An Open Book

Indonesian business titan Mochtar Riady reveals the secrets to his success in his new autobiography, and he tells Hong Xinyi why he wants to share his story

o understand indonesian magnate Mochtar Riady, it helps to know a little bit about the three women who have shaped his beliefs. The founder and chairman of global conglomerate Lippo Group, now 87, was born to Chinese immigrant parents in East Java, but as a young boy spent a few years in his family’s ancestral village in China’s Putian county, where he grew close to his grandmother. “I remember her taking me to a nearby mountaintop one day so that we could look down on our village, and she told me that the people here were poor because they had no opportunity to get a good education,” he reminisces in Mandarin. “She had great foresight; she was no ordinary woman.” After moving back to Indonesia, his mother died during childbirth when he was eight years old. His father never remarried, dedicating himself to Mochtar’s education. “I was very lucky to have such a father. He often gazed at a photo of my mother with tears in his eyes,” he recalls. “If there had been hospitals nearby, then maybe I would not have lost her at such a young age.” Because of this early loss, and his grandmother’s imparted belief in the value of education, the family’s Pelita Harapan Educational Foundation now runs 52 schools and three universities across Indonesia, as well as the Mochtar Riady Institute for Nanotechnology. Other initiatives include hospitals in the remote areas of Indonesia, and a teachers’ college that gives 500 students each year a free education. In exchange, the graduates teach in rural schools for a few years. The third important woman in Mochtar’s life is his wife, Li Limei, a fair and slender woman with regal posture who accompanies him to this interview in the OUE Bayfront building at Collyer Quay. (OUE is the integrated property development arm of the Lippo Group.) During their courtship years, Mochtar was an idealistic young man drawn to Communist ideology like many youths during the post-wwii years, and he seriously considered making his way to the Chinese Communist headquarters in Yan’an to join the cause. A tearful letter from Li reached him before he boarded a boat to embark on the journey, and while he was agonising over whether to leave, an onboard explosion killed all the passengers before the boat even set sail. “She wrote that if I left, we would be in two worlds and she wasn’t sure if we would ever see each other again,” he says of the fateful letter that saved his life. “So that made me hesitate. If I had made it to Yan’an, my life would have been very different. In the world of politics, there are so many struggles and uncertainties. When you’re young, you don’t think about that.” As Indonesia emerged from the Japanese Occupation and anti-colonial movement as an independent nation, Mochtar turned his focus to business, first working in the import-export line, then moving into banking. In his early years as a banker, a client once gifted him with four gold bars. “I was very happy, but when I took the bars home to show my wife, she insisted I return them. She believed accepting the gift would be like selling my independence, and it wasn’t right. So I listened to her,” he says with a chuckle. “She has always been like this. My kids are more capable than me, and that’s all because of my wife. She teaches them by setting an example. When she was 50, she completed a degree in sociology at the University of Southern California, and that showed our children that