ZHANG YIN

Will Hutton
Sunday October 15, 2006
The Observer

Last week it was reported that China's richest billionaire is now a woman - 49-year-old Zhang Yin is worth a cool $3.4bn (£1.8bn). It is capitalists such as her who are proof that paradoxically it is communist China that is home to the globe's most vigorous capitalism. And she is a woman.
As the daughter of an officer in the People's Liberation Army, Zhang Yin also understands the corrupt and controlling pathology of Chinese communism well - and has understood the imperative to keep ownership and direction of her company as distant as possible from Beijing. In China the party controls, or has the capacity to control, everything; almost every private businessperson in China is either a party member or applying to join.
Zhang has avoided much of that - courtesy of Hong Kong, a Taiwanese husband and managing to get out of China in the months after Tiananmen Square when repression was at its height and the prospects for any kind of private enterprise seemed nil. Her cleverest moves were her first; incorporating her company in Hong Kong in 1985 and then marrying a Taiwanese with a non Chinese passport.
Scrap paper is one of the few industries the party considers non-strategic and which it indulges - another smart choice for an ambitious woman.
It is true that Ms Zhang could not have made her money if China had not opened to the world. But nobody should believe that somehow her fortune means that China has made the full transition to capitalism. Rather she has exploited the system's fault lines.
Entrepreneurs such as Zhang Yin only succeed if they find ways around the system; they can only push the economy so far.