China is the world's billionaire factory. Although these billionaires have amassed huge fortunes at home, one of their favorite trends is sending their children to study at prestigious universities abroad.
For the super-rich, their legacy depends not only on how much wealth they create and how they rank in terms of spending power, but also onthe education and lives of their children and grandchildren.
According to a list published by the Hurun Research Institute, four out of every 10 billionaires in the world are from China. The country recently added 182 new billionaires, bringing the total to 799, according to the Hurun Global Rich List 2020. Meanwhile, only 59 new billionaires were in the US, bringing the total to 626.
Billionaire Ren Zhengfei's daughter Yao Anna, Stanley Ho's son Ho Youjun, and Yu Jingyuan's daughter Yu Loanloan all study at top universities around the world.
China's education, grades, and teaching standards are very strict. This is believed to be one of the reasons why nearly half of China's billionaires do not have a very high level of education.
In fact, China’s billionaires are largely home-schooled. Jack Ma (net worth $38.8 billion) graduated from Hangzhou Normal University and Ma Huateng (net worth $38.1 billion) from Shenzhen University. Another tech giant, Li Wanhong (net worth $6.2 billion), chairman and CEO of Baidu, studied at Peking University.
Meanwhile, Xu Ka-yin (net worth $21.8 billion), chairman of Evergrande Real Estate Group—one of China’s largest real estate developers—is an alumnus of Wuhan University of Science and Technology.
Sending heirs to study abroad is an option for many billionaires, according to China.com, a website of China Radio International (CRI).
Most of the majors that the children of China's super-rich study are mainly related to business management, economics, finance and other economic-related majors because after all, these rich people still need someone to inherit the family's future career, according to Sohu.
Yao Anna, daughter of Huawei technology group founder Ren Zhengfei (net worth $1.1 billion), studied ballet professionally since childhood.
“I never considered myself a princess. Like most people my age, I had to work very hard to get into a good school,” said Yao Anna, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in computer science. “I also felt lost after college, but I kept trying different things before finding what I was passionate about,” according to The South China Morning Post.
The sons of two tycoons, Zhong Tiantian, head of beverage company Nongfu Spring, and Li Ruijie, chairman of Shenzhen Zhongqingbao Interaction Network, both studied at the University of California, Irvine in the United States, majoring in English and business economics. Also studying at the University of California is Jack Ma's son.
Wang Sicong is the son of Wang Jielun (net worth $14.1 billion), founder of Salian Wanda Group, China’s largest real estate developer. Sicong was educated abroad, first in Singapore and then at Winchester College in England, where annual tuition is $51,400.
Singer Faye Wong (net worth $150 million) has a daughter, Yuan Le, who studies at Albin Beausoleil College, a prestigious Swiss university, with monthly tuition fees of around $12,000.
Yu Loan Loan is the only daughter of Yu Jing Yuan, president of the Manhtian Wood Manufacturing Group. This "princess" is extremely pampered by her family and has been studying at an aristocratic boarding school in England since the age of 15.
She excelled in Mathematics and won a gold medal in the British National Advanced Mathematics Competition. After graduating from the London College of Fashion, she attended Oxford University, Cambridge University and Columbia University.
The son of Macau’s “gambling king” Stanley Ho, is Ho Yu-kwan, who has won the Hong Kong Mathematics Championship twice. Yu-kwan studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and completed a four-year course in just three years. He is also the youngest student in the history of MIT’s Master of Finance program.
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