The so-called young investors' meet-up.

It was really just a gathering of the elite tier of Shanghai's finance world.

Besides a number of senior people from the industry, plenty of finance-world heirs were there too.

Zhao Ming was one of the representative figures among them, so there was no getting out of a gathering like this whenever one came around. In the past he had always gone alone; this time he had company.

"The rich kids in Shanghai split into two circles. One is the spoiled-little-prince crowd, the ones I took you to the club with last time. The other is the elite-children crowd. The two of them have always kept out of each other's way, but if there's ever any real trouble between them, it's usually the first bunch who back down."

"Why?"

"The first bunch mostly get left to run wild by their parents. To put it bluntly, they're a pack of Adous nobody can prop up [TL: 阿斗 — the childhood name of Liu Shan, last ruler of the state of Shu Han in the Three Kingdoms period, proverbial for an heir so hopeless that no amount of propping up will make anything of him. 扶不起的阿斗 is still the standard way to say somebody is beyond helping.] — their families have given up on training them. The second bunch have generally had an elite education, mostly graduates of world-famous schools like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford. Only a very small number of them actually got in on their own, but the quality's not bad, and once people like that come home from studying abroad their parents usually groom them as successors. So compared with those 'Adous', this crowd naturally sits a bit higher."

Xu Ye laughed. "So which bunch are you?"

"Grass on top of a wall, I suppose. I'm on decent terms with both sides either way."

Xu Ye called it out flat. "Mainly because your uncle's business is big enough that anyone with a pulse has to give you a little face."

"You can't put it quite like that. There are people I have to…