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Dan Wang
Bi Gan (毕赦赩), filmmaker
When people ask me who the three most intriguing Chinese figures are today, I immediately think of him. Born in 1989 in Kaili, Guizhou, a poor, mountainous province in southwest China, Bi Gan first drew attention with Kaili Blues (2015), which won a prize at Locarno, and later with A Grand Journey Toward Night (2018). In May 2025, Resurrection earned a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Bi Gan’s films are stunningly beautiful. Resurrection influenced me; I hope to write about it someday. Bi Gan is a filmmaker deeply rooted in Guizhou—and Guizhou is the neighboring province to Yunnan, where I come from, so we share a lot with people like him. He always speaks the Guizhou dialect, which I understand very well and find quite amusing. My method for understanding China and the world is to read everything and then travel, travel, travel—go to rural, poor, mountainous China rather than watching it from the capitals. Bi Gan captures this China from the inside.
Alessandro Aresu
Gu Ailing (谷爱凌), freestyle skier
If you don’t know Eileen Gu, known in China as Gu Ailing, you may have been away in recent months. This freestyle skier, a multiple Olympic champion at Beijing and then Milan-Cortina (where banners with “Eileen, marry me” could be seen), a model and a Stanford student, was born in San Francisco in 2003. Raised by her mother and grandmother, with Chinese roots, between California and frequent visits to China, she exists in both worlds. Yet it was when U.S.-China tensions intensified that she became a global celebrity. In 2019, after competing under the American flag, she announced that she would represent China at the 2022 Beijing Games to inspire millions of young Chinese girls to engage in sport and athletic culture. While juggling questions of international politics and the support the Chinese government provides to its most famous athlete, she continues to win, study, and travel the world as an ambassador for Western and Chinese brands, such as Red Bull, Louis Vuitton, and Anta.
Wang Laichun (王来春), cofounder of Luxshare Precision Industry
Wang Laichun, also known as Grace Wang, was born in 1967. She began as a factory worker at Foxconn in Shenzhen when she was twenty, quickly developing skills in production management and supply-chain organization. With her brother, she moved into entrepreneurship and founded Luxshare in Dongguan in 2004. Luxshare became one of Apple’s principal suppliers, involved in assembling major Apple products and even competing with Foxconn. Nearly 50 billion in revenue in 2025, Luxshare embodies the sectoral and geographic ambitions of China’s electronics industry. The company has diversified into automotive electronics, communications, and data centers, and has established production sites or R&D centers in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico.
Wang Tao (汪滔), aerospace engineer and businessman
Frank Wang was born in Hangzhou in 1980. After studying electronics engineering in Hong Kong, he founded DJI in Shenzhen in 2006. By integrating flight control, sensors, cameras, software, and image transmission, DJI has become over the past two decades the global leader in civil drones and a decisive catalyst in bringing drones into everyday consumer products. Estimates of its share of the civil market range from 70 to 80 percent, thanks to its ecosystem, production capacity, and ongoing talent development—an edge rivaled by no one. Since at least 2020, DJI has been at the center of U.S. blacklists by the Commerce, Defense, and Treasury departments. In some cases, U.S. policy had to be reversed because there was no genuine alternative to Shenzhen-made drones. For U.S. startups in the field, DJI is both the reason they seek government support and the model to emulate.
Michael Pettis
Yang Haisong (杨海崧), novelist, translator, producer
The single most influential figure in China’s independent music scene is Yang Haisong, without a doubt. A poet, novelist, and consummate translator, he rose to prominence when PK14, the band he founded in Nanjing in 1997, relocated to Beijing in 2001. His use of language and stage traditions opened paths for nearly every major band that followed in China.
But his influence doesn’t stop there. In 2007, a Beijing-based emerging band, Carsick Cars, asked him to produce their first album, which he did. That record became the watershed of China’s independent scene and launched Yang’s long career as a producer for some of China’s most memorable albums.
Also in 2007, he co-founded the Maybe Mars/Bing Masi label, which within five to six years became China’s leading independent music label. The label was sold to a large Chinese media group in 2020, but Yang remains at its helm.
