Zheng Shuliang
Source of wealth: Aluminum products
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Modules
Biography
Zheng Shuliang is the vice chairman of China Hongqiao Group, one of the country's largest aluminum producers founded by her late husband Zhang Shiping.
Zhang, who died in 2019, built Hongqiao into a multibillion-dollar business during the reform and opening-up years ushered in by then-leader Deng Xiaoping.
The couple's son, Zhang Bo, is the chairman and CEO of Hong Kong-listed Hongqiao.
Their daughter, Zhang Hongxia, is the chairman of textile producer Weiqiao Textile, which was taken private from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2024.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Zheng Shuliang
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 Zheng Shuliang, linked to Metals & Mining and 'Aluminum products', 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 194 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 12.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.