The latest rich list published by The Hurun Research Institute has revealed the richest people in China in 2021. At the top of the ranking is newly minted billionaire Zhong Shanshan of bottled water and beverage empire Nongfu Spring, who took his company public in 2020. But Zhong wasn't the only billionaire who zoomed past last year's richest Chinese, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, in the past twelve months. The wealth of Zhang Yiming of TikTok owner ByteDance and Zeng Yuqun of battery maker CATL grew at a fast clip, even making the two contenders for the $100 billion dollar club.
Despite more modest wealth gains, Pony Ma Huateng, CEO of Tencent, also got ahead of the Alibaba co-founder, who was one of the first business magnates affected by China's now infamous tech crackdown. Between 2019 and 2021, Jack Ma's wealth only grew by $600 million.
How does the vast wealth of China's richest compare to the wealthiest people in the world? According to the Forbes real-time billionaires ranking, the richest person on Earth is currently Elon Musk with a staggering net worth of $320 billion. Zhong Shanshan, who is assigned an even higher net worth of $66.3 billion by Forbes, currently ranks as the 19th richest person in the world.
