Forbes recently released its 2021 list of the world’s richest people, showing that Beijing has surpassed New York for the first time as the city with the most billionaires in the world. (NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)
In early April, Forbes published its list of the world’s richest people in 2021, and for the first time, Beijing surpassed New York to become the city with the most billionaires in the world. Beijing has 100 billionaires, surpassing New York, which has 99.
The list shows that most of Beijing’s billionaires are in the technology, e-commerce, manufacturing, education, bio-manufacturing, pharmaceutical and real estate industries.
The richest person in Beijing is Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of ByteDance Technologies Ltd. with a fortune of $35.6 billion. The video-sharing social platform Jitterbug and TikTok, the overseas version of Jitterbug, are both products of the company.
The richest newcomer to the list of Beijing’s newest billionaires is 34-year-old Wang Ning and his family. Wang Ning’s Pop Mart, which made its fortune selling Blind Box toys, went public in Hong Kong last December.
Zhang Yiming, the founder and CEO of Byte Jump Technology, is one of Beijing’s richest men and an alleged Communist Party “mouthpiece,” and Byte Jump has close ties to Beijing authorities. (GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
U.S. Department of Justice: Zhang Yiming is a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party
On September 25 of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed legal documents in court proving that ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming is a “mouthpiece” for the Chinese Communist Party and that the technology company has close ties to the Beijing authorities, endangering the safety of Americans.
In the filing with the court, Justice Department lawyers said Zhang made public statements indicating that he was “committed to promoting” the Communist Party’s agenda.
Trump administration officials have said that although Zhang Yiming is not a member of the Communist Party, he publicly apologized to the Communist Party in April 2018 for a ByteDance app, saying “the product went the wrong way and showed content that was inconsistent with core socialist values.”
The Trump administration also submitted another document on Sept. 25 last year. The U.S. Department of Commerce detailed its concerns about TikTok in the intelligence and security assessment document. The document said there is substantial evidence that ByteTok has close ties to Beijing authorities and that its Beijing office employs 130 members of the Communist Party of China.
U.S. Justice Department officials said ByteTok obeyed Communist Party laws that may have required the company to assist and monitor intelligence activities under the direction of the Communist Party.
On Aug. 6 last year, then-President Donald Trump signed two executive orders barring any U.S. company or individual from doing business with TikTok parent company ByteTok and WeChat parent company Tencent after 45 days (after Sept. 20).
In the executive orders, Trump said TikTok obtains large amounts of information from users, including location data, browsing and search history and other information about Internet and other online activities.
“These data collections could give the Chinese Communist Party access to personal and proprietary information about the United States – potentially allowing China (CCP) to track the location of federal employees and contractors, build profiles of personal information for blackmail, and conduct commercial espionage.”
The executive order also mentions that TikTok censors content deemed politically sensitive by the CCP and could also be used to spread disinformation campaigns in favor of the Communist Party.
The Washington Post reported last Sept. 15 that a search for “#hongkong” on TikTok turned up funny selfies, food photos, sing-alongs, etc., and it was hard to see content about the Hong Kong protests. The “#TiananmenSquare” hashtag about the Tiananmen Square massacre shows about 20 videos on TikTok, most of them joking that the bloody event never happened.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported in 2019 how TikTok censored the films that upset Beijing. The article said TikTok has detailed vetting guidelines that require moderators to censor films that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or Falun Gong.
The guidelines divide banned content into two categories: posts promoting Falun Gong are marked as “serious violations,” while posts on Tibetan independence, Taiwan-China relations, and Tiananmen Square are marked as “for your own viewing only,” meaning that you can only view them for yourself, but are restricted from The postings on Tibetan independence, Taiwan-China relations and Tiananmen Square were marked as “for your eyes only,” meaning that you could only watch them yourself, but were restricted from forwarding them.
