Wu Yajun
A former state factory worker who became China's richest self-made woman in property
Wu Yajun was born in 1964 in Chongqing, in central China, and trained as an engineer, taking a job at a state-owned optical instruments factory in the years before China's economic reforms opened space for private business. Factory work under the old planned economy offered security but little room to build anything of her own, and she left it for a period as a journalist, a trade that took her into building sites and local government offices and gave her an unusual grasp of how construction and land deals actually worked.
In 1993 she and her husband founded a small property company in Chongqing that grew, over the following two decades, into Longfor Group, one of China's largest residential developers. She was known within the industry for insisting on careful build quality and for a cautious approach to debt at a time when many rivals borrowed heavily to expand as fast as possible, a discipline that helped Longfor survive downturns that damaged less careful competitors.
By the 2010s Wu had become one of the richest self-made women in the world, a striking outcome for someone who began adult life on a factory production line with no family wealth behind her. She divorced her co-founder husband in 2012 in a settlement that left her the company's controlling shareholder, an unusually public and complicated transition that she navigated while keeping the business stable.
She has largely avoided the spotlight since, running Longfor with a reputation for caution rather than the flamboyant risk-taking common among China's property tycoons.