L iu Yongxing is a Chinese industrialist and the founder and chairman of the East Hope Group. He was one of the four Liu brothers who famously started an agribusiness empire, the Hope Group, in the 1980s by raising quails. After the brothers split their assets to pursue separate ventures, Liu Yongxing took his share and founded East Hope. While he initially continued to build on his success in the animal feed industry, he made a colossal and highly successful strategic pivot into heavy industry.

Anticipating China's industrial growth, he invested billions into building massive production facilities for aluminum and polysilicon, the key raw material for solar panels. He strategically located these energy-intensive plants in remote western regions of China, like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, to take advantage of cheaper electricity costs. This move has made East Hope Group one of the world's largest and lowest-cost producers of both aluminum and solar-grade polysilicon. This transformation from an agricultural entrepreneur to a heavy industry titan makes his career path one of the most remarkable in modern China.