Zhang Shouwang (张守望), guitarist and composer
While Yang Haisong is often regarded as the elder statesman and craftsman of Beijing’s indie-rock scene, Zhang Shouwang is widely seen as the prodigy—the guitarist and emblematic composer of the next generation. His Carsick Cars, formed in 2005, rapidly gained nationwide fame for their blend of melodic finesse and anarchic guitar edges, propelling them to the forefront of China’s indie rock explosion between 2005 and 2015. The band also became the country’s best-known export, touring Europe with Sonic Youth and performing at major festivals in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan.
Yet Zhang’s leadership of Carsick Cars only tells part of his story. His experimental dance project White is nearly as well-known in China as Carsick Cars. His compositions have been performed by chamber ensembles in Beijing, Shanghai, London, and New York, and he is arguably the leading figure in Beijing’s vibrant community of experimental composers and improvisers.
Yan Yulong (闫玉龙), singer and multi-instrumentalist
Yan Yulong, four years younger than Zhang, emerged from the same experimental scene and founded his own flagship group, Chui Wan. His work draws equally from psychedelia, California minimalism, Balinese influences, and Western Chinese musical traditions, shaping a distinct sound that guided younger Chinese musicians toward a more intricate path. Yan Yulong is often regarded as one of the artists who pushed Beijing’s underground rock beyond post-punk toward a sound increasingly inflected with ambient, folk, and experimental elements.
A seasoned violinist and sound designer, he has performed internationally, including in Europe, North America, and Asia. Alongside Kan Ziyi, he programs the Beijing weekly Sally Can’t Dance, which in the past two years has become China’s main hub for experimental and improvised music in Beijing.
David Ownby
Liu Xiaodong (刘小东), painter
Liu Xiaodong is among China’s most renowned contemporary artists. He works in oil, mostly portraits, though not exclusively. His signature concern is “how to see people,” and while his work is not overtly political, he travels to conflict zones across the globe to paint there—Italians, Palestinians, Mexicans, Texans, and sex workers. The film Hometown Boy follows his return to his hometown to paint his friends and relatives.
Xiang Biao (项飙), anthropologist
Xiang Biao stands as one of China’s best-known intellectuals and the youthful favorite. An anthropologist who works in Germany, he pens books on agency and solitude, which have found broad success in China. He also tours across the country to promote his ideas, meet young people, and deepen his research. He popularized the term “involution” (neijuan) to describe the unproductive overwork many Chinese youths feel compelled to endure. His book Self as Method is available in English translation.
Tang Wei (湯唯), actress
Tang Wei is one of China’s best-known actresses, famed for her role in Lust, Caution by Ang Lee—the Chinese release of which caused trouble for her in China due to explicit scenes. Her career peaked with Park Chan-wook’s Park Chan-wook’s neo-noir thriller Decision to Leave, in which she plays a Chinese immigrant in South Korea entangled with organized crime.
Jean-Louis Rocca
Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯), filmmaker and producer
Jia Zhangke is an internationally recognized filmmaker (Golden Lion at Venice in 2006 for Still Life; screenplay prize at Cannes in 2013 for A Touch of Sin). His films highlight the tensions and challenges within Chinese society, which has sometimes brought him into conflict with censorship. At the same time, he served as a deputy in the National People’s Congress (2018–2023). He is the president of the National Association of Filmmakers (since 2024), an official organization representing the profession. Thus he embodies the stance of many Chinese artists who, within the country’s unique political context, must hold official roles while aiming to create work that critically examines social reality. Meanwhile, the state relies on recognized artists to lend prestige to this domain. A modus vivendi, therefore, emerges.
Li Peilin (李培林), academic, sociologist
A sociologist by training, trained at Lyon 2 and a PhD from Paris 1, Li Peilin enjoys international scientific recognition. His work examines the new Chinese society and its defining phenomena—social stratification, inequality, the middle class, fertility, aging, urbanization, and the rural revival—and the problems they generate. His analyses offer lucid diagnoses of social realities. He has also held public roles: he served as vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and as a deputy in the National People’s Congress from 2018 to 2023, and he was a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee as an alternate member.
