At nine she was homeless; as a teenager, she worked in sweatshops. So how did Zhang Xin become one of China’s richest women, asks Leo Lewis.
Inside the penthouse premises of the exclusive Beijing American Club, China’s most powerful woman aims a quiet smile at a circle of armchairs; she targets each occupant with a flash of eye contact and brings the exquisitely elite gathering to attention. Silence falls.
Property developer Zhang Xin, queen of the Beijing skyline, is the chief executive of Soho China, one of the country’s most influential property companies. She is immaculately but not ostentatiously dressed in a scarlet blouse, chairing a discussion that touches delicately on the future of China, of the Communist Party and of China’s engagement with the outside world. Sharing her sofa, and the main speaker for the evening, is Peter Mandelson; his book The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, newly translated into Chinese, is already popular within the higher echelons of Party leadership. Around them sits a unique assembly of Chinese business leaders, diplomats, journalists and high financiers. It is an evening that reflects Zhang’s status as one of the world’s greatest female success stories.
Over the past decade, Zhang, 48, has become a role model for women, for the ambitious poor and for ordinary Chinese in general. The 6.7 million people who follow her on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) are doing so for a reason: the Chinese Government may try to co-opt the concept of a “Chinese Dream” for political ends, but Zhang is its living embodiment – a woman who has risen from her beginnings as a teenage sweatshop worker to become one of the wealthiest women on the planet, overseeing an empire worth $3.6 billion (£2.2 billion).
Zhang’s parents were educated Chinese Burmese who moved back to China in the Fifties when Chairman Mao’s dream still appeared unsullied. But during the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution, their university degrees counted against them: a young Zhang and her mother were separated from her father and brother and forced – as part of the country’s “re-education” programme – to swap their urban lifestyle for the grinding poverty of the Chinese countryside.
When she was 9, Zhang was able to return to Beijing with her mother, but the city offered scant relief from debilitating poverty. The two were briefly homeless, obliged to sleep on the desks of the small office where Zhang’s mother worked translating the grandstanding speeches of Communist leaders. Life did not improve much. A few years later, with China’s great economic boom still years away, the pair escaped to Hong Kong. Aged 14, Zhang toiled in the territory’s cramped, punishing garment factories. Driven by the need for hard cash, she would switch employers for the sake of a single dollar’s increase in pay.
“The motivation for working in the factories was to get out of the factories,” she says. The girls alongside her appeared content with their lives. She could never contemplate that. Convinced even then that education had the power to change everything, Zhang would scurry from each 12-hour shift straight to evening classes. She dreamt all the time, she says, simply of keeping pace with the education that “normal” teenage schoolgirls would be receiving back in China.
Slowly, her savings grew to the point where she could afford a plane ticket from Hong Kong to London. Armed with nothing but a raw immigrant’s ambition, she arrived in the UK and began another lowest-rung scrabble for cash. This time, there were English classes at the end of each work day. The strategy paid off: using grants and scholarships, she secured a place at the University of Sussex. Afterwards, she completed a master’s degree in development economics at Cambridge.
Earlier this year, Zhang returned to Sussex as an honorary Doctor of Laws and delivered a speech to graduating students. “It is the place that cultivated me, inspired me and encouraged me to follow my deepest instincts and to become the person that I am today,” she told them. “For this I am truly grateful.”
“If I look back at my life and ask myself what was the most important transformational element, I would say education,” she says. “The point it all changed was when I decided to go to England to become a student.
“When I first got there, I thought there has to be a model answer for these essays we write every week, because that is how the Chinese write. I would submit the essay and my tutor would call us in, and he wasn’t interested at all in whether this answer was right or wrong. Only later, I understood this is a way of cultivating your intellectual curiosity… That is still largely missing in Chinese education.”
via Zhang Xin: the billionaire queen of China’s new skyline | The Times.
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