Internet now the wealth creator

The changing nature of how China's wealthiest people are making their money, as shown by the Hurun Rich List released on Thursday, offers a chance to understand the changing driver of the country's economic growth over the past few years.

According to Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Research Institute, 68 of China's 100 richest people were born after 1980 and most of them are internet entrepreneurs.

Since the report was first published in 1999, property tycoons have dominated the list until now. With the red-hot development of real estate over the following decade, all the top 10 richest people in China listed by the Hurun report were real estate developers. The golden decade the housing market experienced in China justified this, but such kind of wealth concentration in the real estate sector also exposed some intrinsic problems in China's economic structure.