Wang Huning (王沪宁), theorist and politician
Wang Huning sits on the Politburo Standing Committee—the core of power—presides over the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (a kind of second parliamentary chamber), and ranks as the regime’s number four. Seen as the party’s ideologue, he began with a French major and later studied international politics at Fudan, holding various academic roles. He joined politics in the late 1990s, contributing to multiple commissions under three successive leaders (Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping) that sought to provide a theoretical framework for the party’s sometimes eclectic orientations. He helped develop the concept of the “three representativeness,” embedded in party statutes and the state constitution, formalizing the entry of successful entrepreneurs into the party and state institutions. He is a proponent of neo-authoritarianism, arguing for a strong central power as the only force capable of advancing the country. For him, Marxism-Leninism should remain at the heart of the political system, but he also advocates for China to forge its own values—drawn from the past but also asserting principles such as democracy, equality, and the rule of law.
Emmanuel Lincot
Wang Yi (王毅), Chinese Foreign Minister
Wang Yi participates in every major international gathering. Steadfast and enduring, he has succeeded Yang Jiechi and then Qin Gang, who was dismissed in 2023, as foreign minister. His style, affability, and firmness have perhaps elevated him to a status that rivals the best Chinese diplomats in the public imagination. Born in Beijing in 1953, he belongs to the final cohort of leaders who experienced the Cultural Revolution. A tireless worker, he began studying English and Japanese in the late 1970s, languages he speaks fluently. Appointed ambassador to Tokyo under Hu Jintao, he spent three years there as Sino-Japanese relations began to sour. Since 2023, he has led the Party’s Central Foreign Affairs Office, reinforcing his central role in Chinese diplomacy. For him, diplomacy boils down to two words: power and sovereignty. Attached to symbols, he reaffirmed in 2026 China’s tradition that the minister’s first annual trip should be to Africa, underscoring the continent’s importance to China. A proponent of multilateralism, he meetings with Japan and the Philippines and participates in ASEAN summits to seek solutions to island disputes and issues related to Taiwan.
With the United States, Wang Yi seeks to avoid direct confrontation and to pursue coexistence, while also engaging with Russia’s Sergei Lavrov and strengthening Beijing-Moscow coordination within the UN and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. He also asserts that China and the European Union are partners rather than rivals and advocates for harmonious coexistence despite differences. Beyond the sometimes soothing rhetoric, history will remember him as a premier negotiator of high rank.
Gao Xingjian (高行健), writer, playwright, director and painter
There are two kinds of men: those who travel and those who depart and never return. Ulysses and Abraham, in short. Gao Xingjian’s path began with a journey through languages. In Beijing, he studied French before being sent to the countryside—one of the many youths educated during the Cultural Revolution. Gao does not primarily master spoken language but the written form and the brush’s art—an inheritance from the long tradition of Chinese literati. A painter and wordsmith, scarred by the hardships and the power’s humiliations, he has not returned to China since 1988. Subversive and early on confronted with censorship and totalitarian ideology’s hegemony, which warps language much as Viktor Klemperer warned about Germany’s Nazi era, Gao’s work remains a testament to that danger. Despite China’s reform era turmoil, these foreign authors have not lost favor in Beijing’s eyes. The “spiritual pollution” from the West remains one of the regime’s deadliest poisons to guard against. The Tiananmen crackdown of 1989 sealed his choice to stay in his adopted home, France.
Ai Weiwei (艾未未), artist and activist
Born in 1957 in Beijing, Ai Weiwei stands as one of the world’s most influential and engaged contemporary artists. The son of the renowned Francophone poet Ai Qing, he is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, photographer, designer, critic, and activist. Fusing the figure of the entrepreneur with the countercultural hero, Ai Weiwei embodies a paradox of our times. Self-taught, he spent more than a decade in exile in New York after his father was deported by the regime to Xinjiang. Ai Weiwei leaves behind at least three major works. Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium designed with Herzog & de Meuron, symbolizes modernity and the tensions with the Chinese regime that turned it into one of the principal showcases for the 2008 Games. Remembering (2009) pays homage to the Sichuan earthquake victims, built from thousands of school backpacks and displayed at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, confronting the government with its responsibilities after the disaster. Sunflower Seeds (2010) is a monumental installation with millions of porcelain seeds shown at London’s Tate Modern, challenging mass production and individuality within Chinese society. The piece critiques Mao-era propaganda that likened the Chinese populace to sunflowers eternally turned toward Mao. Declared “unwanted” by the state and harassed by police, Ai Weiwei first sought refuge in Germany and then Portugal.
