Forbes recently released a list of the richest people in China in 2021. Find out who came out on top of the list!

Net worth: $29.6 billion
Industry: Real estate

The heiress is the largest shareholder of real estate developer Country Garden Holdings. Her stake was transferred to her from her father Yeung Kwok Keung, who founded the company and still serves as the chairman. 

9. William Lei Ding

Net worth: $33 billion
Industry: Online games

Revenue at his Nasdaq-listed NetEase rose 24% in 2020 as pandemic lockdowns drove demand for its online-gaming and remote-learning products. The company’s pipeline of games include “Harry Potter: Magic Awakened,” “The Lord of the Rings: Rise to War” and “Pokémon Quest.”

8. Qin Yinglin & family

Net worth: $33.5 billion
Industry: Pig breeding

Qin founded China’s top hog producer, Muyuan Foodstuff Co., in 1992 with wife Qian Ying and just 22 pigs. The group now has 140,000 employees and produced over 18 million pigs in 2020. Qin is chairman, while Qian, who is also a billionaire, sits on the board.

7. Zhang Yiming

Net worth: $35.6 billion
Industry: TikTok

Zhang founded ByteDance, creator of popular short-video app TikTok, in a four-bedroom apartment in 2012. The company first hit it big with news aggregator app Toutiao in China, before taking the world by storm with TikTok. A December funding round valued the unicorn at $180 billion.

Fun fact: Yiming majored in microelectronics and software engineering at Nankai University.

6. He Xiangjian

Net worth: $37.7 billion
Industry: Home Appliances

The cofounder of electric-appliance maker Midea Group reportedly escaped a kidnapping attempt last June, when several men tried to break into his home using explosives. His son allegedly got out of the house and swam across a river to alert the authorities. He, who stepped down as Midea’s chairman in 2012, still owns a controlling stake with his family.

5. Wang Wei

Net worth: $39 billion
Industry: Package delivery

Revenue of his S.F. Express—the “FedEx of China”—rose 37% in 2020 as e-commerce boomed during China’s Covid-19 lockdowns.  Wang founded the company in 1993 and took it public on the Shenzhen Stock exchange 24 years later through a reverse merger; he still owns nearly 60% of the stock.

4. Jack Ma

Net worth: $48.4 billion
Industry: E-commerce

The Alibaba cofounder has been lying low since the dual listing of his fintech giant, Ant Group, was halted by Chinese regulators in November. His e-commerce empire is also under pressure; Chinese regulators launched an anti-monopoly investigation into the company in December.

Fun fact: Jack Ma is an alumni of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), one of the top business schools in the world. He joined CKGSB in 2006 and participated in China CEO program.

3. Colin Zheng Huang

Net worth: $55.3 billion
Industry: E-commerce

The founder of online discounter Pinduoduo stepped down as its chairman in March to pursue  research in food and life sciences; he gave up his CEO role last July. In 2020, Pinduoduo surpassed Alibaba as China’s most popular e-commerce company with 788.4 million users, just five years after Huang launched the firm. The latter’s annual revenue ($72 billion) still dwarfs Pinduoduo’s ($9.1 billion).

Fun fact: Huang started studying computer science at the prestigious Zhejiang University, one of China’s Ivy League schools.

2. Ma Huateng

Net worth: $65.8 billion
Industry: Internet media

His web-media giant, Tencent, which owns stakes in Tesla, Snap and Spotify, notched another win with the February public offering of video-sharing app Kuaishou. Tencent, which is best known for its messaging and social media app WeChat, owns 18% of the Hong Kong listed firm.

1. Zhong Shanshan

Net worth: $68.9 billion
Industry: Beverages

The September 2020 IPO of his bottled-water firm, Nongfu Spring, drove up his fortune by 3,345%, making him the year’s biggest percentage gainer and China’s new richest person. Zhong also chairs Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy, which went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in April 2020.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferwang/2021/04/06/the-10-richest-chinese-billionaires-in-2021/