A few days ago, Unitree Robotics captivated audiences with the world’s first robot boxing tournament, a spectacle that showcased the fusion of engineering precision and creative design. This event exemplifies the dynamic innovation landscape in China, where design and technology converge to push boundaries. It also underscores the opportunities available for UK innovators to engage with China’s burgeoning tech ecosystem.

The Design Intelligence Award (DIA), now in its 10th edition, stands as a testament to this spirit of innovation.  As one of the world’s most prestigious award programmes, the DIA offers a platform for designers, entrepreneurs and innovators to gain recognition and access to the Chinese market. This year marks the fifth consecutive partnership between the China-Britain Business Council (CBBC) and the DIA, reflecting our commitment to fostering UK-China collaboration in design and innovation.

The DIA is inviting participants to explore how design can drive sustainable development, technological advancement, and societal well-being. With a total award fund of 5 million RMB (approximately £600,000), the DIA not only recognises outstanding design but also facilitates the commercialisation of innovative ideas.

The significance of engaging with China’s market cannot be overstated. According to the UK Department for Business and Trade’s “Trade and Investment Factsheet” published in May 2025, total trade in goods and services between the UK and China remained close to £100 billion mark in the four quarters to the end of Q4 2024.  China kept its position as the UK’s fifth-largest trading partner, accounting for 5.5% of total UK trade.

Peter Burnett, CEO of CBBC, emphasises the role of design in this context: “Design is a powerful enabler of innovation and a key strength of the UK’s global offer.  As China deepens its focus on high-quality growth, there is clear potential for British businesses to co-create solutions across priority sectors, from sustainable products to next-generation health technologies, and beyond,” he said.

New for 2025, the DIA introduces two entry routes: the established Product Group and the newly launched Innovation Incubation Group. The latter offers participants the opportunity to co-create solutions to real-world challenges with leading enterprises such as Alibaba, Unitree Robotics, Rokid, Fourier Intelligence, Deep Robotics, and BrainCo, unlocking unparalleled opportunities for collaboration and market entry.  For those eager to chart their own course, the X Track within the same group provides the freedom to develop and showcase independent innovations, making space for bold and original ideas.

It is worth noting that UK institutions have already established partnerships with these companies:

• Alibaba Cloud has collaborated with the University of Reading’s Henley Business School to launch a Skills Centre in the UK, focusing on cloud computing, big data, and AI.
• Fourier Intelligence has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UK’s National Robotarium to advance rehabilitation robotics.
• Unitree Robotics has engaged with the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s RACE team, showcasing their humanoid and quadruped robots.

These collaborations highlight the mutual interest and potential for UK innovators to contribute to and benefit from China’s innovation landscape.

As CBBC’s sector lead for tech and innovation, healthcare and life sciences, I encourage UK entrepreneurs, designers, and innovators to seize this opportunity. Participating in the DIA can open doors to new markets, partnerships, and avenues for growth.  With China’s emphasis on high-quality development and the UK’s strengths in design and innovation, the synergy between our nations has never been more promising.

The free submission deadline for this year’s DIA is 20^th June 2025. Late submissions will be accepted until 20^th September 2025, and by quoting the invitation code UK2025-1VCVSKF, applicants can waive the standard late fee. This opportunity for CBBC Focus readers reflects our shared mission to support UK innovators in accessing growth markets like China. If you’re not yet a CBBC member, now is the perfect time to explore our services and join a community committed to helping UK organisations succeed in China.

Click here to start the application process for the 2025 Design Intelligence Award

Elinor Greenhouse is CBBC’s Senior Adviser for Tech and Innovation, Healthcare & Life Sciences.  For inquiries, contact Elinor at Elinor.Greenhouse@cbbc.org.

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Whether you are a villager using e-commerce to find new and more profitable markets or a middle-class urban woman reselling luxury goods, the entrepreneurship journey is never easy – global financial crises, the US-China trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic have all taken their toll. Lin Zhang also argues that rather than being liberating, digital entrepreneurship has perhaps also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas.

Whatever the conclusion, it’s a very Chinese story – one you’ve probably seen played out on the roadsides, shopping malls and wet markets of China – but never given detailed thought to. Paul French caught up with Lin Zhang, currently an assistant professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire, to talk grassroots digital entrepreneurship.

Your book turns many assumptions about China on their head. For example, you give so many great examples of technology and the digital economy opening up small-scale entry-level entrepreneurship opportunities. You call this phenomenon ‘reinvention’. Can you explain what is going on with the ‘labour of reinvention’?

By centring on the analysis of the “entrepreneurial labour of reinvention”, I am trying to problematise not only our traditional understanding of labour and entrepreneurship but also how the global phenomenon of digitalisation of labour has usually been conceptualised. We have always considered labour and entrepreneurship as two completely different activities and identities, if not belonging to two different classes.