His advocacy for migrants is documented in the film Human Flow (2017). The controversy around him in Europe stems not only from his activism but also from the fusion of conceptual art with Duchampian irony and Warholian excess. His provocations have increasingly targeted the West. In January 2026, he stated that the West has lost its moral authority to criticize China on human rights grounds, citing the censorship of his own works in response to his support for the Palestinian cause and the treatment of Julian Assange as examples of Western hypocrisy. He argues that the West economically benefited from China’s regime (such as lax labor rights and environmental neglect) and thus collaborated in creating a “monstrous regime” in China while turning a blind eye to its own contradictions. In short, Ai Weiwei does not merely critique China; he challenges Western hypocrisy and its economic interests, arguing that fundamental values like freedom of expression and human rights are no longer being defended as they should be. “Exile is a hard profession,” wrote the great poet Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963), whom Ai Weiwei greatly admires. His painful experiences in China and subsequent exile to the United States and Europe have allowed him to cultivate a total aversion to system thinking and ideological frameworks, albeit with some contradictions.
Gilles Guiheux
Huang Nubo (黄怒波), businessman, founder of Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group
Born in 1956, Huang Nubo is a billionaire, poet, and mountaineer. A Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, he was later sent to the countryside as part of the 17 million urban youths. In 1976, he began studying literature at Peking University. After finishing, as a party member, he spent almost a decade in the Propaganda Department of the CPC Central Committee. The connections he built there would serve his interests when he headed Zhongkun Investment Corporation, an empire spanning real estate and tourism and one of China’s leading fortunes.
Huang started writing poetry at 14. Under the pen name Luo Ying, he published his first work in 1978. In Le Gène du garde rouge. Souvenirs de la Révolution culturelle (Gallimard, 2015), a book not published in his homeland, he recounts his gradual indoctrination, his father’s corpse left on a heap of rubbish, and his mother reduced to begging to survive. Over the last two decades, he has become a seasoned mountaineer, scaling the world’s highest peaks, including Everest three times. His latest novel, À la vie, à la mort – De Pékin à l’Everest, appeared in France in 2024 with Éditions du Mont-Blanc and explores the backstage of a businessperson’s ascent in a rapidly changing country where ambition, money, and power shape destinies. Huang Nubo’s trajectory—bridging several worlds—summarizes China’s beauty and complexity at its peak.
Wang Bing (王兵), filmmaker and documentarian
Born in 1967, he is a filmmaker and documentary filmmaker. After studying photography at the Shenyang Academy of Fine Arts and then at the Beijing Film Academy’s photography department, he undertook a bold project from 1999 to 2003: to document, with a single video camera, the vanishing world of state-owned industrial workers—those once hailed as heroes of socialism sacrificed to reform. He captured both the interior of a dying steel plant and workers’ daily lives at home and in decrepit public spaces, producing a remarkable nine-hour documentary, 铁西区 (West of the Rails).
Since then, Wang Bing has pursued numerous projects that bear witness to the lives of the marginalized and voiceless in China’s prosperity: victims of systems of confinement (Le Fossé), children left to fend for themselves as parents work far away (The Three Sisters of Yunnan), psychiatric inmates (Madness), and young migrant workers in the apparel industry (Bitter Money and the Youth trilogy). His work has earned him multiple international prizes.
Liu Cixin (刘慈欣), science-fiction writer
Born in 1963 in Shanxi province, Liu Cixin is a science-fiction writer best known for The Three-Body Problem trilogy. A graduate in water resources and electric power engineering from North University of China in Taiyuan, he spent several years as an engineer at a power plant.
