Colin Huang, the Founder of PDD Holders and Temu, was just crowned as the richest man in China. With a net worth of USD $48.6 billion, he overtook Zhong ShanShan, the boss of beverage company Nongfu Spring, to be the world's 25th wealthiest person and the richest person in China. But in a country where billionaires often mysteriously disappear, how long can Colin Huang last before he faces the same predicament as his predecessors? CEO of Renaissance, Bao Fan; real estate tycoon, Ren Zhiqiang, and most prominently, Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, all went missing from the face of the earth during their prime. How would Huang's predicament be any different?
Born in 1980 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Huang was a teenage maths whizz and a former employee at Google China. In 2015, he founded the online shopping platform Pinduoduo, which has become one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world today.
In 2020, Huang stepped down as PDD's chief executive and later left the board as chairman in 2021, as Beijing began cracking down on China's tech giants. It was at this time that PDD's net worth started to tumble.But despite its struggles in China, Temu's sales overseas were booming, which allowed the company to generate USD $34 billion yuan revenue last year.
It seems that Colin Huang is one of the most well liked tech giants by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This could be due to the fact that Huang thrived while toeing the party line and staying a low profile in China.
Bao Fan was reported missing by his workers on 16 February 2024. 11 days after his disappearance, his company reports that Bao was cooperating with authorities in an unspecified investigation. Bao fan follows the footsteps of Jack Ma, and Ren Zhiqiang, and a string of other business elites who have gone missing while under some form of investigation. Ren Zhiqiang was sentenced to 18 years in jail in 2020 for calling the Chinese president a clown. Similarly, Jack Ma mysteriously disappeared in 2020 after he insinuated that the state owned banks were holding up pawnshop mentality. But clearly, another part of his disappearance was also credited to the growing strength of Alibaba and how it was becoming a rival to big state owned enterprises and state owned banking systems.
Jack Ma's episode also marked the start of CCP's crackdown on tech companies, where regulators target tech giants like Tencent, Baidu, and JD.com, Bytedance and others. This has led many to believe that the CCP is secretly getting rid of these tech giants that the party is deeming to be too powerful and too influential. As China enters a new era where the Chinese party has much more control over the economy but also private businesses, it poses a question of "should private sectors be afraid?"
In a time when China is still recovering from the economic downturn of the pandemic, it seems that China still needs to rely on private investors to rebuild the tattered Chinese economy. But experts say that this is unlikely to be long-term. China is only taking on this market friendly attitude towards the private sector because it needs to be friendly right now, but in the long term, the CCP is bound to take stronger political control by the CCP and that would be bad for both foreign businesses and entrepreneurs.
As Xi Jinping continues to rule over China with an iron fist, it seems that anyone who would dare to challenge the authority of the Party is going to be in his cross hairs. So as Colin Huang rises to the top of the Chinese echalon, he too should be careful not to step on the toes of the CCP. Huang has to remember that his company is working in a country with a fundamentally different political system, and the "rule of law" that the chinese government has regularly says they have established in China just means something very different there.
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