How do you say 'Ponzi' in Chinese?

WASHINGTON -- Businesses have long fantasized about the Chinese market: "Sure, they're poor but if we can only make a buck a year off each one, why, that's 1.5 billion."
For years, the communist government punctured this marketing reverie by insuring that most Chinese didn't have a buck or much else and the leaders discouraged theft by keeping everything worth having for themselves.
With the coming of a market economy, the Chinese people began prospering and despite decades of indoctrination quickly embraced the capitalist concept of "disposable income." And with that income there appeared one of the less desirable byproducts of capitalism, the scam artist.
The Washington Post has drawn our attention to an innovative, home-grown member of that breed, Wang Zhendong, who probably never heard of a Ponzi scheme but pioneered one all the same.
Our own Charles Ponzi was a sort of reverse immigrant success story. He worked hard, kept an eye out for opportunities and eventually swindled his new countrymen out of millions.
Ponzi's scam was to offer to double people's money every 90 days, ostensibly by speculating in international postal coupons. In fact, he was paying off the earlier investors with the tens of thousands that later investors were eagerly thrusting into his hands.
A successful Ponzi scheme requires that the swindler dematerialize with the proceeds at a propitious time but the perpetrator becomes mesmerized by the river of cash. Ponzi was shuffling money right up until his conviction for mail fraud. Something like that happened to Wang.
One word: "Ants!"
Wang dabbled in a number of businesses from plastics to chicken breeding in his native Yingkou but didn't hit it big until he lucked into -- ant farms. These were special ants, he told investors. For one thing, they were edible. And, the Post explained, "The Chinese have eaten certain ants, brewed wine from their bodies and turned them into medicines for thousands of years." To this entomologically untrained eye, however, they looked like plain old ants.
If you invested 1,300, Wang's minions would drop off two cardboard boxes of ants at your house. You would feed them -- they didn't eat much -- and every five weeks or so the company would pick up the ants, drop off two more boxes and pay you 52. They would do that 10 times a year, so the ant ranchers were earning 520 a year on their 1,300 investment.
"It seemed so easy," one woman, who had invested 13,000 saved for her daughter's college education, told the Post. That's the beauty of Ponzi schemes. Wang mulcted his countrymen out of 400 million before the authorities caught up with him.
Ponzi's victims were stuck with worthless paper. As least Wang's victims were left with ants that, if they were of a mind to, they could eat.
Before incipient scam artists book passage to Beijing -- remember, a buck a year off 1.5 billion Chinese -- consider Wang's fate. Here, he would serve jail time, find religion, get a book contract and begin a second career as a motivational speaker.
The Chinese courts sentenced him to death. But greed springs eternal in the human breast and the Post says another company is promising double-digit returns on ant farms.
Scripps Howard News Service