Zhang Yin was born in Guangdong in the northeast of China. She came from a modest background. She was the daughter of a military office and was the oldest of eight children. Zhang first worked as an accountant. After economic change got under way in China in the early 1980s, she moved to the southern coastal city Of Shenzhen. This was one of the first areas in China where people began to experiment with Capitalism. In 1985, she went to Hong Kong and Soon started a paper-trading company with 30,000 Yuan ($3,800).
Hong Kong became too small for her and her Business. So she moved to Los Angeles in 1990, And she and her husband formed a company There. The company collected paper for recycling and shipped it to China. Zhang Yin made deals whit American and European scrap yards. Her company take heaps of waste paper from the United States and Europe, ships the paper to China, and recycles it into corrugated cardboard. The cardboard is then used for boxes that are packed with toy, electronics, and furniture. The boxes are then often shipped right back across the ocean to Western consumers. After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again.
So, some countries’ waste paper is another woman’s gold mine. Zhang Yin says, “Maybe one day they’ll call me the Queen of Containerboards.” Her company, Nine Dragons, is one of the biggest paper companies in the world with over 7,000 employees, and it is worth more than 5 billion dollars.