Cheung Yan

Cheung Yan, also known as Zhang Yin, was born in Heilongjiang province in 1957. After working in various trading roles in China, she moved to the United States in the early 1990s where she recognized a major arbitrage opportunity: vast quantities of waste paper and cardboard were available cheaply in America while China needed raw materials for manufacturing. She collected and shipped this waste paper to China, using it as the feedstock for Nine Dragons Paper Holdings, which she co-founded with her husband in 1995 in Dongguan, Guangdong. The company grew to become the world's largest recycled paper manufacturer. When Nine Dragons Paper listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2006, Cheung Yan briefly became the richest woman in China. Her story — immigrant moving from China to America, identifying a business opportunity invisible to locals, and building a global manufacturing empire — became one of the most celebrated entrepreneurship narratives in Asia.