China's biggest billionaire is a woman

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1922819,00.html
Thanks to Mao, Zhang Yin's a billionaire
The revolutionary leader transformed women's 
lives, but China still has a long way to go

Will Hutton
Sunday October 15, 2006
The Observer

It was one of China's proverbs that Mao loved to 
quote; women, he would say, hold up half the sky. 
But until the communist revolution of 1949 the 
Chinese had not meant it. The Chinese imperial 
system, famously, had been one of the most 
anti-feminist societies on Earth. Women had no 
rights, existing only to have babies and please 
men, the richer forced to hobble and disfigure 
themselves by binding their feet from birth to 
affirm their essential purpose - decorative daintiness.

But 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). The 
tycoon is the world's richest self-made woman, 
having built China's largest paper recycling 
business, Nine Dragons Paper, which was floated 
on the Hong Kong stock market just six months 
ago. She seems an eloquent symbol of the new 
China; a capitalist whose success and wealth was 
unthinkable before Deng Xiaoping freed China from 
the embrace of Maoism in 1978. 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.

In China, though, beware. Nothing is quite what 
it seems. Zhang Yin owes her success both to 
pro-market Deng Xiaoping and ardent communist 
Mao. As the eldest daughter of a family with 
eight children, her expectation before the 
communist revolution would have been to grow up 
illiterate before becoming her husband's chattel. 
Mao's radical egalitarianism may have given China 
the murderous mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. 
But he also transformed the role, expectations and education of women.

In 1949 female illiteracy in rural China was 99 
per cent. In 1976 when Mao died it was 45 per 
cent and today it is 13 per cent. One of Mao's 
first acts was to give women the same rights in 
divorce as men, and for all his other barbarism 
he consistently championed the equality of women.

China is still a sexist society, but compared 
with the rest of Asia it is light years ahead. 
Female illiteracy in rural India, for example, is 
still 55 per cent. The change has gone deep into 
the marrow of Chinese society. One survey 
recently revealed that Chinese girls between 16 
and 19 name becoming president, chief executive 
or senior manager of a company as their top 
career choices; Japanese girls between 16 and 19 
say they want to become housewives, flight 
attendants or child-care workers. One of China's 
most formidable economic and social resources has become its women.

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; the number of companies 
forced into decline or even bankruptcy because 
they were compelled to support party aims - 
bailing out an endemically loss-making company to 
protect jobs or buying a state-owned company at 
an astronomic price to feather the nest of a 
senior official - is beyond counting. Indigenous 
Chinese capitalism is a form of hit-and-run 
guerrilla economic warfare in a constant battle 
with the world's greediest and most corrupt 
officialdom. Survival depends upon paying 
tribute. It is no accident that two thirds of 
China's six million private businesses are owned 
and run by ex-communist officials. 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. In exile in Los Angeles in 1990 the 
pair founded America Chung Nam - a company 
specialising in scrap paper brokerage as she had been doing in Hong Kong.

Scrap paper is one of the few industries the 
party considers non-strategic and which it 
indulges - another smart choice for an ambitious 
woman. In December 1991 the Soviet Union 
collapsed, and in January 1992 the ageing Deng 
Xiaoping declared in a tour of Guangdong, China's 
most pro-capitalist province, that as 
international communism was dead the only way for 
Chinese communism to survive was to embrace 
pro-market reform. In particular it should 
welcome inward investment from foreign companies 
with know-how and technology. It was glorious, he said, to be rich.

There was an avalanche of inward investment, 
including America Chung Nam building a paper and 
board mill in the very same Guangdong- a foreign 
investor even if owned by a Chinese living 
abroad. After all, China's booming exports would 
need to be wrapped in paper and paperboard. 
Guangdong's exports have grown phenomenally; so have sales of paper and board.

And six months ago Zhang Yin and her husband 
cashed in - floating their shares not in one of 
China's stock markets on the mainland, but in 
Hong Kong. Here a private company can keep its 
distance from the party; if there is a dispute 
with the communists it gets settled in Hong 
Kong's still independent legal system - legacy of 
the British - and not in one of the mainland's rigged courts.

The extent of China's reform, and its subsequent 
growth, is stunning. It is also 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. This remains a one-party state, in which 
every institution - from the media to its 
companies - is constructed to sustain its monopoly of power.

Entrepreneurs such as Zhang Yin only succeed if 
they find ways around the system; they can only 
push the economy so far. One day the party will 
have to let go properly. The issues are only how and when.

· Will Hutton's book on China and the West, The 
Writing on The Wall, will be published in January