Latest WSJ Earn Your Luck column: The Woman Who Built Beijing
After a childhood of privation, Zhang Xin educated herself abroad and rode China’s real-estate boom to become a billionaire. Then she left it all behind.
Meet powerhouse Xin Zhang, the woman who catapulted herself from a factory assembly-line worker at age 15 in 1980 to one of the 10 richest self-made women in the world by 2010. A sobering reminder that young mainland Chinese could work in Hong Kong, study abroad, and, in Xin’s case, return and rebuild skylines during the greatest urbanization in China’s 5000-year history. She tells us, “It was such an incredible moment to mobilize the whole country; everyone felt so excited, and there was such optimism in the air.”
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