Zhang Hongchao
Source of wealth: Bubble tea
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Modules
Biography
Zhang Hongchao is the chairman of Mixue Group, the world's second biggest seller of freshly-made drinks by annual cups sold after Starbucks.
He started a shaved ice shop in 1997 in China with a homemade machine and opened the first Mixue Bingcheng store two years later.
Nearly all-franchised, the Mixue Bingcheng chain offers bubble tea, lemonade, coffee and other drinks as well as ice cream at dirt-cheap prices across more than 50,000 stores, including nearly 5,000 overseas.
The company went public in a $444 million Hong Kong IPO in March 2025.
His younger brother Zhang Hongfu, CEO of the company and also a billionaire, joined Mixue in 2007.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Zhang Hongchao
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Zhang Hongchao, linked to Food & Beverage and 'Bubble tea', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 32 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 2.0 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.