Zhang Yin
She left a state accounting job to trade wastepaper and became a self-made paper billionaire
Zhang Yin was born in Guangdong province, China, in 1957, one of eight children in a family that lost most of what it had during the Cultural Revolution. She worked for years as an accountant and clerk before moving to Hong Kong in the 1980s to trade in the paper business, learning that China's booming factories needed vast amounts of paper and cardboard for packaging while the country itself had little wastepaper to recycle.
In 1990 she moved to Los Angeles with her husband and, with modest savings, began buying scrap paper from American mills and shipping it to China to be reprocessed, filling a gap left by container ships that would otherwise have returned from the United States empty. She used the profits to build her own recycling and paperboard mills in China, founding Nine Dragons Paper in 1995 with her husband and brother-in-law.
The company grew rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s as China's export manufacturing boom created relentless demand for cardboard packaging, and it listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2006. For a period she was ranked the wealthiest self-made woman in the world, and one of the richest people in China of either sex, a rise that was widely covered as an example of the country's post-reform manufacturing wealth.
The paper and packaging industry has since been squeezed by overcapacity and weaker Chinese construction demand, and Nine Dragons has had difficult years, but Zhang has remained chair of the company she founded from a shipping trade most competitors overlooked.