Tigress Tycoons

The article discusses Chinese businesswomen, focusing on real-estate executive Zhang Xin, talk-show host Yang Lan, online retail business owner Peggy Yu Yu, and restaurant executive Zhang Lan. The author examines the lives of businesswomen and provides information on their views on innovation in Chinese businesses, the Chinese education system, and Western business practices. The article also looks at Chinese parenting, concerns that the country's one-child policy has led to children being spoiled, and gender equality in China. Zhang Xin is a rags-to-riches tale right out of Dickens. She was born in Beijing in 1965. The next year Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and millions, including intellectuals and party dissidents, were purged or forcibly relocated to primitive rural areas. Children were encouraged to turn in their parents and teachers as counterrevolutionaries. Returning to Beijing in 1972, Zhang remembers sleeping on office desks, using books for pillows. At 14 she left for Hong Kong with her mother, and for five years she worked in a factory by day, attending school at night. "I was a miserable kid," she told me. With her chic cropped leather jacket and infectious laughter, the cofounder of the .6 billion Soho China real-estate empire is today an odd combination of measured calculation and warm spontaneity. "My mother drove me in school so hard. That generation didn't know how to express love. "But it wasn't just me. It was all of China. I don't think anybody was happy. If you look at photos from those days, no one is smiling." She mentioned the contemporary artist Zhang Xiaogang, who paints "cold, emotionless" faces. "That's exactly how we all grew up." At 20, desperate to escape, Zhang made her way to England with barely more than a dictionary, a wok, and a cleaver. "The minute I went to England, everything changed," she said. Back home, "it was unthinkable that someone like me could go to university. But in England, who doesn't go to university? It was like, if you don't have money, you can apply for grants." Thus began Zhang's love affair with the West. At the University of Sussex, "I read so much history, philosophy--I loved the opera. I traveled and became immersed in European culture, the Enlightenment." In 1992, a year after graduating from Cambridge with a master's in economics, she was working for Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. But Zhang yearned to return to China. In 1994, while in Beijing, she met Pan Shiyi, a budding real-estate tycoon from even humbler origins, who had already scored big by speculating in one of China's early real-estate bubbles. Sparks flew, and Pan proposed four days later. The next year the two founded the company that would become Soho China. The early days weren't easy. Zhang's unabashedly Western outlook clashed with her husband's more traditional ways, and they fought incessantly. Some of Pan's colleagues referred to her disparagingly as his "foreign wife." At one point they separated, with Zhang returning to England. But the couple persevered, had two sons, and, by combining Pan's shrewd local savvy with Zhang's flair for innovative architectural design, shot to the top of Beijing's real-estate elite. For the last decade they've been Beijing's "it" couple, hosting celebrity parties while erecting some of the city's most iconic new structures. Zhang, one of Forbes's 50 most powerful women in the world, masterminded Soho China's spectacular Commune by the Great Wall, which won her a prize at the 2002 Venice Biennale. Nestled at the foot of the Great Wall, the commune featured a collection of private villas designed by 12 of the most prominent architects in Asia. Zhang sees a lack of innovation as a persistent problem for China. "Going forward, we need people who can invent. The reason China doesn't have a Steve Jobs is because of the education system, which needs reform, along with health care and the political system. China does not train enough people to think." In fact, Zhang identifies with Jobs. "I was just like him, a perfectionist." To every design an employee sent her, "I'd say, 'No good, no good!' I'd get angry, because when your standards are that high and others are not reaching them, you get frustrated." But Zhang and Pan increasingly felt a spiritual void despite their success, and in 2005 the couple converted to the Bahai faith. The experience, she says, transformed her. "Not that my drive or standards are different, but I now understand that you need everybody to grow and to be empowered." It doesn't hurt that Zhang and Pan, who always appear to be one step ahead of their competition, have publicly embraced a new system of values at a time when class tensions are on the rise and China's "moral vacuum" has become a ubiquitous theme. As a mother, Zhang remains more Chinese than Western. When her sons, now 11 and 13, get home from school, she makes them practice Chinese characters every day for two hours, rebuffing their pleas to go to friends' houses or play soccer.