Party grandees such as Mao Zedong founded what they called “New China” in 1949, after driving Beijing’s former republican government out of power. Today, Xi Jinping is the leader of 1.4 billion people whose interests are inextricable from those of the ruling party, which boasts 96 million card-carrying members.
Having celebrated its 100th anniversary, the CCP aims to create a “great modern socialist country in all respects” by 2049, according to Xi, for which it intends to harness every index of China’s comprehensive national power.
Despite its humble beginnings in 1921, the party’s control over the world’s largest one-party socialist state means it alone wields China’s financial resources, and any calculation of the CCP’s wealth arguably is inseparable from that of the national coffers under its command.
In the 1980s, China’s former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, a reformist, oversaw a policy of economic opening, propelling the country toward integration in the global economy, ultimately joining the World Trade Organization in 2001—with the backing of the United States and others.
According to management consultancy McKinsey & Company, China accounted for one-third of the world’s national net wealth growth as the collective worth of all countries soared from $156 trillion in 2000 to $514 trillion in 2020.
China’s wealth rose from $7 trillion in 2000 to $120 trillion in 2020. In the same period, the U.S.’s national net worth more than doubled to $90 trillion, the November 2021 report said.
What’s more, among the 10 wealthiest countries in the world, China accounted for 50 percent of the growth, followed by the U.S. at 22 percent and Japan at 11 percent. By McKinsey’s measurements, China is presently the world’s richest country.
National net wealth is the total sum of a country’s assets minus its liabilities. It measures the nation’s ability to take on debt and sustain spending, and can be difficult to evaluate accurately and consistently.
The Credit Suisse Research Institute, for instance, placed the U.S. atop its national net worth list at $145 trillion, accounting for 31.5 percent of global wealth. China was second with $85 trillion and 18.4 percent of the pie, while Japan was third with $25 trillion and 5.5 percent.
The investment bank’s Global Wealth Databook 2022 revealed some troubling trends when it came to the financial divide between the Global North and Global South: the top 10 countries on the list held 76.8 percent of the world’s wealth.
National wealth is not to be confused with gross domestic product, which is commonly used to measure the size of a country’s economy. China overtook Japan as the second-largest economy in GDP terms in 2010.
According to the World Bank, the U.S. economy was valued at $23 trillion versus China’s $17.73 trillion in GDP terms in 2021. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, China was expected to overtake the U.S. in the coming years, with some predicting that this would occur by the end of the 2020s.
How Many Billionaires Are There in China?
China’s explosive economic growth in the industrial, retail and real estate sectors has unsurprisingly made many dollar billionaires in recent years. But here, too, precise evaluations vary.
According to this year’s The World’s Billionaires, the widely cited ranking published annually by Forbes since 1987, there were 607 billionaires in China, including Hong Kong and Macau, making it the country with the second-highest number of super-rich.
The U.S. topped the list with 735 dollar billionaires, while India was third with 166.
The magazine counted 2,668 billionaires in the world in 2022, down 97 but still worth a combined $12.7 trillion.
According to another tally, however, China topped the list of most dollar billionaires this year. Hurun Report, which is run by former Forbes rich list researcher Rupert Hoogewerf, publishes its own count every April, two months after Forbes.
In 2021, the group named China as the first country to pass 1,000 billionaires. This year, China had 1,087 members of the dollar billionaire club, Huron Report’s global billionaire count reached 3,381, up 153 members from 2020.
The Hurun Global Rich List has Musk, Bezos and Arnault in the same top three spots, but its U.S. billionaire count—716—is lower than Forbes’ 735.
China may be home to the most billionaires worldwide, according to Hurun, but North America still has the highest number of ultra-high net worth individuals—those worth more than $50 million as defined by Statista.com.
Asia accounted for 54 percent of billionaires in 2022, Hurun said, while 44 percent of billionaires resided in North America and Europe, the company said.
The CCP’s revolutionary founders probably didn’t have billionaires in mind, and Xi has kept China’s mega-rich on their toes. Their wealth fluctuates whenever the Chinese president believes a certain industry has grown too rich for its own good, or when he indirectly mandates their contributions toward shared wealth as part of his policy of “common prosperity.”
Is the CCP Really Communist?
The Chinese government isn’t unique in distributing a wide range of benefits to its population, including for education, housing and childbirth, and these alone don’t make China communist.
Its ruling party was inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was founded on the principles of Marxism-Leninism.
Marxism-Leninism was the official ideology of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement in the 20th century. Its goal was the establishment of a one-party socialist state to replace capitalism on behalf of the working class.
The death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin led to the emergence of new interpretations of Marxism-Leninism in different countries, including in China. Today, the collapse of the Soviet Union still informs Beijing’s belief—and especially Xi’s personal conviction—in the need to forge strong ideological links between society and the ruling party to ensure the CCP’s survival.
Over the decades, Chinese leaders have proposed their own period-specific ideologies, such as Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and now Xi Jinping Thought—also called Maoism, Dengism and Xiism, which are part of a collective set of political theories known as socialism with Chinese characteristics.
China’s current leader is known to be deeply ideological, which informs his statist approach of exercising more centralized control over Chinese society and the economy.
Xi’s belief that the “East is rising and the West is declining” is not unique to him. As early as Mao leaders have expressed some version of the phrase, which is not so much a conviction as an ideological imperative of Marxist-Leninism.
Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a long-time China watcher, notes that Xi, like all Marxist-Leninists, views history as an ongoing class struggle, in which “China’s move to a more advanced stage of socialism necessarily accompanies the decline of capitalist systems.”
