The number of Chinese (including Hong Kong) companies on this year's Fortune 500 reached 124, surpassing the US's 121 for the first time in history.
There are 133 companies in China on the list if you Taiwanese companies are counted.
China also has more Internet companies on the list than the United States. Four Chinese companies - Tencent, Alibaba, JD.com, and Xiaomi - are on the list, compared to just three in the US - Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
Huawei, which has faced various challenges in the past year, has maintained its upward momentum, rising from 61st place last year to 49th this year.
This is the 26th year in a row that Fortune magazine has published this list of the world's largest companies.
This year's Fortune Global 500 companies posted record revenues of $33 trillion, close to the combined GDP of China and the United States.
The minimum sales revenue for companies that made the list increased from $24.8 billion to $25.4 billion.
After the 2008 financial crisis, these large companies hit a low point in their operations. The biggest subsequent shift occurred in 2018, when year-over-year revenue and profit growth approached 9 percent and 15 percent, respectively.
On top of that, Fortune 500 revenues continued to grow 2% year-over-year in 2019. However, last year, the combined earnings of these companies were $2 trillion, down more than 4% year-over-year.
Third place went to Japan with 53. It was followed by France, Germany and the UK with 31, 27 and 21 respectively.
In 1997, only four companies from mainland China made the list.
In 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, 12 Chinese companies entered the ranking, and the number has increased rapidly over the years.
Since 2008, the number of Chinese companies in the ranking has accelerated. First, they overtook Germany, France, and the UK, and later Japan.
In this year's ranking, Chinese companies overtook the United States to take the top spot in terms of the number of companies on the list.
Fortune said no other country or region has seen such rapid growth in the number of companies on its list of the world's top 500 companies since it was published in 1995.
The largest number of Chinese companies on the list are in Beijing, with 55, followed by Guangdong, and Shanghai, with 14 and nine, respectively. Hong Kong has seven.
