FT
Opinion Chinese business & finance
It’s no longer glorious to get rich in China — it’s dangerous
Why no one wants to be the nation’s top tycoon any more
Last month, Colin Huang, founder of ecommerce powerhouse PDD, attracted the usual headlines when he rose to become China’s richest man. But shortly after, PDD surprised investors with a downbeat profit forecast. Its stock plummeted. Huang lost $14bn overnight, and ceded the top spot to Zhong Shanshan, founder of beverage giant Nongfu Spring. Within 24 hours, Nongfu Spring issued its own unexpectedly depressing outlook, and Zhong, too, soon slipped from first place on the rich lists.
On Chinese social media, chatter broke out about whether corporate leaders might be competitively devaluing their own stock prices to avoid the widening crackdown on excessive wealth, which is a centrepiece of leader Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign. It is not implausible to conclude, wrote one Wall Street broker, that “nobody wants to be the richest man in China” at a time when its government is turning more assertively socialist.
Whatever the true motive for these profit warnings, the way they were spun on Chinese social media reflects a real change in the national zeitgeist. When Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader in the late 1970s, he defanged the old Maoist hostility to wealth creation. To get rich would be “glorious” in his increasingly capitalist nation.
But there was a catch. It was glorious to get rich — just not too rich. China was generating far more wealth than other developing countries, yet its largest individual fortunes remained modest compared with those in much smaller economies, including Nigeria and Mexico. Even during the roaring boom of the 2000s, an unwritten cap seemed to remain: no single fortune would rise much higher than $10bn. China’s billionaire list was also unusual for the high rate of churn in its top ranks.
By the early 2010s, at least two tycoons had seen their net worth approach that decabillion-dollar barrier, only to land in jail on corruption charges instead. That is not to say the charges were baseless, only that the choice of targets did appear to reflect a lingering, levelling tendency among China’s leaders.
That instinct flowered anew under Xi. Coming to power in 2012, he launched a campaign against corruption that reached deep into the elite. The early targets were often public sector bigwigs — bureaucrats, Communist party princelings. With China’s economy slowing, the regime seemed reluctant to scare the one private-sector goose still laying golden eggs: big tech companies. Over the years, many Chinese would build fortunes bigger than $10bn. The first three to breach that threshold, and keep rising, were tech industry founders led by Jack Ma of Alibaba.
This quiet tolerance would turn in 2020, during the stimulus-driven market boom. China added nearly 240 billionaires — twice as many as the US — but late that same year Ma made a speech that helped bring this party to a halt. In a guarded but unmistakable critique, Ma questioned the direction of Communist party rule, warning that overregulation threatened to slow tech innovation, and that Chinese banks suffered from “pawnshop thinking”.
State retaliation was swift. Alibaba’s share price collapsed. Ma tumbled down the rich lists and dropped out of public view. Early the next year, Xi launched his common prosperity campaign and the crackdown spread to any company deemed out of step with its egalitarian values.
In this new era, it’s dangerous to get too rich. Stories abound of the state launching investigations against this business figure or that financier. The pressure is drying up venture capital funds, scaring the young away from lucrative professions such as investment banking. The number of millionaires leaving China has been rising and peaked last year at 15,000 — dwarfing the exodus from any other nation.
The private sector is in retreat. Since 2021, the stock market has been sliding, but state companies have grown their share of total market cap by more than a third to nearly 50 per cent. China now has the world’s only major stock market in which state-owned companies are valued on par with those in the private sector. Individual fortunes have shrunk dramatically over the past three years; the number of billionaires has fallen 35 per cent in China, even as it rose 12 per cent in the rest of the world.
China’s super-rich increasingly choose to lie low. Become the richest tycoon in the US and you might launch your own space programme. In India, you might throw gazillion-dollar weddings for your children. In China, you might look for a way to lose your new title — and the target on your back.
clearly something hasn’t gone quite to plan!
No, everything has gone exactly to plan!
This is pretty typical self-justifying bullshit. They’re justifying pre-held beliefs (china is good; china has billionaires; therefore billionaires must be good) rather than actually considering the claim based on the merits. (is it actually a good thing that china has billionaires, and what does that say about socialism/marxism as practiced in china)
You can believe that people have different needs and that we don’t all need to be absolutely 1:1 equal in terms of our material possessions etc. and that having some goal to work towards is beneficial to society (ambition) without having billionaires.
This essay is like trying to justify genocide by pointing out that sometimes, for the benefit of society, the death of an individual is preferable to the suffering of many. The issue with billionaires isn’t one of inequality in the micro - it’s the magnitude of that inequality, and the power it brings, which is the issue.
You can believe that people have different needs and that we don’t all need to be absolutely 1:1 equal in terms of our material possessions etc.
