The same year he broke ground on a $50 billion canal in Nicaragua to compete with Panama’s. Little ground has moved since. A deal in Ukraine has been tied up by that country’s courts. Wang was also a high-profile loser in China’s 2015 stock market crash. After his Beijing Xinwei Technology Group added $30 billion in market value in less than a year, making Wang one of China’s richest people, the collapse wiped out three-quarters of those gains within four months. The telecom equipment company’s shares have been suspended since last December, after they fell 10 percent in one day on a Chinese media report questioning Xinwei’s business model, including in Cambodia. The company has published a 105-page report denying any wrongdoing and providing clarifications on its global operations.