From Factory Floor to 127 Billion Yuan: China's New Richest Woman Is the 'Glass Queen' Zhou Qunfei

The 2026 Hurun Rich List, released on Monday, returned ByteDance's Zhang Yiming to the top with 670 billion yuan — we covered the list's AI-heavy shape this morning — but its other record-setting line belongs to a manufacturer. Zhou Qunfei, founder of the glass supplier Lens Technology, is China's new richest woman, with a personal fortune the research institute puts at 127 billion yuan; with her husband Zheng Junlong, the couple ranks 33rd overall on 128 billion.

The list itself is a portrait of where Chinese wealth is moving. Bottled-water magnate Zhong Shanshan fell 120 billion yuan over the year to 410 billion, dropping to second; DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng entered the ranking for the first time, at 280 billion, straight into the top ten. Of the 1,529 entrepreneurs on the list — a record, up 95 from last year — The Paper notes that more than 160 owe their wealth to the AI sector and close to 80 to robotics.

Zhou's fortune cuts against that software-flavored grain. She was born to a poor family, lost her mother young and had a father who went blind; at 15 she left school and went south to Shenzhen, where she took a job on a watch-glass production line. She spent her evenings after shifts at night school, learning techniques and management until she had mastered the entire glass-working process, then opened her own small workshop. When mobile phones began replacing wristwatches, she converted her watch-glass craft into protective screens for handsets, won orders from Motorola and then Apple, and built Lens Technology into the supplier whose cover glass sits on products from Apple, Huawei, Samsung and Tesla — the company the Chinese press calls "the glass queen."

She had been here before. In 2018, a Phoenix TV interview profiled her as the world's richest self-made woman, then worth 61.5 billion yuan, and traced the same arc from the production line up. In that interview she recalled quitting a secure factory job — the resignation letter she describes as the start of everything — and staff who worked with her explained why colleagues call her "Fei Ge," using the male suffix for a boss, a habit from the years when she ran factory floors as a young woman.

The biography is doing cultural work this week. On a list crowded with platform founders, the richest woman in China is a factory-floor story: someone who learned a craft by hand, timed a technology transition correctly, and spent three decades supplying the physical glass that every phone screen requires. That is the part of the Chinese economy the rich list usually hides behind app valuations, and readers on Weibo noticed — the top posts about her all retell the dropout-to-billionaire arc step by step.

It also extends a running theme of this year's list: as The Paper's data team put it, one in ten of China's richest people now traces wealth to AI. Zhou made her billions from silicon too — just the kind you can hold.