Echoing many scholars of flexible and digital labour, I argue that recent technological and social transformations have rendered the distinction between the two increasingly blurred. For example, most of the participants of my ethnographic fieldwork see themselves as entrepreneurs, whether they are peasants doing e-commerce or college graduates starting up their own tech ventures. But if you examine their work experiences as either based on monopoly digital platforms or being dictated (and if they get lucky, eventually bought out) by venture capitalists, you see how in reality their desire for autonomy and flexibility has been channelled to restructure and redefine labour experiences and relations.

By highlighting this broader transformation as “reinvention” while focusing on the Chinese experiences with entrepreneurial labour, I emphasise the embeddedness of this new entrepreneurial labour regime in pre-existing social relations and institutional structures. I have underlined how entrepreneurial labour practices both build on and transform the multilayer and multi-pronged roles of the state in the economy and the family-based and gendered division of labour at the foundation of the Chinese economy.

You give a wide and fascinating range of examples of ground-level entrepreneurialism – from rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom, to middle-class women reselling luxury goods. Could you perhaps give us a few examples of these reinventions that particularly caught your attention while travelling around China?

One example of booming tech entrepreneurship in China is the Garage Café, a café-style incubator/coworking space for early-stage entrepreneurs in Beijing’s high-tech district Zhongguancun. It was founded in 2011 by a venture capital manager turned serial entrepreneur. I situated the story of the Garage Café in Zhongguancun’s history as China’s science and technology centre reaching back to the socialist 1950s. As a prototypical example of reinvention, the Garage Café emerged as one of the new generation entrepreneurial spaces modelled after successful examples in the West. The café’s later struggle to stay competitive while holding on to its founding vision of supporting “grassroots” and early-stage entrepreneurs, complicated by the local state’s involvement in promoting it as a “model mass entrepreneurship and innovation site”, is reminiscent of ZGC’s troubled socialist experiments during the years of Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Another example is the handicraft “Taobao Village” in which I did extensive fieldwork and lived among rural entrepreneurs for months. The county in Shandong province in which the Taobao village is based boasts more than 1,000 years of history in making handicrafts out of bulrush grass. The family-based gendered division of labour evolved as the villages in the area transitioned from subsistence economy to socialist county-owned collective enterprises to post-reform export-oriented family firms. Since around 2008, the villagers have embraced the entry of digital platforms like Alibaba and Pinduoduo into the countryside.

Both stories of entrepreneurial reinvention have captured how the articulation of historical legacies and digital/high-tech disruptions has shaped entrepreneurship in China’s new digital economy.

You also talk about how the surge in digital entrepreneurialism has occurred against the backdrop of global financial crises, the US-China trade war, and the Covid-19 pandemic. How have small-scale entrepreneurs avoided these massive problems to survive?

The 2008 global recession, the trade war and the pandemic represented both crises and opportunities for these entrepreneurs. The 2008 crisis led to massive layoffs in export-oriented factories, which forced many migrant workers to return to the countryside. This large-scale return of “migrant birds” converged with e-commerce platforms’ (e.g. Alibaba, JD, and later Pinduoduo) expansion into the rural market, which contributed to the post-2008 boom in rural e-commerce and digital entrepreneurship.

The US-China trade war has created some barriers to Chinese exports to the US market. It has also destabilised mutual venture capital investment and put sanctions on many more established Chinese high-tech companies. However, the sanctions and trade barriers have also facilitated an unprecedented shift in the Chinese IT startup scene to prioritise the domestic market, indigenous innovation and Chinese (and sometimes state) capital. One Zhongguancun chip design firm founder told me jokingly: “I have to thank Trump. If not for his sanctions on Huawei and ZTE, Chinese tech companies would never have made up their minds to become more self-reliant in chips. Now they have no choice…The state had been promoting semiconductor independence for years, but the market didn’t really take it seriously; they thought the government was just crying wolf. Now the wolf has finally come.”

Whether their entrepreneurial endeavours could survive these crises depend on many factors, but one thing is for sure: they must keep reinventing themselves to brave the constantly shifting currents of economic and geopolitical uncertainties.

You suggest that though part of China’s new technological and liberal market economy, digital entrepreneurship is also reinforcing traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labour, gender and identity, as well as perhaps reinforcing traditional family and generating new inequalities. How does this happen?

