There is an acronym for it

I learned a new term the other day, while writing about China's burgeoning luxury sector for a business consultancy: HNWI.

That's High Net Worth Individual - defined as having investable assets of US$1 million or more. There's also an Ultra-HNWI classification, with assets in excess of 30 million dollars. China is reckoned to have around 10,000 of the latter. And they're migrating into the Renminbi billionaire echelon (assets over US$160 million - nearly 2,000 of them now!) at the rate of several hundreds per year.

I've always preferred to think of them as China's Unscrupulous Nouveau-riche Tycoons.