As previously reported by the Epoch Times, Jitterbug falsely accused the U.S. military of dropping a biochemical virus, smearing the U.S. and overseas countries for fighting the epidemic, and provoking relations between overseas Chinese and other ethnic groups; TikTok denied the June 4 massacre and blocked anti-communist messages. Jieyin and TikTok have become heavy weapons in the Communist Party’s information war against the United States.
Zhou Hongyi, chairman and CEO of Qihoo 360 Technologies, is ranked 727th on the Forbes Rich List. 2012, Qihoo 360 joined the Communist Party’s GFW Great Firewall program, and several of its products are suspected of violating user privacy and posing serious security risks. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Two Tech Giants Play Major Role in Communist Party’s Surveillance of Chinese
At No. 727 on Forbes’ list of Beijing’s richest people is Zhou Hongyi, chairman and CEO of Qihoo 360 Technologies, with a fortune of $4 billion, and Qi Xiangdong, chairman of cybersecurity firm Qi Anxin, at No. 925, with a fortune of $3.3 billion.
Notably, both companies have played a major role in helping the Chinese Communist Party set up firewalls and use AI technology to monitor the Chinese.
Qi Xiangdong is the former president of Qihoo360, formerly known as Qihoo 360 Enterprise Security Group.
Qihoo360, whose full name is Beijing Qihoo Technology Co., Ltd, was founded by Zhou Hongyi in September 2005 as an Internet company specializing in cyber security-related businesses.
In 2012, Qihoo360 joined the Communist Party’s GFW Great Firewall program. As early as 2005, Qihoo 360 sent two executives, Qi Xiangdong and Shi Xiaohong, to join the research on search engine security management system.
The GFW program is a hardware and software system used by the Chinese Communist authorities to monitor and filter Internet content, consisting of servers and routers, plus related applications. Its role is mainly to monitor communications on the Internet and to interfere, block, and shield transmissions that are deemed to be inconsistent with the official requirements of the CCP.
A number of Qihoo 360 products are suspected of violating users’ privacy and posing serious security risks.
In an article published in February 2013 by the mainland media Daily Economic News, it was said that 360 started with “360 Security Guard” and “360 Safe Browser”, which carried the company’s cancerous genes when they were first introduced: to Violation of the “principle of least privilege (POLP, Principle of Least Privilege)” as the cornerstone and built.
The “Principle of Least Privilege” is the most basic guideline of the Internet world, and Qihoo 360 is the “cancer of the Internet”. A programmer said that Qihoo 360 “in the name of security, in the user’s knowledge or unawareness, directly on behalf of the Internet users to exercise their rights.
The article said that the 360 product has a black box inside, and it is like a “worker bee to steal personal privacy information”, and is suspected of carrying out covert operations on users’ personal information. The “360 Safe Browser” also conceals a “back door”. The programmer said that this “back door” is “a serious potential threat to the security of the user’s system and information security”.
In May last year, Qihoo 360 was included in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s export control blacklist.
Qi Xiangdong is the chairman of Qi Anxin Group, one of the largest cybersecurity companies in mainland China, which was founded in 2014.
Qi’s official website says the company “has developed into a leading domestic cybersecurity provider based on big data, artificial intelligence and security operation technology. The mainland’s official media also claims that QIANXIN’s clients have covered most central government departments, enterprises directly under the central government and banks.
On July 22 last year, QIANXIN was listed on the science and technology version of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. According to the prospectus, Qi’anxin’s fundraising is intended to focus on six major projects, including the construction of a cloud and big data security protection and management operation center and an industrial Internet security service center, the mainland media reported.
From the early days of the “Great Firewall” to monitor and censor the Chinese public, the CCP has developed high-tech surveillance systems such as face recognition, gait recognition, emotion recognition, and voice recognition, upgrading its surveillance methods on the public step by step. With the development of Internet technology, Beijing is also collecting big data globally and expanding the scope of surveillance overseas.
Recently, internal Communist Party documents revealed that Communist Party leader Xi Jinping personally instructed the Internet Information Office to focus on controlling the global Internet in order to replace U.S. influence.
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