Let me give an example using the case of gendered social media reselling, or daigou. Many entrepreneurs in the daigou business are transnational mobile middle-class women seeking flexibility and mobility in an alternative career. They do so to, for example, balance between motherhood and work, accompany their loved ones to study/work abroad while still generating decent income or earn some extra cash while studying or working full or part-time. I situate this popularity of female digital entrepreneurship like daigou in a broader trend towards refeminisation and retraditionalisation in Chinese society and among ethnic Chinese immigrant communities abroad. In doing so, I show how a younger generation of women, under the renewed pressure from the patriarchal society to prioritise (if not return to) the family, has turned to digital entrepreneurship to reconcile the tension between “living for others” and “living for oneself”. Ironically, the formalisation of these entrepreneurial endeavours in the past decade or so has made digital labour increasingly competitive and demanding, which ends up reinforcing these gendered dilemmas and structural gender inequalities.

We’ve seen the Chinese government become somewhat uneasy at the power and spread of domestic tech companies. What is the government’s response to the rise of grass-roots entrepreneurialism within the digital economy and how far can they regulate its growth and development?

The Chinese state has struggled with the competing demands to promote economic development, maintain equity and strive for independence and indigenous innovation since its founding in 1949. In this light, the state has been generally supportive of grassroots entrepreneurship within the digital economy as entrepreneurship helps to curb unemployment and digitalise traditional manufacturing and service industries. One of the reasons why big digital platforms (like Alibaba) have received so much support from various levels of government is because of their essential roles in driving economic restructuring and absorbing surplus labour and over-production through grassroots entrepreneurship. This state-led enthusiasm about entrepreneurship reached a new height during the peak of the “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation” campaign in 2015-2016 when we witnessed a surge in digital entrepreneurship of all types around the nation.

However, grassroots entrepreneurialism and the state’s attitudes towards various grassroots entrepreneurial activities also ebb and flow with shifting state priorities and macroeconomic cycles. After the 2015 stock market debacle and worsening geopolitical environment, the priority of the Chinese state had shifted more towards maintaining financial security, social stability and technological sovereignty, which was further reinforced by toughened regulation of the Big Techs, determination to reduce carbon emissions, and the protracted zero Covid policy. In this new context, some entrepreneurs, such as those in crypto currency speculation and mining, p2p finance, digital games and after-school education, faced intensified state regulation. But others, like rural e-commerce, chips, EV and biotech continue to be encouraged, if not prioritised. We also see the pendulum swing back to a less regulated environment entering 2023 as the state’s priority shifted back to boost economic development and robust GDP growth.

The problem here, as I raised in my book, is how these financialised cycles of boom and bust, intensified by the campaign-style promotion and regulation of industries, have generated excessive risks and uncertainties for entrepreneurs. The lack of protection for grassroots entrepreneurs (or entrepreneurial workers) runs contrary to the state’s mission to redress inequalities and maintain social stability. So, if we take a longer view of the evolution of state-business relations in China, we see how the party-state has continued to grapple with the development-equity-nationalism tensions and how the campaign-style regulation of business has persisted. In a way, the government is still finding a balanced approach to dealing with domestic tech firms. Small entrepreneurship, especially those mediated by big digital platforms (e.g., e-commerce, live-streaming, restaurants, ride-hailing, etc.), is inevitably impacted by macro-economic cycles and regulatory environment, but their relations with the government are also quite different from that of the Big Techs.

We’re now in a post-covid China and many restrictions are relaxed, so areas like home delivery may see a slight downturn after a peak during the lockdowns. What does the future look like for small-scale entrepreneurs in the digital economy going forward?

The overall prospects for small entrepreneurship post-covid are promising as the Party-state has prioritised boosting economic growth and employment. But we also have to be sector specific. As daily activities return to normal, businesses like restaurants, cafes and shops will likely recover to pre-pandemic levels. But sectors like live streaming e-commerce and home delivery groceries, for example, will see less online traffic and might have to readjust their business strategies. Of course, macro-economic conditions, such as weak overseas/domestic demands, high local governments debts and a bearish stock market, will also impact sales and the support/ investment that small entrepreneurs could receive.

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Let’s face it, it’s a tough time to be doing business in China. But Sandrine Zerbib and Aldo Spaanjaars have seen tough times before. The two veterans of China business have now distilled their experiences into a new book that is particularly timely: Dragon Tactics: How Chinese Entrepreneurs Thrive in Uncertainty (BIS Publishers).

Back in the mid-1990s, Zerbib was President of Adidas Greater China. She later became the CEO of the Chinese consumer brand aggregator Dongxiang, which gave her a perfect observation post to understand Chinese entrepreneurial management. Today she runs her own e-commerce operation, Fulljet.

Spaanjaars is a former CEO of Lacoste Greater China and a co-founder of J. Walter Thompson Beijing (an advertising agency). Most recently, he has started working for Fosun International, one of China’s largest private equity firms.

Paul French chatted with Zerbib and Spaanjaars to try and understand their key “Dragon Tactics” and just how the last couple of years have upended the China business world.

