The man generally credited with introducing the first universal pension scheme is Otto von Bismarck.

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The modern social welfare state was invented by Otto von Bismarck in the mid-19th century.

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But Alexander von Bismarck, from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a non-governmental organisation or NGO, says the main beneficiaries are Chinese mafiosi and businessmen.

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In 1885, the Congress of Berlin, hosted by Otto von Bismarck and attended by 15 nations, agreed on the partition of Central and East Africa.

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After all it was that arch-reactionary, Otto von Bismarck, who introduced the world's first welfare system, including the old-age pension, in Germany in the 1860s.

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Except for the tapered electric bulbs in the sconces, we could easily have been sitting there in 1849, listening to the sound of young Count Otto von Bismarck clanging sabers in the next room.

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Imperial Germany in 1889 enacted the first pension plan, financed by equal contributions from employers and employees, largely because Chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw it as a method to wean the masses away from socialism.

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Xu Xiaonian, an economics professor at the China-Europe International Business School, was even more strident in his remarks, saying China's state-capitalist model was in fact pioneered by Otto Von Bismarck, the 19th-century statesman credited with uniting Germany.

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The four decades following America's first Gilded Age in the 1870s were pocked with dislocation: multiple financial panics, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the onset of the Mexican Revolution and Otto von Bismarck's German makeover.

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