Although suffering from a nearly $20 billion decline in net worth, Liang Wengen's family from Sany Group still retains its position as the richest family in China this year, according to the latest rich list of Chinese families published by Money Week, a Guangzhou-based wealth management journal, earlier this month.

Liang Wengen's family was followed by Wu Yajun's family from Longfor Properties and Li Yanhong's family from Baidu who ranked fourth and second on last year's list respectively.

Five of the top 10 and eight out of the top 15 families earned their wealth from the real estate industry, suggesting resurgence from last year's property market downturn. However, the total wealth value of these eight real estate families dropped from last year's 445.7 billion yuan (US$ 69.97 bln) to 202.8 billion yuan (US$31.83 bln) this year.

   Zhang Jindong & family (張近東家族)

 Wealth value: 19.22 billion yuan (US$3.02 bln)

Company: Suning Appliance Co., Ltd. (蘇寧集團)

Share Holdings: 31.67%

Headquarters: Jiangsu

Focus: Home appliances

Founded in 2001, Suning Appliance has emerged as a key player in China's home appliance market during the past 5 years. It operates nearly 700 chain stores in more than 150 cities of 29 provinces and municipalities in China with 92,000 employees. As one of the two founders of Suning, Zhang Jindong was first to set the chain store model for Chinese home appliance chain retailing. Next up for Zhang and Suning is to build up a networked retail platform, which is expected to reach 300 billion yuan in sales revenue by 2020.