Your book revolves around five Dragon Tactics. The first you discuss is wolf culture, personified, you argue, by Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei. Can you explain this term a little, please?

Wolf Culture is probably best described as a survival culture, shaped by the earliest business leaders in China who, when growing up, personally suffered through decades of hardship in the 70s and 80s. Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei is recognised as the main representative of ‘wolf culture’; at Huawei, the term was written into their company culture and Ren Zhengfei has spoken about it publicly many times. However, many others follow a similar line of thinking and demonstrate similar behaviour.

Wolf culture is driven by a “tomorrow could be our last day” attitude, and survival thinking is at the heart of who they are and how they behave. A wolf has a very keen sense of smell for opportunities, an indomitable, relentless offensive spirit, a real devotion to the collective, and sees absolute loyalty as more important than ability. This wolf behaviour makes companies very different from companies managed in a non-wolf culture environment. This survival mindset has a real impact on how they perceive and deal with risks, encourage opportunistic behaviour, are razor sharply consumer-focused, value opportunities over efficiencies and determine which people they hire and keep.

Your second Dragon Tactic is called ‘adapt to change or die.’ We all think we understand the importance of accepting permanent change, but you seem to suggest that this concept is seen differently in China. Do we, as foreign businesspeople, need to grasp that?

Adapt or die is much more ingrained in Chinese culture and habits than it is in the West. To start with, there is no such notion as transcendent gods, eternal ideas and the essence of things in China’s cultural past. Instead, Chinese culture and its three millennial traditions, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, are all infused with expectations of permanent change.

It is also the result of the very turbulent and hyper-competitive environment in which Chinese entrepreneurs have created and developed their businesses over the past 30 years. This translates into deep differences in management attitudes. For example, while in Western philosophy the important thing is to think well, for the Chinese the important thing is to observe well. Therefore, in Western philosophy, a genius is seen as gifted with exceptional creative thinking, when Chinese wisdom would describe a genius as quite simply the one who is able to seize the opportune moment that escapes any plan conceived in advance.

This means that in the West, strategic planning is seen as critically important, but in China, it is considered difficult to consistently execute a fixed plan. In China, one only needs vision and tactics; while working towards a long-term goal, the short term can be as flexible as the here and now requires. For any Westerner who has worked for a Chinese company, this is often one of the most baffling features of Chinese management.

Your third Dragon Tactic, ‘the emperor decides, but agility rules,’ is perhaps harder for a foreign audience to comprehend, as we tend to think that absolute rulers lack flexibility and that this is a weakness when it comes to moving quickly and decisively. How can we balance top-down organisations with entrepreneurial nimbleness?

As far back as 2852 BC, China has always been ruled by demi-gods: Chinese sovereigns. In Western philosophy, early democratic thinking argued for decision-making based on the majority principle, but Chinese philosophers have mostly adhered to and supported absolute leadership, i.e., the ancient belief that the legitimate ruler was given the Mandate of Heaven.

In essence, submission to authority was only taken within the context of the ethical obligations that a ruler had toward his subjects. In particular, he was required to show compassion and generosity. He could expect loyalty as long as he ensured his underlings would not starve. So it should come as no surprise that such thinking has entered business management and most companies are very top-down and led from the absolute top.

Yet, Chinese companies are extremely agile. Instead of building a huge hierarchical organisation with layers and layers of professional managers, they keep structures flat and flexible, with as many direct reports as needed, and that, within agreed parameters, allows for a fair degree of decentralisation.

Lacking traditional departmental hierarchy, Chinese companies are able to act on a project basis rather than a departmental basis, assembling and disbanding project teams as required. They have also become masters of eco-system building, giving them valuable resources that can be used upon need, without the cost and inflexibility of in-house resources.

Last but not least, fierce internal competition is encouraged to keep everyone on their toes.

Fourthly, you say ‘people come and go. Those who fit stay longer.’ How can we view successful businesses as happy families in China?

Note that we are not saying that Chinese companies are all about love and benevolence. Quite the reverse: they are quite tough. Just as a patriarchal family can be.

It remains true that a good Chinese leader would share their vision in a compelling way. This creates a true emotional bond with the team and can mobilise the troops much better than a “mission and vision” often can. And although a leader may be tough at times, they also know how to care about their people.

In founder-driven companies, loyalty and a cultural fit are often the most important requirements for success and career advancement. They are also, beyond financial incentives, key reasons for employees to stay.

This is actually something we experienced personally when working at Adidas, where we – Zerbib and Spaanjaars – were President and COO, respectively. One of the key success factors was the emotional bond there was in the team, at every level of the company. This was the basis for true employee engagement. As a result, whenever we were invited to employees’ wedding parties, we would see just at least as many colleagues as family members of the bride and groom.

