China’s ‘Fantastic Four’: the new breed of entrepreneurs reshaping the global tech landscape

China’s new generation of tech tsars were born after the country began its ‘reform and opening up’ phase

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Published: 11:00am, 1 Mar 2025Updated: 10:02am, 3 Mar 2025

A new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, represented by a group of start-up founders known as the “Fantastic Four”, are reshaping the global technology landscape and helping China in its rivalry with the US.

Liang Wenfeng, founder of Hangzhou-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek, along with Wang Xingxing, Zhang Yiming and Wang Tao, the founders of Unitree Robotics, ByteDance and DJI, respectively, are being hailed for their role in transforming China into a formidable tech power.

DeepSeek’s Liang and Unitree’s Wang were among a group of local business entrepreneurs invited to a high-profile symposium chaired by President Xi Jinping last month. Wang, the youngest entrepreneur at the meeting at just 35 years old, told Xi that the humanoid robot developer and its team were “born and raised in China”.

Xi responded that the country’s innovation required contributions from a younger generation, according to a report from the official Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily.

Unlike the former generation of Chinese tech entrepreneurs who grew up with memories of absolute poverty – such as Alibaba Group Holding’s Jack Ma, Baidu’s Robin Li Yanhong and Tencent Holdings’ Pony Ma Huateng – China’s new generation of tech tsars were born after the country began its “reform and opening up” phase under Deng Xiaoping, when “class struggle” was abolished and private enterprise was encouraged. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Unitree’s Wang was born in 1990, while Zhang was born in 1983. Liang’s birth year was 1985, and DJI’s Wang was born in 1980. They grew up in a period remembered as the most liberal and open-minded since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, during which traditional social barriers were dismantled and science, engineering and maths education proliferated across the country’s public school system.