How China's Richest Billionaires Made Their Money In 2024

As China’s stock market goes, so goes its billionaire population. And last year was not a good year for many Chinese stocks. As a result, the number of mainland Chinese billionaires on Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list fell for the third consecutive year. A total of 406 Chinese billionaires made the ranking, down from 495 a year ago and a record 626 in 2021. Continued fallout from the pandemic and geopolitical tension drove down stock prices and hurt economic growth in the world’s second largest economy. A deepening slump in the country’s property market also diminished fortunes.

Still, mainland China has the second largest number of billionaires globally, behind only the U.S., which has 813 billionaires this year.

Mainland China doesn’t include passport holders from Hong Kong or Macau, whom Forbes lists separately. Counting those billionaires, greater China has 473 members, down from 562 in 2023, 607 in 2022 and 698 in 2021.

The Forbes World’s Billionaires list is a snapshot of wealth using stock prices and exchange rates from March 8, 2024. Some people become richer or poorer within days of publication. We list individuals rather than multigenerational families who share fortunes, though we include wealth belonging to a billionaire’s spouse and children in certain cases, namely if that person is the founder of the fortune. For Russian billionaires, fortunes were calculated using ownership structures from February 2022, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and before many made transfers of assets to managers, friends and others in an effort to protect their holdings from sanctions. We value a variety of assets, including private companies, real estate, art and more. We don’t pretend to know each billionaire’s private balance sheet (though some provide it). When documentation isn’t supplied or available, we discount fortunes. For daily updates of net worths, go to forbes.com/real-time-billionaires.

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