Your fifth Dragon Tactic is that ‘it all starts with data.’ Traditionally, reliable data has been problematic in the PRC, but technology has moved on radically. Do you think this has made understanding the consumer easier, or more complex and nuanced?

For most of the book, we looked to the past to explain what has made Chinese entrepreneurs successful, and we described methodologies that are rooted in Chinese history and culture.

Where data is concerned, it is important to understand where the future is headed based on what is happening today. China is leading a digital revolution that is changing the way business is done and go-to-market strategies are implemented.

How entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world adapt to this digital disruption will be a decisive factor in the success or failure of many enterprises. Driven by a Chinese government that has been instrumental in ensuring the right environment for large investments in a wide variety of technologies, China is becoming a leader in various sectors, most notably AI. In fact, China has gone from a fringe player to a global leader in fundamental research in less than two decades and thanks to a more relaxed approach to data management, is increasingly able to build superior data-based solutions.

Chinese entrepreneurs have always had a razor-sharp focus on consumers and their needs, and rich data sets enable an even deeper ultra-consumer focused understanding. The more data, the better the models, the better the data, the higher the loyalty. Data is the new gold and Chinese entrepreneurs have the edge.

Finally, as much of the world reopens to a ‘new normal,’ China is still grappling with Zero Covid. Eventually, China will emerge from the pandemic on its own terms, but do you think your Dragon Tactics will still apply when the economy emerges again?

If anything, they will apply more than ever. China has indeed entered a very uncertain period and Chinese entrepreneurs will have to adapt to this new environment with lots of tenacity and flair, innovative business models and new people management approaches, as well as intense use of data.

But Dragon Tactics is actually not a book about China, and even less so about the Chinese government. Ultimately, the book describes the Dragon Tactics mentality in entrepreneurial China, and in those who embody it, to explain how and why Chinese businesses thrive in chaos. We have all entered an increasingly uncertain and volatile world far beyond China’s borders. Even before the war in Ukraine, business uncertainties have been on the rise globally, driven by climate change, the increasing calls for firms to become more socially responsible and involved, the role of China on the world stage growing and changing, rapid digitisation, and the massive moment of uncertainty that the Covid-19 pandemic has forced on all of us.

In fact, the world may only now start to experience what successful Chinese entrepreneurs have known since the very beginning. In this fast-developing new reality, we believe that the lessons in this book are of vital importance to entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world.

Get immediate access to the China market with Launchpad, CBBC’s flagship market entry service. Call +44 (0)20 7802 2000 or email enquiries@cbbc.org now to find out more.

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The year 2016 saw a significant milestone: it was when the number of Chinese US-dollar billionaires overtook the number of America billionaires. Since then, the numbers have swelled. According to the Hurun Report’s 2020 China Rich List, there was more wealth created last year than the past three combined. ‘The world has never seen this much wealth created in just one year,’ says Rupert Hoogewerf, Chairman and Chief Researcher of the Hurun Report. Those at the top of the list come from a wide range of industries – from real estate and fintech to beverages and (perhaps oddly), pork farming.

Many on the list have risen on a scale unseen anywhere else in the world: Xu Jiayin started by mucking out university latrines and ended as the chairman of a US$500 billion company. Wang Wei began China’s largest delivery service as a smuggler in a mini-van.

Xu Jiayin started by mucking out university latrines and Wang Wei began as a smuggler in a mini-van.

A wealth assessment based on stock market value makes the top ten an ever-changing list, the Forbes Real Time Billionaires list tracking the many different competitors as they rapidly rise and fall. The Hurun Report’s annual China Rich List (published October 2020) offers a more long-term view, providing the names for our list of China’s richest in 2020, but as of January 2021, real-time positions had already shifted dramatically. Hurun estimates are taken from September 2020, Forbes from mid-January 2021.

1. Zhong Shanshan

Company: Nongfu Spring; YST
Location: Hangzhou
Industry: Beverages and vaccines
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$91.1 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$53.7 billion
Age: 66

Zhong Shanshan is a bottled water magnate, and now the richest man in Asia. China is the world’s biggest market for bottled water, already forecast to be worth US$58 billion in 2020 and expected to grow at a compound annual growth of 4.9%, according to Statista.

Zhong has rocketed to the top this year thanks to the IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange of his brand Nongfu Spring, whose red-capped bottles of mineral water are as ubiquitous in Chinese shops as Coca-Cola. Nongfu saw its value rise by US$47 billion through its IPO, and Zhong owns an 84.4% stake in the company. Bottled water is considered by investors as a safe bet in the current uncertain economic climate. He is also the owner of the vaccination company Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy, which listed in April last year on the Shanghai stock exchange, currently with a market capitalisation of US$17 billion. At the time of writing, he has overtaken Jack Ma and Ma Huateng (who topped Hurun’s China Rich List 2020) to become Asia’s richest man and in the Top 10 of the Forbes Rich List.

