Chang Chung-Hsing
Source of wealth: High-precision gearboxes
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Modules
Biography
Chang Chung-Hsing is the chairman of Taichung-based Apex Dynamics.
He founded the company in 1987 as a maker of robotic arms, and has built it into one of the world's largest suppliers of high-precision gearboxes.
Apex listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange in 2022.
It also owns Millennium Vee Hotel Taichung, operated in partnership with Singapore's Millennium Hotels & Resorts, one of the oldest international-brand hotels in central Taiwan.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Chang Chung-Hsing
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Chang Chung-Hsing, linked to Manufacturing and 'High-precision gearboxes', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 8 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 0.5 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.