The Three-Body Problem (San Ti) is the first volume of a trilogy that continues with The Dark Forest and Death’s End. The title refers to the three-body problem in celestial mechanics. Serialized in a magazine in 2006, the novel was fully published in 2008. It was adapted as a TV series for Chinese audiences by Tencent Video, and later for an international audience by Netflix in 2024. Evoking contemporary Chinese history, extraterrestrial civilizations, and scientific inquiry, this science-fiction work ranks among the century’s most ambitious, testifying to Chinese writers’ ability to address a global readership.
Afra Wang
Yang Zhilin (杨植麟), founder of Moonshot AI
Zhilin is the founder of the rock group Splay, but he is best known for creating Moonshot AI, the company that gave birth to the Kimi AI model, whose capabilities are approaching Claude Fable 5’s and which has surprised Europe and the United States.
If asked to define success in China, Yang embodies it: born in 1992, he is a Tsinghua alumnus with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. He worked at Google Brain and Meta before returning to Beijing to build an AI company. The Chinese name of the company, 月之暗面 (“The Dark Side of the Moon”), nods to Pink Floyd. Moonshot AI stands among the youngest, most innovative, and Western-facing Chinese AI players. Yang represents what I call the “fourth generation” of Chinese tech founders: the latest cohort forged in the US–China tech rivalry of the 2020s.
Wang Xingxing (王兴兴), founder of Unitree Robotics
Wang described himself as an outsider: a poor student, a founder who doesn’t speak English, and who attended a second‑tier university. In his first year, he spent roughly 200 yuan to buy a few cheap microcontrollers and more than a dozen servomotors. He manually assembled and refined parts, eventually building a two-legged humanoid robot with fourteen joints. His hands still bore knife marks and calluses from all that tinkering.
Yet, in 2026 Unitree Robotics dominates the global market for quadruped and humanoid robots. At heart, Wang is a Zhejiang entrepreneur who relentlessly reduces the cost of every component through a deep understanding of manufacturing processes and the supply chain. Unitree robots now dance at China’s Spring Festival Gala and even perform for Friedrich Merz. Unitree embodies the Chinese gamble that the next frontier is physical: robots that can walk, fall, and get back up in the real world.
Zhou Qunfei (周群飞), founder of Lens Technology
Zhou sat beside Elon Musk and Tim Cook at a high-level state banquet in Beijing last month, during Donald Trump’s visit to China.
Before dropping out of school at 15, Zhou was raising pigs and chickens in rural Hunan. At 17, she left home to work in a Guangdong factory, where she polished watch crystals for about a dollar a day.
Today she is among the world’s wealthiest women. The glass she manufactures lies beneath the fingertips of nearly every touchscreen, from Apple to Tesla.
She has long resented her educational path. Over the years she accumulated certificates in accounting, computing, customs declarations, and driving, but learning English remained a constant struggle even after she launched her own Shenzhen company at 23. Her life reads like a compressed chronicle of modern China, a reminder of the country’s true growth miracle and a quintessential embodiment of Shenzhen.
Pierre Haski
Cui Jian (崔健), musician
For five years, I listened to Cui Jian for pleasure and necessity—the Chinese rocker’s tape got stuck in my car’s player, so I kept playing it. I also attended his concerts in Beijing’s small venues, where a crowd versed in his music demanded he play the 1980s tracks, especially his most famous song “Nothing to My Name.” A symbol, really: he sang it on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, facing a sea of students calling for democracy. For that act, Cui Jian, once a trumpeter turned rocker after a tourist gave him a cassette of Simon and Garfunkel, faced two decades of penalty. Restrictions on audience size, no television slots, no visibility. But like a Chinese Johnny, he survived the fashion cycles and China’s transformation to become a veteran of televised music programs—rebellious but tamed—yet he will always be remembered for singing “Nothing to My Name” before a youth who would later endure army crackdowns and normalization.
Zhang Zhan (张展), lawyer and whistleblower
At the start of 2020, as a mysterious virus paralyses Wuhan and then the entire world, Zhang Zhan—a fearless Shanghai woman—begins to investigate. She posts 122 videos on social media showing what official media would not: crowded hospital corridors, the crematorium operating around the clock, and more. On May 15, 2020, she “disappears,” a euphemism used in China for those detained for “sensitive” reasons. She is sentenced to four years for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” and she leaves in 2024 weakened. Yet she refuses to be silenced, resuming her whistleblowing on YouTube—the American platform accessible in China only via VPN. She “disappears” again, given a further four-year sentence for “repeat offense.” “A world without truth has no meaning,” she wrote in one message, a former lawyer struck from the bar for political reasons. China aspires to be a global power but fears this “truth.”
