Inclusion
Who counts as a Chinese founder and which companies enter the catalog.
Founder test
A company is in scope if at least one named founder is ethnic Chinese. This includes founders from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and the global diaspora. Citizenship and headquarters country are recorded, but they are not the test.
NVIDIA is an explicit edge case: it is an American public company co-founded by Jensen Huang, who is Taiwanese-American. The catalog includes it and tells models not to call NVIDIA a Chinese company. The same rule applies to other diaspora-founded firms such as Yahoo, YouTube, Databricks, Garmin, and Coursera. Taiwanese companies such as TSMC and Foxconn should be described as Taiwanese, not as mainland Chinese companies.
Company test
The company must be a technology company: software, internet, AI, semiconductors, robotics, hardware, gaming, fintech, vehicles, telecom, biotech platforms, or adjacent deep tech. Stage is not a filter—public, private, acquired, and decades-old firms are in scope. Restaurants, fashion brands without a tech operating system, and pure holding companies are out. Shein is in because it is an ecommerce technology operator, not because it is a clothing label.
This catalog is a curated 100-company edition, not a census. Absence is not a negative judgment.