THE ECONOMIST: China’s mysterious new billionaires are richer, younger and more mysterious than ever

Early last year, when DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial-intelligence lab, was causing panic among its Western rivals, almost nothing was known about Liang Wenfeng, its founder.

Mr Liang remains a mysterious figure, but at least one thing is clear. As DeepSeek closes a funding round valuing it at $US71 billion ($101b), its founder’s personal wealth has soared to roughly $US38b — making him far wealthier than Anthropic’s Dario Amodei or OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Mr Liang will not be spotted on the conference circuit. He has never appeared live on Chinese television, and there are few photos or taped footage of his unpolished, wiry figure. That puts him at home among the new generation of young Chinese billionaires.

The country is cranking out more of them than anywhere else bar America. According to Hurun, which tracks the riches of the world’s wealthiest people, there were at least 29 self-made billionaires aged 40 or under in China this year.

Including Mr Liang, who will turn 41 at some point this year, brings the total to 30. That is nine more than last year.

China’s new tycoons differ from their predecessors in striking ways.

They have abandoned real-estate speculation and boozy dinners with officials for video games and meet-ups over Japanese anime. But they are also adept at taking imaginative ideas and scaling them into global businesses faster than any before them.

The history of China’s uber-rich is short. In the 1980s tycoons figured out how to wrest assets from the state. Zhang Ruimin, a member of a troupe of students who terrorised teachers and intellectuals during Mao’s era, got hold of a state-owned refrigerator business called Haier and turned it into what is now the world’s largest home-appliance maker.

The opening of the property market in the 1990s minted another early group of billionaires including Xu Jiayin, founder of Evergrande, a now-collapsed property developer.

In the early 2000s industrialists such as Wang Chuanfu of BYD, originally a battery maker, launched a wave of manufacturing firms as China entered the World Trade Organisation.

And then in the 2010s the consumer internet produced China’s first generation of tech moguls, including Jack Ma of Alibaba, an e-commerce giant, and Pony Ma of Tencent, maker of WeChat.

The founders of ByteDance, creator of TikTok, and Shein, the online fast-fashion firm, who are both now in their early 40s, built their fortunes a few years later.

China’s new generation of tycoons are charting out a different path.

More than two-thirds of the young billionaires on Hurun’s list made their money from consumer goods or media. Seven created video games; four built tea or coffee businesses.

After Mr Liang, the wealthiest is Wang Ning, the founder of Pop Mart, which sells Labubus, strange-looking dolls.

Only three have struck it rich with AI, including Yang Zhilin, the baby-faced 34-year-old founder of Moonshot AI, which on July 17 released a new model that is said to rival the best from America.

No property mogul makes the list — perhaps unsurprisingly, given how the sector has fared in recent years.

The businesses built by China’s new billionaires are also far more global than in the past. It once took a decade or more for Chinese entrepreneurs to figure out foreign expansion.

No longer. Zhang Junjie, the 33-year-old founder of Chagee, a milk-tea shop, launched his firm in 2017 and opened his first overseas shop just two years later. The company is now listed in New York and operating in nine countries.

The new tycoons’ heavy reliance on foreign markets partly reflects the slump in consumer spending at home. Around 80 per cent of sales at Dreame, a consumer- electronics brand founded by 39-year-old Yu Hao, come from overseas.

Insta360, which sells small, waterproof cameras, is almost as reliant on foreign demand.

Pop Mart made more than $US2b in sales from outside China last year, about 40 per cent of its total. Chagee’s sales in China have slumped, but overseas they are growing healthily.

Attitudes to work have also shifted. A controversial part of Chinese business culture for the past decade or so has been the so-called “996” routine, working from 9am to 9pm six days a week. The idea was championed by Alibaba’s Mr Ma and embraced by other local tech giants.

At Pinduoduo, another e-commerce platform, young white-collar staff have died from overwork on their way home from the office.

China’s new entrepreneurs, by contrast, have adopted a more relaxed style of management. Many are comparatively flexible on working times.

Liu Wei, the 39-year-old billionaire co-founder of miHoYo, a gaming firm, has eschewed presenteeism. He has overseen what the company calls its “happy work, steady growth” approach, which prioritises mental health (though one employee also recently died from complications related to overwork, suggesting that cultural norms are hard to shift).

DeepSeek’s Mr Liang has reportedly said that the human brain can only concentrate for 6-8 hours a day, and that overwork leads to mistakes.

A willingness to put in longer hours than anyone else in the world is what built the Chinese economy over the past thirty years, huffs one private-equity investor, who recently visited an up-and-coming consumer brand and did not like what he saw.

Some blame the relatively laid-back attitude of China’s young founders on cushy upbringings. Gone are the tales told by earlier tycoons of struggling for survival amid the country’s political and economic convulsions.

Among China’s young billionaires, only Mr Liang and Mr Zhang of Chagee grew up poor. The three founders of miHoYo originally bonded over Japanese cartoons and formed their company as a celebration of gaming and comics. The founder of MiniMax, an AI lab, is so fond of a multi-player game called “Dota 2” that his staff refer to him as “IO”, a character from it.

To get rich is perilous

It is not all rosy for China’s young billionaires. The relationship between China’s government and its wealthiest people has deteriorated over the past few years. Older magnates once viewed themselves as part of a nation-building project.

The property sector, which contributed up to a quarter of China’s GDP at its peak, was a collaborative effort between private entrepreneurs and local officials.

Mr Ma was instrumental in building China’s digital economy. But the central government has now punished many prominent figures in these areas. Leverage has been sucked out of the real-estate industry. Mr Ma’s business empire became the subject of a state crackdown in 2020 after he criticised regulators. Xi Jinping, China’s ruler, has sought to tamp down inequality under the slogan of “common prosperity”.

In 2021 Zhong Shanshan, the 71-year-old founder of Nongfu, a bottled-water company, reached a net worth of nearly $US100b. No one has since come close, including Mr Zhong, who has seen his wealth plunge to around $US39b as the share price of his company has slumped.

Mr Ma is worth roughly a fifth as much as in 2021, and many other internet moguls have suffered similarly. Still, they have fared better than property magnates, a number of whom have been detained.

This environment has created a sense of disillusionment among China’s young billionaires.

Many are eager to engage in industrial policy but are given little opportunity to do so, notes Steven Hai of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Their global ambitions also leave them exposed to souring relations between China and America.

Xiao Hong, the 33-year-old founder of Manus, another AI firm, would have become a billionaire earlier this year if the Chinese government had not stopped him from selling his company to Meta, an American tech giant.

These people live with the sense that their businesses could be derailed at any time by sudden policy changes in China or America, notes Rupert Hoogewerf of Hurun. By shunning publicity they seem to believe they can survive longer, he says. Most young Chinese billionaires have never spoken with foreign media. (None would speak to The Economist.) Many avoid the Chinese press as well. The result is a generation of tycoons that is both China’s most global — and its most enigmatic.