<html>Chinese billionaires seek peace and purchase remote islands</html>
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Lin made a fortune by founding a medical equipment company and is one of the growing number of wealthy Chinese acquiring their own islands. The 42-year-old slender man with a graying beard is only concerned about bureaucratic restrictions on land ownership. "I don’t dare invest on the island; anything I build could be torn down," he complained to AFP.
According to Lin's estimate, there are at least 600 island owners in China, most of whom are companies planning to use the islands for tourism or fishing. However, the number of individuals establishing private clubs on the islands for meetings with friends or political officials is also increasing.
Lin counts himself among the elite group of Chinese who buy islands for personal pleasure, and he also established the first Chinese association of island owners. His members "love nature, beaches, and also just lying on their backs listening to music," Lin stated.
Forty-one-year-old lawyer Wang Jüe commutes from the Chinese financial metropolis of Shanghai to an uninhabited island measuring one square kilometer about 40 kilometers off the coast. "At night on this island, you see a sky full of stars and the moon rising in the east. It's an amazing feeling," he says.
China claims 7,300 islets, all of which are owned by the government in Beijing. A new law enacted in 2010 allowed the sale of land-use rights on islands for a duration of 50 years.
A year later, the eastern province of Zhejiang held the first “island auction.” One company paid 20 million yuan (78 million CZK) for a contract on an uninhabited island larger than 2.5 hectares. Several other provinces followed this example.
Entrepreneur Lin Tung purchased his unnamed island off the coast of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2009 - before the passage of the island sale law - and thus faces the possible risk of eviction. Fearing loss of his island, Lin preferred to buy another one, located on a lake, where he feels freer.
With over a million dollar millionaires, China has plenty of potential buyers who can afford to purchase a piece of land in the middle of the sea, but local restrictions are driving many Chinese toward overseas shores.
Recently, there were reports that Chinese woman Wendy Wei-mei Wu bought New Zealand's Slipper Island for 5.6 million dollars (135.6 million CZK), which also has available landing and takeoff runways and residential buildings.
Another Chinese buyer paid five million yuan (19.5 million CZK) in last year’s online auction for an island in Fiji.
"The management of private islands in other countries is more developed than in China," says 31-year-old IT consultant Grammy Leung. He himself spent around 500,000 yuan (1.95 million CZK) last year on a 1.6-hectare island on one of the lakes in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Manuel Brinkschulte, a manager at Vladi Private Islands based in Hamburg, stated that China is the fastest-growing market for the company, though not yet the largest. He pointed out on his phone photos of a Chinese food magnate who this year took a trip to the Greek islands with his wife looking for a new investment.
Ultimately, however, the Chinese businessman dismissed the sunny Mediterranean Sea and is instead negotiating the purchase of a 140-hectare Scottish island that has a golf course and a small hotel. "They like places that are radically different from what they have in China, especially when there is no one to be seen for miles around," Brinkschulte noted.
The English translation is powered by AI tool. Switch to Czech to view the original text source.
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