Lei Jun (雷军), founder of Xiaomi
Lei Jun has often been likened to Steve Jobs. The Chinese tech entrepreneur admits being inspired by reading the Apple founder’s autobiography while still a student at an engineering school. When he founded Xiaomi in 2010, he modeled many launches on Apple’s keynotes, even choosing outfits to echo Jobs’s style. He’s viewed as a guru by many young Chinese, and his smartphones have enjoyed global appeal far beyond a simple brand. He has recently pushed further by launching his first electric car, at a time when Apple abandoned its car project. In the mobile sector, Xiaomi ranks third worldwide and hopes to sell its SUVs globally. Lei Jun has also managed to dodge the political snares that hit Huawei, marking one of his greatest successes in a divided world.
JiaJia Wang
Li Ziqi (李子柒), global ambassador of traditional Chinese culture
Li Ziqi is among China’s most internationally recognized content creators. Through videos about rural life, traditional cuisine, farming, and craft, she offers a China shaped by aesthetics, nature, and ancestral know-how.
Her videos rely far less on dialogue and more on image power, music, and narrative flow, enabling them to resonate with audiences well beyond Chinese-speaking regions. More than recipes, they tell a way of life and a perception of the human-nature relationship.
Her success stems from her ability to transform a personal project into a genuine cultural venture. Without overt political messaging or explicit nation-promotion, she has significantly reshaped China’s image for an international audience.
Ba Ling Biaozi (八零彪子), keeper of rural memory
Ba Ling Biaozi is a content creator who specializes in reconstructing daily life in Chinese countryside during the 1970s and 1980s. Through making traditional foods, restoring old objects, and presenting artisanal techniques, he revives a shared memory that spans several generations of Chinese people.
His videos favor a slow pace, a restrained aesthetic, and a nostalgic atmosphere. They invite viewers not so much to learn a craft as to reconnect with a familiar universe of childhood memories and rural traditions.
Critics mostly target the sometimes idealized portrayal of rural life. Some argue that his videos embellish an era marked by harsh living conditions, while others view them as a cultural effort to preserve intangible heritage and traditional know-how. His success nonetheless reflects a deeper trend among Chinese youth, as seen in another viral format circulating on Chinese social networks, titled “the core of the Chinese dream” (中式梦核), which shows grainy images of China in the 2000s.
Alex (“Lao A” / 牢A, Squeaky King), a new generation of Chinese storytellers shaped by international experience
After studying in the United States, Alex narrates his life abroad, his experiences in menial jobs, and his insights into cultural differences between China and the United States.
His main strength lies in his storytelling ability. By weaving personal experiences, social analysis, and a carefully crafted narrative, he captivates a young audience hungry for authentic stories and international perspectives. He also coined the term “American Kill Line,” derived from video-game slang, to denote the critical threshold at which illness, job loss, or a crisis can push a U.S. household into irreversible financial jeopardy. The expression quickly spread as one of the most widely cited concepts online in China.
Yet his success comes with controversy. While many praise his view of American society, others note that some narratives or details he recounts cannot be independently verified and are more testimonial than investigative. Regardless, Alex embodies a new generation of Chinese creators building influence through storytelling, lived experience, and a decidedly global lens.
Yolaine Escande
Maggie Cheung (張曼玉), actress
Maggie Cheung is a Hong Kong-born film actress who grew up there, studied in the United Kingdom, then returned to participate in the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant before joining TVB.
She began her career in television series, notably Police Cadet ’84 (1984), where she co-starred with Tony Leung. She later turned to independent cinema, working with Wong Kar-Wai on films such as As Tears Go By (1988); Nos années sauvages (1990); Flowers of Shanghai (1994); In the Mood for Love (2000), while also accepting occasional roles in mainstream blockbusters like Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985) or Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002). Cheung has won Taiwan’s Golden Horse Award for Best Actress four times and Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actress five times. She gained international fame after winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress Award in 2004 for Olivier Assayas’s Clean, following the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 1992 for Centre Stage by Stanley Kwan.
