From sweatshop to skyline queen: The story of Zhang Xin

Inside the penthouse premises of the exclusive Beijing American Club, China's most powerful woman aims a quiet smile at a circle of armchairs; she targets each occupant with a flash of eye contact and brings the elite gathering to attention. Silence falls.

Property developer Zhang Xin, queen of the Beijing skyline, is the chief executive of Soho China, one of the country's most influential real estate companies. She is immaculately but not ostentatiously dressed in a scarlet blouse, chairing a discussion that touches delicately on the future of the nation, of the Communist Party and of China's engagement with the outside world. Sharing her sofa, and the main speaker for the evening, is British politician Peter Mandelson, whose book, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour, newly translated into Chinese, is already popular within the higher echelons of party leadership. Around them sits an assembly of business leaders, diplomats, journalists and high-financiers. It is an evening that reflects Zhang's status as one of the world's greatest female success stories.

Over the past decade, Zhang, 48, has become a role model for women, for the ambitious poor and for ordinary Chinese. The 6.7 million people who follow her on Weibo (the mainland's equivalent of Twitter) are doing so for a reason: the government may try to co-opt the concept of a "Chinese Dream" for political ends but Zhang is its living embodiment - a woman who has risen from her beginnings as a teenage sweatshop worker to become one of the wealthiest women on the planet, overseeing an empire worth US$3.6 billion.

Zhang's parents were educated Chinese-Burmese who moved back to China in the 1950s, when Mao Zedong's dream still appeared unsullied. But during the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution, their university degrees counted against them: a young Zhang and her mother were separated from her father and brother, and forced - as part of the country's "re-education" programme - to swap their urban lifestyle for the grinding poverty of the countryside.

When she was nine years old, Zhang was able to return to Beijing with her mother, but the city offered scant relief from debilitating poverty. The two were briefly homeless, obliged to sleep on the desks of the small office where Zhang's mother translated the grandstanding speeches of communist leaders.

A few years later, with the mainland's great economic boom still years away, the pair escaped to Hong Kong. Aged 14, Zhang toiled in the territory's cramped, punishing garment factories. Driven by the need for hard cash, she would switch employers for the sake of a single dollar's increase in pay.

"The motivation for working in the factories was to get out of the factories," she says. The girls alongside her appeared content with their lives, but she could never accept that. Convinced even then that education had the power to change everything, Zhang would scurry from each 12-hour shift straight to evening classes. She dreamed all the time, she says, simply of keeping pace with the education that "normal" teenage schoolgirls would be receiving back in the mainland.