Xu Bo is a well-known and controversial figure in China’s video game industry. He launched the popular MMORPG Fantasy Westward Journey and went on to found the Guangzhou-based Duoyi Network, one of the largest gaming companies in China. But over the years, Xu also became known for a series of misogynistic and overall controversial statements regarding children.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article alleging that the Chinese billionaire had fathered over 100 children through surrogacy agencies in the United States. The shocking figure was confirmed by Duoyi in a statement that read that Xu has “only a little over 100” children, fathered “after many years of effort”.
But 100 children sounds like a conservative number if you believe Xu Bo’s ex-partner, who claims that he has fathered well over 300 offspring during their relationship alone. Xu met Tang Jing on a matchmaking website in 2009, and even though they never formally tied the knot, they lived together for 14 years. The two are now involved in a financial dispute, with Tang claiming that she spent millions supporting he former partner’s children.
“Over the past decade or so, the expenses required to maintain and care for this large family of 300 children have been enormous. The vast majority of the money I received went towards our daily living costs during that time,” Tang Jing told the South China Morning Post.
One could say that a scorned ex-partner would make up all sorts of lies about a successful businessman like Xu, and the media would write anything that sells, but the thing is Xu Bo himself has made all sorts of bizarre remarks about fathering children over the years.
In 2023, he publicly recruited girlfriends on social media with the goal of fathering “at least 50 high-quality sons” (he made it very clear that boys were superior to girls) who could one day take over his empire, and even changed his online username to “Having More Children Solves Everything”.
Xu often boasted that he was a “one-in-a-million elite male” whose 50 sons would become socialite elites, with at least 10 achieving top-tier success.
Interestingly, Xu Bo fathered 11 children with his former partner Tian Jing, and the two are currently fighting for the custody of their two daughters.
No one knows exactly how many children the self-described “China’s First Father” has, or how many he plans to have in the future, but he might have a bit of a tougher time carrying out his plans following the controversy in his home country, where surrogacy is banned.
“Can anyone stop him? Just because he has wealth, does that mean he can raise children like livestock? Children are living beings, not bugs. Is he running some kind of human breeding experiment?” one outraged person commented on Weibo.
