China: The New Wealth Creators

Hurun's latest wealth report, published with Bank of East Asia in June and covering the mainland plus Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, estimates that 77 trillion yuan, about $10.8 trillion, will pass to the next generation within 30 years, 21 trillion of it within the coming decade. Behind that projection, 5.06 million households each hold more than 6 million yuan in assets, collectively worth 145 trillion yuan; the 126,000 households with more than 100 million yuan hold 84 trillion yuan, about 58% of the total. Four in five of those households are business owners, with company equity making up more than 70% of their assets. This is founder wealth. UBS, in its first Global Next Generation Report in May, called the coming shift one of the largest intergenerational wealth transfers in modern history and found that successors in Asia, particularly China, are assuming control of family wealth at younger ages.

For two decades the surest route to the top ran through property and manufacturing. Zhong Shanshan, the bottled-water founder who ranks second on the 2026 Hurun Global Rich List, and He Xiangjian, 83, whose 1968 bottle-cap workshop in Guangdong grew into the appliance maker Midea, represent that generation. The current list reads differently. China counted 1,110 US-dollar billionaires this year, up 287, overtaking the United States at 1,000, according to the Hurun Global Rich List 2026. At the top sits Zhang Yiming, born in 1983, founder of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin, with a fortune of about 550 billion yuan, or $79 billion, buoyed by an AI-driven revaluation of the company.

Most of the new fortunes on the list still come from industry and technology: the year's Chinese entrants cluster in AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing. Alongside them, a smaller cohort matters specifically to luxury: founders who built fortunes on brands. Wang Ning, 39, of Pop Mart, the collectible toy company behind Labubu, saw his wealth rise sixfold in a year to $25.5 billion on Hurun's China list last October; by the global list's January snapshot it stood at $16 billion, joint second worldwide among self-made billionaires under 40. Xu Gaoming, 61, and his son broke straight into the China list's top 100 with 69.5 billion yuan, about $9.75 billion, as their company Laopu Gold became what Hurun described as a luxury jewelry brand "perhaps the first to come out of China."

This cohort matters beyond its size. These are owners who understand pricing power, brand codes, and community, because they engineered those things themselves. Some, like Laopu, now compete with European houses directly. When such founders buy luxury, they do so as operators who can deconstruct the brand proposition.