Guo Pei (郭培), haute-couture designer
Born in 1967 in Beijing, Guo Pei is a haute-couture designer with a thirty-year career. After working in one of Beijing’s few private design ateliers from 1986 to 1997, she founded her own studio in the capital in 1997. She trains her own assistants and quickly becomes renowned in haute couture for her sumptuous embroidery and exceptional sewing expertise. She blends the dress codes of China’s imperial court with European court fashion, architectural aesthetics, and botanical motifs. She was the first and only designer born and trained in Asia invited by the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode (FHCM) to present ten haute couture collections in Paris from 2015 to 2020. She also earned the title of “Extraordinary Dressmaker of Asia” from the Asian Couture Federation (ACF). In 2016, she appeared on Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.
Jack Ma (Ma Yun马云), cofounder of Alibaba Group
Born in 1964 in Hangzhou, Jack Ma co-founded Alibaba in 1999, an online-commerce company that has since become a multinational conglomerate. After a tumultuous spell studying English at Hangzhou University, he began by teaching the language at Hangzhou University of Electronic Science and Technology. A 1995 trip to the United States revealed the importance of the Internet and the absence of Chinese products’ websites there. He launched chinapages.com, one of China’s earliest internet startups, which turned a profit within three years. From 1999 to 2019, Jack Ma served as executive chairman of Alibaba, remaining one of China’s most influential tech holdings for two decades. The charismatic leader “disappeared” for several months in 2020 after making critical remarks about the Chinese government. He has since returned to the fold and remains unwavering in his support for the Communist Party’s policies.
Simone Pieranni
Cai Qi (蔡奇), Premier Secretary of the General Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party
Today perhaps the most powerful politician after Xi Jinping, Cai Qi is among Xi’s closest aides, rooted in the Fujian faction that dominates much of the Party’s contemporary leadership. When Xi rose to power, he pushed aside many Young Communist League members from the previous leadership—those tied to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, who belonged to this faction. Cai Qi holds two particularly influential roles: he is secretary of the CPC Central Committee and a standing member of the Politburo, making him one of China’s seven most powerful individuals. He is also Xi Jinping’s personal secretary, which does not imply he manages Xi’s schedule, but does indicate he exercises strict control over the ideology behind Xi’s positions. He effectively organizes the ideological work for the most important Politburo sessions, from plenaries to Beidaihe meetings, in some ways serving as the party’s summer summit.
Yin Li (尹力), Beijing Party Secretary
Born in 1962, he is currently the CCP secretary in Beijing, a typical stepping-stone to joining the seven-member core. The 2027 party congress will determine the new leadership—though with Xi Jinping, it is less a “new generation” and more a continuity. Yin Li attended medical training and later moved into political work; he was sent in 2003 to manage the SARS outbreak—an early demonstration of his capability—and during the Covid era he was deployed to Sichuan, a province of 82 million people, where he proved adept at navigating a technocratic leadership within the party. A physician and party secretary, he could be among China’s seven or nine most powerful figures.
Wang Qishan (王岐山), politician
Since I’ve mentioned someone rising, I’ll mention another waning: Wang Qishan, who led the anti-corruption campaign with which Xi Jinping began his term. In March 2013, Xi became president and launched a fierce anti-corruption drive under which hundreds of thousands of cadres and officials were imprisoned. Wang Qishan appears to be far from resting easy of late—besides purges within the army, purges targeting his secretaries and the technocrats from Zhu Rongji’s era (who died recently at 98) continue. Zhu Rongji is considered Jiang Zemin’s premier and, in the 1990s, the architect of China’s WTO accession. Wang Qishan, by contrast, is the “czar” of China’s anti-corruption drive who now seems somewhat in danger. He is 78, but we have seen that Xi Jinping shows no mercy for the elderly or for those who have walked a long political path with him.