After dropping out of elementary school during the Cultural Revolution, he started out doing odd jobs as a mushroom farmer, builder and peddler of erectile dysfunction pills. Zhong launched his Nongfu Spring brand back in 1996, edging ahead of rivals by switching from purified water to mineral water, arguing it was more beneficial to health; that Nongfu Spring tasted sweet was only further proof that it was good for you. The company has since branched out into numerous beverages, including orange juice and coffee, and currently has a market share of over 26%. Zhong is a notable recluse, refusing to speak to the press and telling China Daily in 2016 “I don’t like making friends with businesspeople”. It’s not for nothing that he’s been nicknamed the “Lone Wolf”.

2. Ma Huateng

Company: Tencent Holdings
Location: Shenzhen
Industry: Fintech and E-commerce
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$66 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$57.4 billion
Age: 49

‘Pony’ Ma is reserved about his private life, but is known to be interested in astronomy and art collecting, and started dating his future wife after meeting her on his own instant messaging platform, QQ. He is China’s second-richest man thanks to a 9% stake in Tencent Holdings, this year seeing a wealth increase of 50% according to Hurun, owing to a good performance by Tencent Games, further expansion of WeChat, and good returns on investments (especially Tesla and Meituan).

This Ma has been sure to keep the state on side. He served in the 12^th National People’s Congress, and in a discussion on censorship at a Singapore tech conference, Ma is quoted as saying “Lots of people think they can speak out and that they can be irresponsible. I think that’s wrong[…] We are a great supporter of the government in terms of information security. We try to have a better management and control of the Internet.” In 2016, Ma pledged that 2% of annual net profits would be given to charity – in April of that year he pledged 100 million shares in Tencent to a personal charity fund.

3. Jack Ma

Company: AliBaba Group
Location: Hangzhou
Industry: Fintech and eCommerce
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$62 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$58.8 billion
Age: 56

It’s a funny thing. I’m running one of the biggest e-commerce companies in China, maybe in the world, but I know nothing about computers. All I know about computers is how to send and receive emails and browse

Although the two Mas are rivals in the world of fintech and e-commerce, they have very different personalities. The former CEO of Alibaba relishes the spotlight (occasionally performing at music events in loud outfits), preferring to see himself as a straight-talking businessman rather than a tech expert. It’s been a stratospheric rise for Ma, from humble beginnings as a 12-year old boy offering visiting Americans tours in exchange for English lessons. 2020 had been a good year, with the pandemic leading to sales boosts on Taobao, and Alibaba listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange, making his the first internet company to have dual listing on the Hong Kong and New York stock exchanges. But his wings were clipped after he criticised China’s banking regulations, accusing Chinese banks of having a ‘pawn shop’ mentality. That lead to the postponement of the Ant IPO on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

It was tipped to be the world’s largest IPO to date (valued at US$200 billion), with numerous state institutions heavily investing in the venture, but the suspension, coupled with new micro-lending rules, means Ant is unlikely to have retained its pre-suspension valuation. Ma dropped out of public view in October last year, only reappearing in mid-January 2021 in an online video for the Jack Ma Rural Teachers Award. For Hoogewerf, the crackdown by Chinese regulators is typical of the anti-monopoly moves being made by governments across the globe, adding, “If you give them another five to ten years, they’ll be really too big for anyone to go after.” If Ma honours his pre-suspension pledge to donate 600 million shares of Ant to charity upon listing, he will have donated over US$10 billion throughout the course of his career to date.

4. Huang Zheng

Company: Pinduoduo
Location: Shanghai
Industry: e-commerce
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$60.2 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$32.4 billion
Age: 40

The founder and (until July 2020) CEO of Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng (or ‘Colin’ Huang) is the youngest self-made billionaire in the Hurun top 10. Although Huang is responsible for a raft of apps (like Vova, an important European e-commerce app) his wealth is largely thanks to Pinduoduo. This app raised US$1.6 billion on a US IPO in July 2018. Zheng turned down safe job offers from IBM and Microsoft in 2004, preferring instead to work for the then more obscure but intriguing Google. He left Google in 2007 and became his own boss, establishing several companies before landing on Pinduoduo. The app combines social media, gaming and e-commerce, offering price discounts if users can encourage their friends to buy in bulk. Huang compares it to a fusion of Costco and Disneyland, merging shopping with fun.

