China People

Wang Xingxing (born 1990) is the founder and chief executive of Unitree, the robotics company behind the AlienGo and Go1 quadruped robots and the H1 humanoid robot.

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is a computer scientist born in Shanghai who won the 2000 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, and later founded Tsinghua University's Yao Class and IIIS.

Taiwan-born computer scientist and executive who built research labs at Microsoft and Google in China, co-founded Sinovation Ventures, wrote widely read books on AI, and founded the foundation-model company 01.AI.

Robin Li (李彦宏) is a Chinese technologist and businessman who co-founded Baidu in 2000 and has been its chief executive since 2004. He is best known for the company's search business and its ERNIE AI models.

Zhou Zhihua is a Chinese computer scientist at Nanjing University who works on ensemble learning, weakly supervised learning and multi-label learning. He founded the LAMDA institute there, serves as a university vice president, and was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2025.

Chinese technology entrepreneur who co-founded ByteDance in 2012 and led it as CEO until November 2021, when he handed the role to co-founder Liang Rubo and remained founder and chairman.

Liang Wenfeng is a Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and founded the AI company DeepSeek in 2023. He is the corresponding author of the DeepSeek-R1 paper published in Nature in 2025.

Harry Shum is a computer scientist who spent most of his career at Microsoft, helping found Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing and later leading the company's AI and Research group. He is an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow recognised for computer vision and graphics.

Joseph Tsai is co-founder and chairman of Alibaba Group. A lawyer by training, he has served on the company's board since its founding in 1999 and has previously held the roles of chief financial officer and head of strategic investments.

Pony Ma is a co-founder of Tencent and serves as its chairman of the board and chief executive officer. He studied computer science at Shenzhen University and has spent his career in telecommunications and the internet industry.

Kaiming He is a computer-vision and deep-learning researcher, first author of the 2015 ResNet paper that introduced residual connections, now a tenured associate professor at MIT.

Wang Jian is the founder of Alibaba Cloud and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was previously a Zhejiang University psychology professor and Microsoft Research Asia executive, and directs Zhijiang Laboratory.

Chinese engineer and technology communicator who worked on AI chips and algorithms at Huawei and co-founded the robotics company AgiBot, where he is president and chief technology officer.

Eddie Wu is a co-founder of Alibaba Group who has been its chief executive officer and a director since September 2023, after more than two decades in technical and business roles across Alipay, Alimama and Taobao.

Zhang Bo (born 1935) is a scholar in automatic control and artificial intelligence. He studied and taught at Tsinghua University and helped found the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems.

Tang Xiaoou (1968–2023) was a Chinese computer vision researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and co-founder and chairman of SenseTime, one of China's best-known AI companies.

Liu Qingfeng is the president and chairman of iFlytek, the company he founded in 1999 while a Ph.D. student at USTC. He unveiled the Spark large model in May 2023.

Chinese computer scientist and entrepreneur who built Sogou Search and the Sogou input method, led Sogou as CEO through its New York listing, and later founded the AI company Baichuan.

Su Hua is a Chinese technology entrepreneur who co-founded Kuaishou in 2011 and later stepped down as CEO, remaining involved in board leadership during the transition.

Cheng Yixiao is a Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded Kuaishou, served as its chief product officer, and has been its chief executive officer since 2021 and chairman since 2023.

Zhang Yaqin is an electrical engineer and technology executive who spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, served as president of Baidu from 2014 to 2019, and joined Tsinghua University in 2019 as a chair professor of intelligent science.

Jingren Zhou is a computer scientist at Alibaba, where he is chief technology officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, leads the Tongyi AI lab and joined the Alibaba Partnership in 2025; he was named a 2024 ACM Fellow.

Yan Junjie is a co-founder and chief executive officer of the Chinese AI company MiniMax, which he led to a Hong Kong listing on 9 January 2026; he was previously an executive at SenseTime.

Zhu Songchun is a computer vision researcher who worked at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2002 and was named in 2020 to lead Peking University's Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

Wu Yonghui is an AI researcher who spent nearly two decades at Google, worked on Google Brain and became a vice president of research at Google DeepMind, before joining ByteDance's Seed large-model team in 2025.

Xu Li is a co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of SenseTime, the Chinese artificial intelligence company he helped start in 2014. He studied computer science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Tang Jie is a Chinese computer scientist listed as a founder of Zhipu AI and its chief scientist, and a Tsinghua professor who created the AMiner academic database and co-authored the GLM pretraining work behind Zhipu's models.

Jiang Daxin is founder and CEO of the Chinese AI company StepFun and a former Microsoft global vice president. He argues that scaling laws set the ceiling on model intelligence and that unifying multimodal understanding and generation is the path to AGI.

Chinese AI researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded Moonshot AI in Beijing in 2023 and runs it as CEO; the company released the Kimi assistant and the open-weight Kimi K2 and K3 models.

Senior executive at Tencent: Senior Executive Vice President and head of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group since October 2018, previously president of the Social Network Group responsible for QQ, and chairman of Tencent Music Entertainment Group.

Cao Xudong, a former Microsoft researcher, founded Momenta, a physical AI company, in 2016 and leads it as chief executive; he took it public in Hong Kong in 2026 and now points it toward robots.

Yu Kai is chief executive and a co-founder of Horizon Robotics, the Chinese smart-driving supplier that listed in Hong Kong on 24 October 2024 under the code 9660.HK.

AI researcher and research administrator who worked at IBM's Watson Group and at JD.com, and has been director and chief scientist of the Shanghai AI Laboratory since April 2024.

Zhiyuan Liu is a tenured associate professor at Tsinghua University and co-founder and chief scientist of Beijing ModelBest, a company working to run capable large models on local devices.

Wang Haifeng is Baidu's chief technology officer, an ACL and IEEE Fellow, and the first-listed author of the ERNIE technical reports behind the company's foundation models.

Yin Qi is a Chinese AI entrepreneur who co-founded the facial-recognition company Megvii with Tang Wenbin and Yang Mu after graduating from Tsinghua, and later became chairman of Qianli Technology, turning to smart automotive technology.

Xiaodong He is a JD.com vice president, deputy managing director of JD AI Research, and an IEEE Fellow. He works on conversational AI, including question answering, emotion detection, and public-service hotlines.

Sun Jian was a computer-vision scientist who spent 13 years at Microsoft, co-created ResNet, and later became chief scientist at Megvii. He died aged 45 after a sudden illness in June 2022.

Zhang Peng is chief executive officer of Zhipu AI (Z.ai). He led the company through its Hong Kong listing on 8 January 2026, described as the first by a major Chinese LLM company, and through the GLM-4.5 to GLM-5.3 model releases.