60 minutes rewind no one symbolizes china's rapid 30-year rise from the backwaters of communism
to the second largest economy in the world better than real estate developer zhang shin what's
interesting about her is that while we think of china as being uncreative repressive and as far
as you can get from the american dream she breaks every one of those stereotypes she's a mogul who
got her start not in china but on wall street but she missed the great wall so she went back home
and made it big the mogul jang shin is the fifth richest self-made billionaire woman in the world
this is us that the one outside that one is us she's pointing out her buildings with her
partner husband she has built more of beijing than almost any emperor in china's history how
many buildings have you and your husband built oh you can't even count them right wherever
you look you see the company logo soho china on one cutting edge skyscraper after the next as a
developer shin pays special attention to design which is why she's been called the steve jobs
of the architecture world her buildings are fluid and futuristic and daring and would be
at home in new york or london an expression of china's emergence into the modern world
i'm wondering when you see these buildings if it ever strikes you and you are designing beijing
it's a huge responsibility i feel that i really do feel it on your shoulders i feel that i feel these
buildings are forming the face of our city and you build huge buildings and huge
projects that's china you know china if you think about what is the character of china
it's enormous scales it's bigness everything she took us to the site of her newest project
do you love to come out i love coming up that's so huge it's swarming with thousands of workers
these kinds of projects are one reason for china's explosive economic growth recently though there
have been fears of overbuilding and a real estate bubble shin told us that's why she keeps her focus
narrow only office buildings and only in beijing and shanghai my own view is that residential
property development in china has really come to an end you don't feel that there's any
threat of a bursting bubble in commercial real estate in beijing and shanghai i think in retail
like shops shopping malls yeah there is oversupply but office is doing is the only property sector
that's doing well even though the future may be uncertain the future may be uncertain in terms of
well the future is always uncertain now even if the certainty is not 10
growth for china it goes down to seven percent growth it's still a better place
you think i think so you have that much faith that's why we're investing heavily
her business instincts are usually right they've made her enormously wealthy and a celebrity here
when she opens a new building it can look like a hollywood premiere
yet at 47 she remains grounded and unpretentious never forgetting she grew up wretchedly poor
she says her personal story shows that china is the new land of opportunity china is the place
that produced more self-made billionaire than any other country in the world do you know what the
american dream is it sounds like the american doesn't it very much so how times have changed
shin was born during the cultural revolution when mao zedong brutally purged all the capitalists
and intellectuals whom he derided as running dogs and if you were educated you were almost crushed
my parents were university graduates oh boy they were in trouble they were they were sent to the
countryside i spent years in the countryside as part of the re-education camp but call it the
revenge of the running dogs their children are today the country's leading capitalists
for shin it goes back to when she was eight her mother was allowed to return to beijing where she
found work as a translator but they were destitute and homeless forced to sleep in an office
i remember we would sleep on her desk we would use her dictionaries because my mother was a
translator as the pillow you slept on the desktop dictionary is your pillow pillow oh
my goodness yeah for months we did that when chin was 14 she moved to hong kong in search of work
but life there was just as hard she was forced to slave away on assembly lines
as a sweatshop girl on my table there are like five different chips you need to put on the board
then you put up put on the belt and then the bell goes down to the next one right
so we all become like a machine doing that so this is how you spent your teenage years five years
doing that five years so do you look upon that as lost years no i mean i i look at those it's a
different chapter in life i knew that's not a life i wanted to have did you have a dream no i wanted
to just escape here right so when she had saved enough money she bought a one-way ticket to london
packed up her bags and left i thought i need to cook for myself so i carry a wok
a chinese walk-in wear suitcase but forget chinese food with no money she ended up working in a fish
and chip stand her dickensian journey wasn't over i think i was very afraid in england only
because i had never seen so many caucasian funny looking funny looking language i didn't understand
nothing familiar you didn't know anybody didn't know anybody i sit on my suitcase started crying
you end up no one's going to believe this you end up working at goldman sachs
what a tale from crying and alone to school to learn english which led to a scholarship
to the university of sussex and then a masters in economics from cambridge
it was 1992 and shin's timing was perfect china was opening its markets to foreign investors
goldman sachs sent the sweatshop girl to the mainland to look for opportunities
but she was unhappy in the world of investment banking i'll give you some of the quotes that
you've said people spoke crassly treated others badly looked down on the poor and adored the rich
those are your quotes that's pretty much true i mean i think the investment banking environment
was very competitive and cutthroat i was always looking for opportunities to leave you wanted
to come back to china i think i was just missing the idealism that i was naively brought up with
in the communist socialist china when everyone was encouraged and brought out to be idealist
and i guess i was just missing what i was brought up with the story will continue after this
that's when she met the man she would marry pan shehee he was part of a wave of young idealists
committed to liberalizing china through business in his case through a new industry real estate and
i remember he took me to see a construction site it was evening it was late at night
he took me he said you have to come and see what i do and i went wow i had never seen a hole
that big on earth and he told me this is a place will be the manhattan of beijing and i laugh i
thought because he hasn't been to manhattan he has no idea what manhattan means right a whole bunch
of factories in the area big hole on the ground this is now going to be a manhattan of beijing
this is where we are now all this area used to be factory we stood at that spot in a sea of offices
they built it's not manhattan it's bigger building after building some projects the
size of entire neighborhoods and all built in the last 19 years going back to the night shin
and pan first met did you really decide to get married in four days yeah we did and i left my
bank and we joined together from the company with no money no backing no relationship we're none of
us is the sons of the daughters of anything he wasn't a prince a princely no no in fact just
the opposite he came from one of the poorest provinces in china the most impoverished place
but she and pan were finding out that mixing how east and west did business was not easy they
fought constantly and so one day she packed her bags and went back to england but then she changed
her mind i thought you know i cannot just give up like this i called him up i said you know what
i decided to stay in china stayed in this marriage i quit the job i will step aside i stay at home in
her time off she got pregnant with the first of their two sons while pan was making a success of
the company he did so well that there was too much work he couldn't handle so then he said you better
come back to work really i need you to work oh my goodness everything changed from fighting wanting
to get divorced to starting a family with baby and the business is going well and i'm back to work
now they split their duties he focuses on everything inside china she uses her wall
street know-how to raise money abroad and hires the world's top architects together they have
built soho china into a company with 10 billion dollars in assets what about corruption though
corruption is is everywhere in china it's really quite widespread pretty much whoever has a power
uh is uh in the position to be corrupt so they expect you to to pay them off just
pay paid them off so how do you operate in this environment for instance if we buy a piece of land
if we buy an auction then that's very transparent openness openness yeah the more openness it is
the better it is we don't need to know anybody we don't need to be the daughters and sons of anybody
we can just buy with money on an open market that building will stay and then the rest is
all landscape she believes that open market tools like public auctions and transparent accounting
will lessen the corruption and the cronyism the woman who once slept on a dictionary and now has
about three billion dollars in her bank account made tout china as the new land of opportunity
but she knows it's still not the land of the free you know i hear a lot in the u.s people praise you
in wall street people praise state capitalism in china look at how efficient things get done
decisions get made so quick and so effective it can roll over a policy overnight nationwide
and here in the u.s we need to go through congress senate and debate and right you know i have to say
for chinese living in china chinese if you ask one thing everyone craved for
is what it's not food it's not homes everyone crave for democracy i know there's a lot of
negativities in the u.s about the political system but don't forget you know 8 000 miles away
people in china are looking at it longing for it do you think there will be democracy here
let's say i'm going to put a time frame on it in 20 years sooner you're an optimist i am you