Federico Fubini
Wan Gang (万钢), father of China’s electric-vehicle strategy
Wan Gang has reshaped the world’s economic history. But what matters less is the fact itself than the way he achieved it. Born into a certain generation, he was deeply marked by the Cultural Revolution. As a child, he was sent to a distant northeastern province, where he studied while working as a “soldier-laborer.” He earned a forestry degree and later specialized in mechanical engineering in Shanghai. He then decided to study abroad, pursuing a doctorate in mechanical engineering in Germany. He settled there, earned his PhD, and was hired by Audi, where he worked from 1991 to 2000. In 2000, a mature man with solid credentials wrote a letter to the State Council, saying, “I am this engineer, I work in Germany, and I have much experience in the automotive industry. I tell you we have no hope of catching up with Westerners and Europeans in internal-combustion engines because they are far ahead. We won’t get there. The only way is to skip a technological step and dive into electric vehicles.” To everyone’s surprise, the letter was opened and read; Wan Gang was summoned to Beijing, and the State Council entrusted him with leading this transformation. This was the early 2000s. He would become the State Council’s Minister for Science and Technology without joining the Communist Party. He is the man who sparked China’s electric-vehicle revolution.
Guan Zhi’ou (关志鸥), Secretary of the Hubei Provincial Committee
Guan Zhi’ou serves as the Communist Party secretary for Hubei, a major semiconductor-producing region. Appointed in May, he has overseen the launch of a new weekly column in the province’s official Party newspaper, The Theory Weekly, which offers a critique of Xi Jinping’s economic management. China’s economy has its quirks that particularly interest Europe—for instance, household consumption’s share of GDP remains quite low, around 39%. Even in Italy, a country famed for modest domestic consumption, that figure is about 55%.
Ma Huateng (马化腾), founder of Tencent
Tencent is today a behemoth of Internet services with 1.4 billion users. I recently explored one of their apps that consolidates 24 functions—from payments and wealth management to travel and insurance, including healthcare questions.
Thierry Breton
Ren Zhengfei (任正非), CEO, Huawei
Born in 1944 in Guizhou, Ren Zhengfei is the son of teachers. A civil-engineering graduate, he spent nearly a decade with the People’s Liberation Army’s Corps of Engineers. It was there that he read Clausewitz, a writer he would never abandon. In 1987, armed with roughly €3,000, he founded Huawei in Shenzhen. Today the company employs around 200,000 people worldwide and has become a direct rival to America’s tech giants.
Our story crossed paths unknowingly. In 1998, I was leading Thomson Multimédia in France and RCA in the United States. We were setting up one of the first Western factories in the wave of industrialization that would transform Dongguan, in the Pearl River Delta. Twenty years later, as an European commissioner, I spoke with the CEO of Huawei via video and asked where he called me from. “From a town you probably don’t know, in Guangdong.” I guessed, “Dongguan?” Silence, then: “But how do you know that?” It is there, on the lands where Thomson had set up shop years earlier far from anywhere, that Huawei built its vast research center: twenty-five thousand researchers and twelve villages modeling major European cities. China’s new triumph, in a sense.
Yuja Wang (王羽佳), pianist
Born in Beijing in 1987, she is the daughter of a dancer and a percussionist. She entered the Central Conservatory as a child, then moved to Philadelphia to study at the Curtis Institute, under Gary Graffman, following the path of Lang Lang. In 2007, she stepped in to replace Martha Argerich in Boston, at just twenty years old. Deutsche Grammophon signed her, and she won a Grammy in 2024. Describing her on stage is to capture a boundless virtuosity—breath-taking tempos, a body that lives the music without restraint. She moves through Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and John Adams with equal authority, not seeking to mimic the West: she absorbed what it offered, made it hers, and returns it transfigured.
Pan Jianwei (潘建伟), Executive Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Born in 1970, he trained at China’s University of Science and Technology (often called China’s Caltech) and then in Vienna, where he completed his PhD under Anton Zeilinger, a leading figure in quantum physics (who shared the Nobel Prize in 2022 with Alain Aspect). Returning to China, he committed to turning China into the world’s first quantum power. In 2016, he launched Micius, the first quantum communications satellite ever orbited. In 2017, he organized an eight‑thousand-kilometer quantum-encrypted video conference between Beijing and Vienna. In July, UNESCO awarded him the Mendeleev Prize in Paris.