Astonishingly, despite being only five years old, the app attracted over 643 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2020 (Alibaba recorded 874 million monthly active mobile users in the same period) meaning it is now one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world, a serious contender to market giants Alibaba and JD.com, “an extraordinary achievement” according to Hoogewerf. Pinduoduo targets lower-income individuals in lower-tier Chinese cities and has come under criticism for selling poor quality goods and overworking staff. Due to the pandemic, Pinduoduo had a good year, with Huang’s wealth the fastest growing of all Chinese billionaires during the Chinese lockdown in March and April. Overall his wealth rose by 63% in 2020 – indeed, if he hadn’t given away 14% of Pinduoduo’s shares to his team and to charity, he would have become China’s richest man.

5. He Xiangjian

Company: Midea Group
Location: Foshan
Industry: Electrical domestic appliances
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$41 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$33.1 billion
Age: 78

Midea Group describes itself as ‘the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer appliances’, with assets totalling US$40 billion – and China’s largest air-conditioner exporter. The company originated in a shack in Beijiao, Guangdong province (now absorbed by the city of Foshan), where local villagers would make plastics in secret. The demand for consumer products during China’s Reform and Opening Up period caused He to transfer to electrical appliances, sales booming immediately.

At peak production, a fifth of all home appliances in China were being made in Beijiao , and Midea became China’s first small-town enterprise to be listed on a major stock exchange. He has since bought up the German robotics company KUKA (the world’s largest manufacturer of automobile-building robots). He has now resigned from leading the company, and is currently just the controlling shareholder of the group. He is the first 100 billion yuan enterprise to not hand over chairmanship to family, rather giving it to his second-in-command, Fang Hongbo. Although family-run businesses are still a popular model in China, larger Chinese firms like Alibaba have begun to separate management and ownership. “As these companies get bigger and bigger,” says Hoogewerf, “these splits between management and shareholders have to come about and I think He Xiangjian has done a better job at it than most.”

6. Wang Wei

Company: SF Holding
Location: Shenzhen
Industry: Logistics
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$38.5 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$35.3 billion
Age: 50

I know the taste of being poor, of being discriminated against by people for being poor”

Today, China’s largest delivery service by market revenue is SF Express, generating US$17 billion in 2019. Thanks to the isolation brought about by the pandemic, the company had a windfall year in 2020, effectively doubling Wang’s wealth. This isn’t the first time Wang has done well out of a pandemic: the SARS crisis of 2003 saw Wang create a deal with the airline Yangtze River Express, allowing his company to be the first private express company in China to charter cargo planes. Wang started out illegally smuggling parcels in and out of affluent Hong Kong in a minivan. “We would be fined if caught by postal officers, so we had to handle packages sneakily”, he is quoted as saying. He’s also been looking into the future of logistics: in 2018 his company obtained the country’s first licenses for drone deliveries.

7. Ding Lei

Company: NetEase
Location: Hangzhou
Industry: Online Gaming
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: U$34.4 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$32.4 billion
Age: 49

One of China’s internet trailblazers, Ding Lei is the CEO of NetEase. At university, he would reportedly regularly question teachers, and taught himself to code in his spare time. By the time he graduated, unlike most of his peers, he had the skills needed to create software himself. He quit cushy and stable jobs in state telecom companies to create internet start-ups, much to the chagrin of his family. He became China’s richest man in 2003 thanks partly to his free email system (handy during the SARS epidemic), but mainly due to the popularity of his online gaming services (especially the ever-popular Fantasy Westward Journey). Gaming now accounts for nearly three-quarters of NetEase revenue, and although they have long been overtaken by the likes of WeChat, Ding Lei still managed to increase his wealth by US$14 billion this year, by branching into mobile games and pork markets. In 2015, NetEase expanded into western markets, opening a US headquarters near San Francisco.

8. Yang Huiyan

Company: Country Garden Holdings
Location: Foshan
Industry: Real Estate
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$33.1 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$33.1 billion
Age: 39

With total revenues of US$27 billion in 2020, Country Garden Holdings was ranked 147^th on the Fortune Global 500 and is one of China’s largest real estate developers. Its majority shareholder is Yang Huiyan, groomed from an early age by her self-made father Yang Guoqiang to be his successor, transferring 70% of the company shares to her before its IPO in 2007. At 25, Yang became a billionaire, and now acts as co-chairman of the board’s governance committee. Friends claim that she is fairly shy, and had wanted to be a teacher growing up – which probably explains the fact that she is also chairwoman of Bright Scholar Education Holdings, the largest operator of bilingual K-12 schools in China.