Wonder how this relates to Marxism . . .
The kind of socialism under which everybody would get the same pay, an equal quantity of meat and an equal quantity of bread, would wear the same clothes and receive the same goods in the same quantities — such a socialism is unknown to Marxism.
All that Marxism says is that until classes have been finally abolished and until labor has been transformed from a means of subsistence into the prime want of man, into voluntary labor for society, people will be paid for their labor according to the work performed. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Such is the Marxist formula of socialism, i.e., the formula of the first stage of communism, the first stage of communist society.
Only at the higher stage of communism, only in its higher phase, will each one, working according to his ability, be recompensed for his work according to his needs. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
It is quite clear that people’s needs vary and will continue to vary under socialism. Socialism has never denied that people differ in their tastes, and in the quantity and quality of their needs. Read how Marx criticized Stirner for his leaning towards equalitarianism; read Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme of 1875; read the subsequent works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and you will see how sharply they attack equalitarianism. Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant “communism.” Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with Marxism can have the primitive notion that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally. That is the notion of people who have nothing in common with Marxism. That is how such people as the primitive “communists” of the time of Cromwell and the French Revolution pictured communism to themselves. But Marxism and the Russian Bolsheviks have nothing in common with such equalitarian “communists.”
– some guy, I guess
I don’t personally agree with it, but I was willing to consider the notion on its own merits rather than in contrast with ideology - but even when I do, I find it a wholly unsatisfactory justification
I see where you’re coming from. Having read the article, it feels a little self congratulatory, especially since we can only guess as to the motives of the party members and the state in general. There are interesting perspectives in the article which do point to a general trend towards the “belittling of Capital” and improving the general quality of the workers (*who fall in line with the state [*separate topic]).
I’m trying to avoid words like Marxism/Socialism since I’m still learning and it’s hard to label without full knowledge. I am making a critical assumption that in a global marketplace, where there are monetary and non-monetary transaction costs and discrepancies over value, there will always be billionaires. A metric of “time to billionaire status” is probably better than “number of billionaires” to compare how Marxist/Capitalist the environment is. From the articles it seems that China would have a longer “time to billionaire” than a regular capitalist country. And there is a ceiling to that growth.
In a billionaire corporation, would you rather the workers be on a higher level of Mazlows hierarchy than one where the workers never get to see the fruits of their labor? Yes the exploitation of any worker is bad but at least from the articles perspective, the average Chinese worker has access to some level of housing and bullet trains and food etc. I presume that’s what you meant by the “inequality in the micro” but please correct me if I’m wrong. The inequality suffered by a Chinese worker vs an American or Indian worker (or any other country where Capital has power over policy) is different. I have absolutely no data to back that claim but at least in principle, the worker in a less Capitalist environment is a little less exploited.
For the “inequality of the macro”, the Chinese state is trying to be the only Power in town and making sure that Capital (and by proxy the billionaire corporations), does not control the government. When it tries e.g. Alibaba, examples are made. If billionaires are legit terrified of showing off wealth and are slaves to the party, that at least offers a ceiling to growth of the corporation, and by proxy a ceiling to the exploitation.
As I understood from the article was that the Chinese state has a slightly higher incentive to look after worker and make sure they’re relatively happy since they’re not “corrupted” by corporate interests/billionaires. They have shown some examples in the past to either infiltrate the corporation or keep the bourgeoisie in line. Of course I’m critical of the positive ratings and examples they are stating since it’s hard to separate the noise from false/true signals. Happy to hear critique!
(Stating my position just in case: I’m terrified of one party wielding that much power over people and opinions. I value freedom over security past the line drawn by my potentially uninformed perceptions of China. Happy to update my beliefs based on data)
Thanks for the well-considered and thoughtful response - I appreciate it.
Just to clarify, I’m not trying to make some typical liberal argument that China is evil or anything like that - I’m very far left and I’m not here just criticising China just because that’s what the mainstream media has told me to do. I just think it does leftists like myself no favours to pretend that China is perfect and that we shouldn’t criticise it - and the essay linked above, in my opinion, seems to be a bit of a reflexive defense of China, rather than actually considering the criticism - to me it seems they are choosing arguments to support their position rather than letting the facts and their beliefs lead them to a conclusion.
I don’t think we have to accept that any amount of imbalanced transactions of value necessarily guarantee that billionaires are inevitable - plenty of systems exist where there are “winners and losers” but the system itself reaches an equilibrium state. There are so many solutions which could be implemented to prevent billionaires from existing, and I would say that billionaires can only ever exist when there is a fundamental flaw in the society which produces them. It should be impossible to so thoroughly capture and centralise wealth and power to a point where an individual can have that much.
