The Scamp (1957), an effectively sentimental story of the attempts of a teacher (Richard Attenborough) to raise an unruly youth while the boy's drunken father is abroad, was popular, and Bachelor of Hearts (1958), a frothy tale of university adventures, was a big success, partly due to its German star, Hardy Kruger, who had become a favourite after his performance in the prisoner-of-war drama The One That Got Away.Piccadilly Third Stop (1960) was a disappointment, a routine tale of an embassy heist, but it was followed by his finest film (the first of two for MGM), Village of the Damned, with Rilla extracting every chill to be found in Wyndham's eerie tale of a country village where 12 of the women are impregnated while asleep - it is theorised that the aliens deposited the children in the women's wombs, the way cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of host birds. Like Deng Zhifang, Premier Deng's wealthy son, Rong's son Larry Yung prospered with the help of family connections, becoming chairman of the Hong Kong-based Citic Pacific and eventually one of the former colony's richest men. in Chinese".The name Rong, like Deng, became synonymous with unabashed money-making, and the target - mainly outside China - of allegations of cronyism, corruption and nepotism. The article said: "With an average age of 35, their language is not of Mao's Little Red Book but more of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
He became one of Deng's closest advisers and set up the China International Trust Investment Company (Citic), effectively the investment arm of the Chinese state.Rejecting with breathtaking speed the values of the previous era, the company became one of the most voracious and successful of the new breed of post-Mao enterprises, hoovering up interests in telecoms, utilities, infrastructure and airlines, and becoming a sprawling conglomerate with branches all over the world.A breathless article in Financial Review from the 1990s found the Citic employees "swapping Mao suits for Boss and Chanel" and barking orders into mobile phones. But, when Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) in a bid to hang on to power and destroy "capitalist roaders", Rong's background made him an obvious target for "re-education".Rong was lucky to survive unscathed; and his luck held when Deng took power in 1978, famously rejecting Maoism with the folksy aphorism that he didn't care what colour the cat was "as long as it catches mice". Rong had been the wrong colour for at least a decade, but fewer cats were better qualified to manage China's transition to a free market than a man steeped in two generations of family business. Rong had a privileged upbringing: educated at Shanghai's ?te British-run university, St John's, before taking over the family business. After he surrendered his wealth to the Communists in 1956, he received in return a post as Deputy Mayor of Shanghai, where he first earned the nickname "red capitalist". Rong became one of the key figures in China's remarkable transition from a Third World Stalinist backwater to the world's most dynamic economy.By the end of the century, he was the Rockefeller of the Middle Kingdom, listed by Forbes Magazine as the country's richest man; and he had the political power to match this wealth thanks to a close relationship with Premier Deng Xiaoping.
Under Deng's patronage, Rong was Vice-President of China from 1993 to 1998 and his large extended family became one of the main beneficiaries of red capitalism.Typically for a Chinese success story, though, it wasn't all plain sailing. When Mao Zedong and the Red Army took power in China in 1949, Rong Yiren and his family faced a momentous decision: flee the mainland, or stay and help build a new nation under the Communists. For rich capitalists like the Rongs, this did not seem much of a choice. As the scion of Rong Desheng, a Shanghai textile and flour entrepreneur and one of pre-Mao China's wealthiest men, Rong Yiren could expect few favours from a government that had promised to "eliminate forever" the monopoly capitalist class and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.Remarkably, however, Yiren stayed behind, ignoring the pleas of brothers and friends who took their wealth to Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States Few decisions have paid off so handsomely. During these years, Rilla would occasionally be guest director on television plays, and from the Sixties on, most of his work was in television, where he directed and/or scripted a variety of shows, from plays to the Paul Temple series. When he returned to the big screen, it was for such titles as Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman (1973) and Bedtime with Rosie (1974).Wolf Rilla also wrote six novels, lectured at the London International Film School, and published The A-Z of Movie Making (1970), about working in the film industry.