9. Xu Jiayin

Company: Evergrande Group
Location: Shenzhen
Industry: Real Estate
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$30.2 billion (from Feb 2020)
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$34.6 billion
Age: 62

Xu Jiayin, Chairman of Evergrande Group, was China’s richest person back in 2017, but his wealth has dropped by over US$20 billion in the past three years. Evergrande is one of the world’s largest property developers (with 800 projects in 280 cities) and the world’s most valuable (with assets totalling US$500 billion as of June 2020). But it is also the world’s most debt-ridden, currently owing US$88 billion to Chinese banks according to Bloomberg, and US$35 billion from international bondholders. Defaulting on these debts would be highly damaging to both domestic and global markets, but Evergrande managed to reassure markets in September 2020 by reaching a deal with investors to retain their shares and avoid Evergrande making repayments – it has not been specified when repayments have been delayed until.

Xu “is probably the most skilful I know at walking the tightrope,” says Hoogewerf. “He’s always been very aggressive in terms of expanding sales and also managing his debt…to be able to balance those two is incredible. It might be difficult, but there’s a very good chance he’ll pull through.”

After all, it was still a relatively good year for Xu Jiayin, whose IPO of Evergrande was approved in September, valued at US$1.8 billion. Besides, Xu is no stranger to hardship: his mother died when he was very small and he grew up in poverty in rural Henan, claiming to have survived university on mouldy sweet potatoes and happily clearing drainage ditches from the school latrines. He is now the owner of prominent sports clubs worth millions, and even pledged an investment of US$6 billion in electric cars in 2019. Furthermore, Xu Jiayin is a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a body of experts and individuals who advise government policy. In 2018 he advocated private real estate enterprise deploy their resources towards reducing poverty alleviation, saying the Group had built 50 villages in Guizhou over two years alone to aid social housing. In the late 2010s he gave very generously to charity, topping the Forbes China Philanthropy List for three years in a row.

10. Qin Yinglin & Qian Ying

Company: Muyuan Foods
Location: Nanyang
Industry: Pork Farming
Forbes Estimated Net Worth: US$25 billion
Hurun Estimated Net Worth: US$29.4 billion
Age: 55 and 54

“I never believed that a pig farmer could break into to the Top 10,” says Hoogewerf. “That was something that completely went against everything I knew about big tech and everything else in the year 2020.” The husband and wife team are the joint-owners, founders and directors (with husband Qin Yinglin as Chairman) of Muyuan Foods. The Shenzhen-listed company is the largest pork breeding company in the world’s largest pork market. The couple benefitted from an outbreak of African swine-flu in China in 2019, sending pork prices up by 140% that year. Such unprecedented profits – up over 1,000% in 2019 – means the couple have seen their wealth grow six-fold. From a litter of 22 piglets in 1992, the company sold 10 million animals last year and aims to produce 25–30 million for slaughter by the end of 2021. The company has recently expanded operations on a giant scale, opening what is billed as the largest hog farm in the world, leasing enough land to hold 80 million pigs.

The post Post Covid-19, these are China’s 10 richest business leaders in 2021 appeared first on Focus - China Britain Business Council.

In December 1978, China’s leader Deng Xiaoping, announced that China would start a period of ‘Reform and Opening Up’. This policy sees a de-collectivisation of agriculture, allows foreign investment into the country, and permits entrepreneurs to set up private businesses. By the early 1990s, certain policies and regulations were lifted and state-run businesses were privatised allowing the private sector to boom. The transformation was, as Lord Michael Heseltine says “on a scale without human precedence.”

Year on year, double-digit GDP growth was the norm for much of the 1990s and 2000s and over the last decade, the Chinese economy has tripled in size. Britain has benefitted from China’s growth over this time, with UK-China trade more than doubling from £32 billion in 2008 to £67 billion in 2017.

“The reform and opening up creates huge opportunities for China’s international trading partners and the UK benefits deeply from that,” said the UK’s Ambassador to China, Barbara Woodward.

“The UK economy is very strong in financial services, legal services, education, tourism services and so on. As China opens up in years ahead, that will really help UK-China trade and investment grow even further,” she said. “As the Chinese economy opens to the services sector it will obviously be beneficial to the UK but also for China because it will then be able to develop a more balanced economy and indeed a more cutting edge one.

“As China opens up or relaxes its restrictions on Intellectual Property development, R&D collaboration and demonstrates that it really can protect intellectual property then I think there is more scope for collaboration between UK and China in that area.”

During last month’s British Business Awards, organised by the British Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, a new award was established to celebrate the anniversary of China’s Opening Up.

The winner of the 40 Years of Reform Award was Rolls Royce. The engine maker has been operating in China since 1963 when it was making engines for China’s Vickers Viscount aircraft. Today, China has become the company’s second largest market making up 12 percent of its global revenue.

“Reform and opening-up has connected China to the world in an unimaginable way,” says Julian McCormack director of Rolls-Royce China.

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