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He is the kind of tech billionaire the Communist Party can accept
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America’s super-rich are rarely quiet types. Just this week, for example, its richest man, Elon Musk, used his platform, X, to promote himself and another noisy billionaire, Donald Trump. China’s wealthiest are more tight-lipped. When Colin Huang, founder of Pinduoduo, an e-commerce site, this month displaced a bottled-water tycoon to become China’s richest man, his public reaction was typical: utter silence. He has thrived while toeing the party line and keeping quiet.
Mr Huang was born in 1980, as China’s economy was starting to open up. His parents were factory-workers in the eastern city of Hangzhou. He was good at maths and hard-working. (He later admitted regretting not having had more fun in his youth.) A talented student at the prestigious Hangzhou Foreign Languages School, a liberal and Western-influenced institution, he went on to a new elite degree programme offered at Zhejiang University, also in Hangzhou, and finally a masters in computer science at the University of Wisconsin.
On graduation in 2004 he got a software-engineering job at Google, then a small Silicon Valley startup, and returned to China for the company, resigning in 2007 to start his own businesses. By 2015, he had built three moderately successful companies, and was looking for something new.
China’s tech scene at the time was dominated by giants like Alibaba in e-commerce and Tencent in gaming. Mr Huang’s companies were in both those businesses. He saw an opportunity in the giants’ reluctance to step outside their own well-defined territories, and started to think about a gamified e-commerce app to compete with them. He had also noticed how his mother and her friends would carefully track grocery prices and band together to buy at a discount. Pinduoduo, which means something like “shop more together”, integrated social features like group-buying.
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Mr Huang’s company quickly came to dominate the market in areas the e-commerce giants had neglected, with an initial focus on allowing small farmers to sell products directly only. He was not focused on providing luxury to the rich. The firm’s aim, he said, was “not about letting people in Shanghai feel like they are living a Parisian life, but making sure that people in Anhui have kitchen paper and fresh fruits”.
From rural areas the company then expanded into cities. But cost remained the focus. Other e-commerce companies might concentrate on branding or expanding into all product categories. But those were, Mr Huang said in 2018 during an interview with Caijing, a Beijing magazine, “a perspective from within the fifth ring road [in central Beijing]”—a reference to the perceived elitism of China’s capital. The company’s focus was, he said, on “the vast majority of Chinese people”.
That is changing. In September 2022, Pinduoduo’s parent company, PDD, launched Temu, an online marketplace, in America, to connect sellers in China with inflation-weary American consumers. It has been highly successful. According to a survey by Omnisend, an e-commerce marketing company, a third of American shoppers now make at least one monthly purchase on the site. With aggressive promotion and the slogan “shop like a billionaire”, it has already expanded to more than 60 countries. As China’s consumer market slows, the recent growth in Mr Huang’s net worth—made up mostly of his 25% stake in PDD—has largely come from Temu’s success abroad. But the company faces challenges: it is still loss-making, and many of its sellers in China are unhappy about what they claim is a rise in recent months of the penalties Temu charges for late delivery or other failings. Meanwhile, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are tightening the rules governing online platforms.
Back in China, Mr Huang seems to have successfully avoided becoming a target for officials by making himself into what the government would see as a “good” billionaire. He has learnt from the mistakes of another Hangzhou-born billionaire, Jack Ma, the outspoken head of Alibaba, who disappeared for several months in 2020 after criticising regulators. He appears to share Xi Jinping’s commitment to the goal of “common prosperity”: Mr Huang donated a 2.4% stake in PDD to charity. The priority he gives to lifting rural people out of poverty echoes the Communist Party’s own rhetoric.
Although only in his forties, he has also stepped back from front-line leadership, resigning first as chief executive at Pinduoduo and then as chairman of its board in 2021, to make way for a “new generation of leaders”. According to a shareholder letter, he has gone to pursue his personal interests in food- and life-sciences, and has also donated $100m to support agricultural research at his alma mater, Zhejiang University. But, like becoming the richest man in the world’s second superpower, these are things Mr Huang does not make much noise about. Perhaps the most important lesson he learnt from Mr Ma’s plight was to keep a low profile. He has said almost nothing publicly since 2021. ■
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China.css-v7aorn{margin-top:0.875rem;}.css-v7aorn +.eq1asik0{margin-top:3rem;padding-bottom:0;}.el1rg701+.css-v7aorn{margin-top:0;}.css-9ejc71{position:relative;border-bottom:0;border-top:0.0625rem solid var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-85);color:var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-35);}.css-9ejc71 .ebxshaw0{margin-top:0;}.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0>*{padding:var(–mb-spacing-md) 0;}.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0>*:nth-of-type(2){border-top:0.0625rem solid var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-85);}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0>*:nth-of-type(2){border-top:0;}}.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0 .e5z0ibw0{gap:var(–mb-spacing-sm);}.css-yb4x8x{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-items:stretch;-webkit-box-align:stretch;-ms-flex-align:stretch;align-items:stretch;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:flex-start;justify-content:flex-start;}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-yb4x8x{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;}}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-yb4x8x{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-yb4x8x{-webkit-box-pack:end;-ms-flex-pack:end;-webkit-justify-content:flex-end;justify-content:flex-end;}}.css-1j1j36d{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;row-gap:0.6rem;-webkit-column-gap:var(–mb-spacing-sm);column-gap:var(–mb-spacing-sm);}ShareReuse this content.css-169lzn0{position:relative;-webkit-align-self:auto;-ms-flex-item-align:auto;align-self:auto;display:none;}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-start:9;}}@media (min-width: 89rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-start:13;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-end:13;}}@media (min-width: 89rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-end:17;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-row-start:1;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-row-end:span 4;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{display:block;}}.css-169lzn0:last-child::after{height:0;}.css-1y1zooy{display:inline;}.css-1y1zooy >*+*{margin-top:2rem;}.css-1y1zooy >*:only-child{margin-top:1.25rem;}.css-1y1zooy >*:last-child{position:-webkit-sticky;position:sticky;top:1.5rem;}.css-mqgbir{margin-top:6rem;}.css-mqgbir .ds-section-headline{margin-bottom:1rem;}
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Chinese authorities try to stop parents gaming the exam system (again)
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They will go to great lengths to try
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Источник: www.economist.com