Zhang Yin, 49, the first woman ever to top the China Rich List, is worth an estimated US$3.4 billion.

It is a figure that makes the founder of Nine Dragons Paper (Holdings) Ltd, which she set up in 1985, the wealthiest self-made woman in the world ahead of both US media star Oprah Winfrey and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Ms Cheung yan [hurun.net]

"Women are becoming more and more visible in China's businesses," said Rupert Hoogewerf, the British publisher of Hurun Report, who compiled the list.

"There's definitely a feeling that women can be more hard-nosed in business than some of their male counterparts."

Expanded this year to 500 names from 400 last year, it now takes a fortune of more than US$100 million to even make it onto the list.

The number of US dollar billionaires has more than doubled to 15 from seven last year.

Aside from Zhang, more familiar success stories on the list included last year's number one, founder of the GOME chain of electrical goods stores, Huang Guangyu, who ranked second with an estimated US$2.5 billion.

Zhang's meteoric rise over the past year, which saw her climb from 36th spot in 2005, is even more impressive considering Huang has not exactly been standing still either - he raised US$520 million through restructuring his assets and on average his worth has risen by about US$2 million every day for the past year.

"The rich in China are getting richer, and fast," added Hoogewerf. "Things have come a long way from our inaugural list eight years ago when we only ranked 50 individuals with a cut off of US$6 million."

He compares China's current economic landscape to periods in developed countries when economies were exploited by "smart, ruthless and fast-moving" entrepreneurs.

While largely accepting market forces, the Chinese Government is keen to combat the destabilizing threat brought by a growing imbalance between rich and poor and the potentially damaging perception that entrepreneurs could be running amok.

One example of this was the recent arrest of Zhang Rongkun, last year ranked as China's 48th richest person, for his suspected involvement in a Shanghai pension fund scandal after it emerged that US$400 million had been loaned from the fund to his company, Fuxi investments.

Chen Li, a graduate student at Peking University, took a philosophical view of the conflict between the need for ambitious entrepreneurs to lead the business world, and the aim of harmonious development for all.

"Hard work and connections are two important parts of becoming rich and every country has its own problem defining at what point using connections becomes corruption," he said.

"As long as people use their connections responsibly then there is no problem. Admittedly there are some supervision shortcomings and crimes are being committed that we don't know about yet we have to keep vigilant and improve the system to make sure this is kept to a minimum."

Joy Shi, editor with an English education magazine in Shanghai, was more cynical.

"Because the system is not transparent, nobody really knows how much money any of these super-rich business people have it's all down to how much money they want people to think they have.

"If someone wanted to keep a low profile and avoid being on the list, they won't appear."

(China Daily 10/12/2006 page1)

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