Hillhouse Capital

Hillhouse Capital founder Zhang Lei holds multiple positions advising the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, including the Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX) Mainland China Advisory Group, the Hong Kong Financial Services Development Council, and the China-United States Exchange Foundation governing board. In October 2022, Zhang met with Shanghai's top Communist Party official Chen Jining. Hillhouse also partnered with the Xishan district government to establish a 5 billion yuan ($783.5 million) government-backed VC fund.

Didi Global, a major Hillhouse Capital portfolio company, was fined $1.2 billion by China's cybersecurity watchdog in July 2022 for violating data security and personal information protection laws. The investigation found Didi engaged in "excessive collection of 8.323 billion pieces of user clipboard and application list information" and "107 million pieces of passenger facial recognition information." Regulators determined Didi's data practices posed "serious risks and hidden dangers to national cybersecurity and data security."

Multiple Hillhouse portfolio companies including JD.com, Tencent, and ByteDance have been implicated in China's brutal "996" work culture (9am-9pm, 6 days a week). JD.com founder Richard Liu publicly stated those who refuse 996 "are not my brothers" and said "slackers" would be "eliminated through various means." In February 2022, a 28-year-old ByteDance employee died suddenly—the third overwork-related death that month in China's tech industry. Tencent faced criticism for employees working 20+ consecutive hours at high intensity.