How to Scrape and Visualize the 2021 China Hurun Rich List with Python

2021 China Hurun Rich List

The Hurun Institute released its 23rd annual China Rich List in 2021, maintaining a 20‑billion‑yuan entry threshold for the ninth consecutive year.

Data Collection

Data source: https://www.hurun.net/zh-CN/Rank/HsRankDetails?pagetype=rich. Open the page, press F12 and Ctrl+R to view network requests. The request URL contains offset (page number) and limit (max items per request). Setting limit=2000 retrieves all entries in a single call.

import requests
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.54 Safari/537.36'}
params = {'num': 'YUBAO34E', 'offset': 0, 'limit': 2000}
url = 'https://www.hurun.net/zh-CN/Rank/HsRankDetailsList'
page_text = requests.get(url=url, headers=headers, params=params).json()
page_text

The JSON response contains many fields; we extract the ones needed for analysis.

df['birth_place_split'] = df['birth_place'].str.split('-')
df['birth_place_split'] = df['birth_place_split'].apply(lambda x: '' if len(x) == 1 else x[1])
df['photo_split'] = df['photo'].apply(lambda x: x.split('/')[-1])
df.head()

After cleaning, the dataset is saved locally for further processing.

Visualization

Visualization tool: Tableau 2021.3.

Top 10 Richest

The top‑10 list includes several familiar names, with industries such as beverages and healthcare appearing prominently.

Age Distribution

About 74% of the listed individuals are aged 45‑70, with the most common age being 58 (125 people).

Birthplace Distribution

The top three birthplaces are Zhejiang, Guangzhou, and Jiangsu.

Hot Industries

Dominant sectors include real estate, investment, pharmaceuticals, food, and chemicals.

Combined Dashboard

An integrated dashboard with linked visualizations provides a comprehensive overview of the dataset.