It is no longer glorious to get rich in China - it is dangerous

Why no one wants to be the nation's top tycoon any more.

- Ruchir Sharma

In August, Mr Colin Huang, founder of e-commerce powerhouse PDD, attracted the usual headlines when he rose to become China's richest man.

But shortly after, PDD surprised investors with a downbeat profit forecast. Its stock plummeted. Mr Huang lost US$14 billion (S$18 billion) overnight, and ceded the top spot to Mr Zhong Shanshan, founder of beverage giant Nongfu Spring. Within 24 hours, Nongfu Spring issued its own unexpectedly depressing outlook, and Mr Zhong, too, soon slipped from first place on the rich lists.

On Chinese social media, chatter broke out about whether corporate leaders might be competitively devaluing their own stock prices to avoid the widening crackdown on excessive wealth, which is a centrepiece of leader Xi Jinping's "common prosperity" campaign. It is not implausible to conclude, wrote one Wall Street broker, that "nobody wants to be the richest man in China" at a time when its government is turning more assertively socialist.

Whatever the true motive for these profit warnings, the way they were spun on Chinese social media reflects a real change in the national zeitgeist. When Mr Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader in the late 1970s, he defanged the old Maoist hostility to wealth creation. To get rich would be "glorious" in his increasingly capitalist nation.