[Retail magnate Peggy] Yu’s childhood was far crueler than [her son] Xander’s. Although she was always a top student, “first or second in a grade of 240 people...I was never good enough for my parents. If I didn’t get 100 in a subject, I’d be weeping.” Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, Yu’s parents did to her what was done to them: “When I did something wrong, they would make me write a letter of self-criticism and post it on the wall.”
Like the other three women, Yu is a hai gui (returned turtle), who came back to China after spending time in the West. (There are also plenty of homegrown Chinese billionaires with a much less cosmopolitan outlook, who are often unwilling to discuss their sources of wealth, especially with Western media; several declined to be interviewed for this article.) Yu first encountered Westerners as a college student in Beijing, when she tutored visiting Americans. “They were such a happy group,” she recalled, “it made me want to get closer to them.” In 1987 she had a chance to visit the United States. “Whenever I had time, I made phone calls from hotel lobbies to see if any universities would interview me...I needed to jump from China to America; I didn’t care where.” Yu started at the University of Oregon and went on to get an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.
...Despite her affection for America, Yu emphasized that working women in China have advantages over their American counterparts. “China has social infrastructure that America doesn’t have, such as inexpensive domestic help and the tradition of having grandparents look after babies.” In fact, all four women felt that, at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field. “Sixty years of communism,” said Yu, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes. I think people in China are brought up believing that women are just as capable as men.”
To be sure, some might point out that all these women, with the exception of Zhang Lan, got an extra boost from their successful and well-connected husbands. And certainly China’s political sphere remains male-dominated: women are starkly underrepresented in China’s Parliament and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, many young Chinese women, disillusioned about their prospects in an economy many see as navigable only by those with money or connections, say the best hope for a woman is “to marry a rich man.” On a popular TV dating show, a model rebuffed an endearing but poor suitor by saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.” In a survey of more than 50,000 single women, as reported in China Daily, 80% agreed that “only men who make more than 4000 yuan [$634] a month deserve to have a relationship with a woman.” All over China, attitudes toward marriage and sex seem to be changing.
In many ways, the Mao era was a deviation for China: anti-intellectual, anti-Confucian, collectivist rather than family-oriented. Thus, as China sheds its communist mantle, it is not only Westernizing but also Sinicizing, rediscovering its traditional values. These values, however, are mutating. The traditional Chinese family, for example, was a pyramid, with a few revered elders at the pinnacle and many younger generations below. In a typical Chinese family today, the pyramid has been inverted, with a “little emperor” only child at the bottom, doted on and catered to by parents and grandparents. At the same time, while the intense competitive pressures of Confucian China have returned, the countervailing Confucian values—selflessness, compassion, honor, and rectitude—have not. As a result, many worry that the China emerging from communism will know no values other than wealth and materialism. “When we were growing up,” says Yang, “we wanted to be nurses, doctors, astronauts, teachers. Today people are suspicious of anything noble or grand. Kids just want to be rich or powerful.” In 2009, schoolchildren in Guangzhou City were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A viral Internet video—later blocked and deleted—showed an adorable 6-year-old giving her answer: “A corrupt official.”
China is so old that nothing is new. In its 5,000-year history there have been frequent periods of endemic corruption and soul searching. There have also been periods of cosmopolitan openness and exploding wealth. And there have been fantastically powerful women, from China’s female emperor Wu Zetian to the calculating Madame Mao. But the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open. Each has found a way to dynamically fuse East and West, to staggering commercial success. It may still be a long way off, but if China can achieve a similar alchemy—melding its tremendous economic potential and traditional values with Western innovation, the rule of law, and individual liberties—it would be a land of opportunity tough to beat.
