People from China

Zhang Yiming

Founder of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok

Born 1983

Zhou Hongyi

Founder of the Chinese security company Qihoo 360

Born 1970

Robin Zeng

Founder of CATL, the world’s largest electric-vehicle battery maker

Andrew Yao

Turing Award-winning theorist who built China’s top computer science programme

Born 1946

Liang Wenfeng

Chinese founder of DeepSeek and the High-Flyer hedge fund

Lei Jun

Founder and CEO of Xiaomi, maker of phones and electric cars

Born 1969

Richard Liu

Founder of JD.com, China’s major online retailer

Born 1973

Ren Zhengfei

Former army engineer who founded Huawei

Born 1944

Colin Huang

Former Google engineer who founded Pinduoduo and Temu’s parent PDD

Born 1980

Ding Lei

Founder and CEO of NetEase, a Chinese gaming and internet giant

Born 1971

Wang Xing

Co-founder and CEO of Meituan, China’s food-delivery giant

Born 1979

Wang Chuanfu

Chemist who founded BYD, the world’s largest electric-vehicle maker

Born 1966

Robin Li

Co-founder and CEO of Baidu, China’s leading search engine

Born 1968

Pony Ma

Co-founder and CEO of Tencent, maker of WeChat

Born 1971

Jack Ma

Former English teacher who founded Alibaba

Born 1964

Cheng Wei

Founder and CEO of DiDi, China’s ride-hailing leader

Born 1983

Chen Tianqiao

Founder of Shanda, China’s online-gaming pioneer, and brain-science philanthropist

Jean Liu

President of DiDi and former Goldman Sachs banker