China's Superrich Decimated as Economic Downturn Wipes out Billions

China's wealthy lost hundreds of billions of dollars in 2022 as the global economic downturn also shook up the country's typically high-growth industries, according to an annual rich list published on Tuesday.

The number of Chinese entrepreneurs worth 5 billion Chinese yuan ($710 million) or more on September 15 fell by 11 percent, or 160 people, to 1,305, compared to the same time in 2021, said Hurun Report, which is led by Rupert Hoogewerf.

Their collective wealth dropped 18 percent to $3.5 trillion, while 293 people dropped off 2022's China rich list altogether, said the report. Those in China's real estate and healthcare industries suffered the biggest losses.

Over the same period, China's dollar billionaire club—the first country to top 1,000 people—dropped by 239 individuals to 946, Hurun said.

Topping Hurun's rich list for the second year in a row was billionaire businessman Zhong Shanshan, 68, owner of the Nongfu Spring bottle water company, whose net worth rose 17 percent to $65 billion.

Retaining the second and third spots were Zhang Yiming, 39, founder of TikTok developer ByteDance, and Robin Zeng, 54, chairman of electric battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology, but the economic slowdown wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from their wealth, the report said.

Zhang was now worth $35 billion and Zeng $32.9 billion, both down 28 percent from 2021.

According to Hurun's figures, the biggest loss was suffered by Yang Huiyan, 41, majority shareholder of the Yang family's real-estate development firm Country Garden Holdings. Her net worth decreased by $15.7 billion, enough to see her drop out of 2022's top 20.

Pony Ma, 51, co-founder of Chinese tech and entertainment giant Tencent, lost $14.6 billion in 2022, the second-biggest drop, while the net worth of Forrest Li, 44, boss of tech conglomerate Sea, was down $13.7 billion. Ma dropped from fourth to fifth on the rich list.

"This year has seen the biggest fall in the Hurun China Rich List of the last 24 years," Hoogewerf, Hurun's chair and chief researcher, said in a press release.

"Part of the reason has been a global-economy downturn, led by the fallout from the Russia-Ukraine war, a sharp drop in tech prices and the generally slow post-COVID economic recovery," he explained, "but also at the national level, the continued disruptions to the economy from localized COVID outbreaks."

"The result? China's stock market has fallen sharply," Hoogewerf added, "with the Hang Seng Index and Shenzhen Component Index falling by more than 20 percent compared with the same period last year, and the Shanghai Composite Index also falling by more than 10 percent."

President Xi Jinping of China, who secured an unprecedented third term in October as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, faces the unenviable task of steadying the economy in the coming years, with some forecasts predicting a global recession in 2023.

China's delayed release of third-quarter gross domestic product data in October revealed modest economic growth of 3.9 percent, outpacing predictions but still falling short of Beijing's 2022 target of 5.5 percent.

It puts the country on course for year-on-year GDP growth of 3 percent, roughly in line with an October estimate by the International Monetary Fund, which forecasted 3.2 percent growth for China in 2022, its slowest rate since the 1980s when excluding the 2.4 percent of COVID-hit 2020.

The United States, meanwhile, was predicted to achieve 1.6 percent GDP growth in 2022, the IMF said.

Hurun releases its China rich list in the autumn but also produces a global version each April, roughly two months after Forbes releases its tally of the world's dollar billionaires.