Covid-free China creates 200 billionaires despite causing pandemic – while rest of world suffers crippling depression
OVER 200 billionaires were created in China last year despite the rest of the world being crippled by the Covid pandemic.
A booming stock market and flood of new company listings offset the damage caused in China by the crisis, a new global tally shows.
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The size of China’s exclusive billionaire’s club has almost doubled in the past five years as the world’s No. 2 economy continued to outpace most others.
The Hurun Global Rich List showed that 259 Chinese broke into the billion-dollar club in 2020 - more than the rest of the world combined.
It takes the country to a total of 1,058 billionaires, the first to break the 1,000 mark.
Beijing's booming economy comes while the rest of the world's finances have been hammered by the virus.
China continues to face allegations over how it handled the Covid outbreak, with allegations it lied about the scale of the virus after it was first identified in the city of Wuhan in 2019.
Wuhan doctors have claimed state officials told them to the world about the Covid outbreak back in December that year so millions could celebrate the Chinese New Year.
One medic was even secretly filmed saying "they shouldn’t have allowed any gatherings" but "we were told not to speak out".
But while other countries were plunged into a financial crisis, China was the only major world economy to grow at all last year, with GDP up by 2.3 per cent.
The US shrank 3.7 per cent, Germany was down 5 per cent, and the UK by 11 per cent.
Leading the Chinese pack was Zhong Shanshan of bottled water giant Nongfu Spring Co.
Shanshan entered the list for the first time with an US$85 billion fortune, putting him No. 1 in Asia and into Hurun’s global top 10 - officially overtaking Jack Ma, who fell foul of Chinese leadership over the last 12 months.
Shanshan, a former construction worker, made his cash following a US$1.1 billion initial public offering in Hong Kong last year.
But Alibaba and Ant Group founder Jack Ma lost his title as China's richest man after he angered Beijing and his empire was put under heavy scrutiny by Chinese regulators.
Ma and his family had held the top spot for China's richest in the Hurun Global Rich List in 2020 and 2019.
But now they trail in fourth place, the latest list showed.
In January, e-tycoon Ma made an appearance in an online video, ending a months-long disappearance that began shortly after he criticised the Beijing regime.
Speculation over the tech tycoon’s whereabouts had swirled since his last appearance in October.
Many had feared for his life after he blasted China’s regulatory system in a speech at a Shanghai forum.
The Alibaba Group founder’s controversial speech on October 24 set him on a collision course with officials and led to the suspension of a potentially record-breaking $37billion IPO for the firm's financial affiliate, Ant Group.
Three individuals globally added more than US$50 billion in a single year, the survey found - Tesla Inc’s Elon Musk, Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos and Colin Huang of e-commerce firm Pinduoduo Inc.
Huang is now worth an estimated $60billion, putting him seventh on China's rich-list and 57th globally.
Overall, China leads the world’s wealth creation, adding 490 new billionaires in the past five years compared with the 160 added in the US, the report said.
Hurun Report chairman Rupert Hoogewerf said that even with the pandemic chaos, the past year saw the biggest wealth increase of the past decade due to new listings and booming stock markets.
Hoogewerf said: “Asia has, for the first time in perhaps hundreds of years, more billionaires than the rest of the world combined.”
The report also flagged a shift in Hong Kong, pointing out that the city's entrepreneurs are now being “dwarfed” by their counterparts in the mainland - only three Hong Kong tycoons make it into the China top 50.
Six of the world's top 10 cities with the highest concentration of billionaires are now in China, with Beijing top of the heap for the sixth year running.
Economists now believe that China will overtake America to become the world's largest economy by 2028.
China’s controversial economy growth comes as a mysterious dark database hidden by China could be the smoking gun that proves Covid DID leak from a Wuhan lab, a study has claimed.
The Sun Online exclusively revealed the closely guarded cache of information is believed to include unpublished samples of data on new viruses and hidden bat collection sties.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been at the centre of a storm ever since the virus first emerged just a stone's throw from the facility which was known to be studying very similar bat viruses.
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Most of WIV's databases were once accessible online - but have since all been taken systematically taken offline by China.
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And it is believed one of the data files - which was password protected before being taken down - could be holding information on new viruses.
World Health Organisation investigators however all but dismissed the lab leak in a joint press conference with their Chinese counterparts - an event which was branded as a "whitewash".