How do you go one better than an ethnic Chinese Dutchman who made his fortune selling underwear and T-shirts to post-1989 Russia and orchids to Beijing and Shanghai yuppies?
The answer is: an overseas Chinese born and educated in South Korea who made a million out of a Chinese fast-food chain near Disneyland and real-estate deals in Greater Los Angeles, and served as a Republican mayor of a city in Orange County.
Kim Jong-il has chosen Julie Sa, diplomats say, to replace Yang Bin as chief executive of the special economic zone of Sinuiju, a project he began two years ago but had to freeze when Chinese police arrested Yang in October 2002, less than two weeks after his appointment. Pyongyang has not announced the decision and Ms Sa, whose Chinese name is Sha Rixiang, declines to confirm it.
Ms Sa was born in 1950 of two Chinese parents in Pusan, South Korea, where she studied international politics at university and taught Putonghua at a Chinese school. In 1973, she went to California, where she opened the China Doll chain of Chinese fast-food restaurants and went into the real estate business. In 1992, she was elected a councillor for the city of Fullerton, a southern suburb of Los Angeles, and became mayor in 1995.
On Monday, Ms Sa arrived in Seoul to brief politicians and business leaders on the development of the special zone and to find ways to drum up investment that will rely on capital from abroad, since North Korea has none.
Mr Kim chose Ms Sa because she seems to have the attributes needed to launch Asia's most bizarre investment project - a free-market economic zone in the world's last Stalinist state that is short of goods, power, roads, telecommunications, law and capital, has no access to world money markets, and has been living on international handouts for the past 10 years.