While Pinduoduo is hardly a household name in the US, it’s quickly becoming one in China. The premise of the app is simple: Buy an apple for yourself at $2. Ask a friend to buy another one together, and each of you only pay 50 cents.

Pinduoduo: China’s hottest online shopping startup

Huang says the idea is to combine budget shopping with entertainment, sort of like merging Costco with Disneyland. But others have accused the former Googler of letting counterfeits thrive on Pinduoduo. Huang said the platform removed 10 million questionable products in a year.

GONG HONGJIA (HIKVISION)

Gong Hongjia is an investor in China’s biggest maker of surveillance cameras, Hikvision. It’s a major supplier of the Skynet Project, China’s national surveillance system that has seen over 20 million cameras deployed across the country.

“Skynet”, China’s massive video surveillance network

But Hikvision also has many global customers, from Florida’s Universal Studios and Manhattan’s glitzy condominiums -- to supermarkets in Kenya and banks in Turkey.

That’s attracted scrutiny from the Trump administration, which now bans the US government from using Hikvision’s video surveillance equipment -- once found in US prisons and schools.

FRANK WANG (DJI)

From dorm room to global behemoth: It’s the entrepreneurial story of a self-made billionaire. And I’m not talking about Mark Zuckerberg. Now in his late thirties, Frank Wang was still a college student in Hong Kong when he founded DJI.

The dream was to build a consumer drone with serious hardware, one that will set itself apart from the shoddy plastic toy drones that were widely available at the time. Their first mass market hit, the Phantom, was released seven years later to critical acclaim. Today, it’s surpassed rivals like GoPro to become the world’s top seller of personal drones. It has offices in North America, Europe and Asia.

The story of drone pioneer DJI

One recent setback though: The company revealed in January that it uncovered cases of corruption inside the company, which could give it a US$150 million hit.

MICREE ZHAN (BITMAIN)

Mining cryptocurrencies takes a lot of computing power, solving complex math puzzles. And Bitmain is a company that makes chips and machines specifically for this purpose. It also runs several mining farms itself.

WANG XING (MEITUAN DIANPING)

If Amazon is “The Everything Store”, then it looks like Meituan Dianping is striving to be the “every service platform”.

The company merges two ventures: The first, Meituan, was created by serial entrepreneur Wang Xing in 2010. It started as China’s equivalent to Groupon, and later expanded to include a food delivery service. The second venture, Dianping, is a Yelp-like crowdsourced review site. Together, they now sell movie tickets, make restaurant reservations, book travels, and more.

Wang’s projects haven’t always been successful. One of his first, a Facebook copycat in China, has largely fizzled out after he left the company. Another, a Twitter lookalike, failed after a government crackdown on blogging sites.

Meituan Dianping: Settle all your local needs on one app

For more insights into China tech, sign up for our tech newsletters, subscribe to our Inside China Tech podcast, and download the comprehensive 2019 China Internet Report. Also roam China Tech City, an award-winning interactive digital map at our sister site Abacus.