CHIEN-MIN CHUNG FOR TIME

Ah, Joy! Wielding a cell phone during her facial, Pu savors the delights of capitalism

Shanghai's Strong Women
	A career of one's own
	By Hannah Beech Shanghai

Posted Monday, June 21, 2003; 21:00 HKT
A lesser woman might have shed a tear. But when Jiang Sha was laid off from the No. 4 Textile Factory in 1994, she went right to work. The native-Shanghainese former machinist had noticed that fashionable folks were eschewing their once ubiquitous mugs of tea for bottles of imported water. So in 1996, she turned a drop of an idea into a reality. With a city-government grant, she quickly turned a bare-bones operation with just 17 employees into one of the most profitable arms of the giant Shanghai Mechanical and Electrical trading company. "Maybe at first people thought I was a secretary," says Jiang, "but now they all know who's the boss." Today, Zi Li is one of Shanghai's leading bottled-water operations, and Jiang has been named one of the top-10 model workers in the nation—an exclusive appellation previously reserved for selfless socialist heroes, not savvy entrepreneurs. Now she's so famous in business-mad Shanghai that a coffee-shop manager rushes over and giggles when she enters. "Very strong woman," he says, giving a thumbs-up sign.

In the rest of China, when women are dubbed strong it's not meant as a compliment. But educated women in Shanghai—and to a lesser extent those in Beijing and Guangzhou—have traditionally been a breed apart. While women nationwide are losing their jobs at state-owned enterprises and finding it hard to regain employment in the private sector because of rampant discrimination, Shanghainese women are basking in the glories of capitalism. Relatively more of the city's women than men own their own businesses, according to the Shanghai Women's Development Forum, which calculated that 6.6% of women run their own companies compared with 5.7% of men. Also, a sample survey conducted by 18 multinational corporations last October found that there are more female than male middle managers at joint-venture companies. "If the state-owned companies don't want us anymore," says Senna Li, who launched a travel agency two years ago, "we'll just go out and start our own firms."

Shanghai's career women are redefining the way the city lives. Cafés catering to moneyed women are springing up all over town. Home ownership is burgeoning, with young, single women leading the way by snapping up apartments formerly marketed as bachelor pads. Besides her own advertising company, Stella Pu, 34, owns two apartments and a chauffeured sedan. To decompress from the stress of managing 30 employees, she takes breaks with facials, massage sessions and high-speed shopping jaunts at Ikea. "Most of our clients are businesswomen, not housewives," says Xiang Lihong, an aesthetician at Dengqier Spa. "They always tell me I should start my own salon." Indeed, when it comes to business in Shanghai, there's only one complaint: the men, it seems, are just too wimpy to negotiate a hard bargain. Even in the boomtowns, equality between the sexes is hard to find.

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