This document provides an overview of several wealthy Chinese women who have moved to London for education and business opportunities. It summarizes their backgrounds, lifestyles, and perspectives on Chinese culture. Some of the women discussed include Elaine Zhang, a property baroness who owns horses and an Aston Martin; Ice Min, who started an organic food business after studying at LSE; and Elly Zhu, an only child facing pressure to return to China and marry a Chinese man. Overall, the document explores how these women have embraced international culture while still facing expectations from their families in China.

1. MEET THE SUPER-
FASHIONABLE
CHINESE WOMEN
CONQUERING LONDON
We've all heard the stories of the generation of 'little
emperors' fleeing China and piling into London to spend their
post-communism millions on fast cars and champagne, but
the reality is more nuanced. David Jenkins meets the
intelligent, hardworking and karaoke-loving elite Chinese
expats...
Ben Quinton Wendy Yu

2. Elaine Zhang had got lost in Essex, checking out possible new stables
for her dressage horses, so she was running a couple of hours late for our
meeting. My phone rang. It was one of the 34-year-old's employees. The
mainland-China-born property baroness was 'feeling peckish'; she'd like
to buy me lunch. Minutes later, Elaine showed up in her silver-grey soft-
top Aston Martin DB9 - registration number E9EEE - and we struck
boldly through Soho and across Oxford Street. She was wearing a black
Louis Vuitton suit with a pink froth running down the back, 'just for the
office', but she loves 'beautiful, elegant clothes. Chanel, and Dolce &
Gabbana. Cavalli! Gucci!' She tooted her horn. 'My star sign is Leo', she
announced, her English fractured, her brown eyes full of mischief.
'Where we go? Arts Club? Loulou?'
Elaine's not typical - she's very much a one-off - of the young, rich
mainland Chinese who have thronged to London, but she's emblematic
of the diaspora; many come to school here, and even more to university -
there were 89,540 Chinese students in UK higher education in 2014-15.
As for money, there are now 593 billionaires in mainland China, all of
whom have made their cash relatively recently - the communist
revolution of 1949 wiped out old fortunes, and it was not until 1978 that
Deng Xiaoping rolled out the economic reforms that produced both
'socialism with Chinese characteristics' and myriad millionaires to join
those billionaires. The beneficiaries of Deng's reforms were the lucky
young things who went to university immediately after the Cultural
Revolution of the late Sixties and then worked either for the party or in
the army before starting their own businesses. And when they had
children... well, the country's one-child policy was introduced in 1978
and only formally relaxed in 2015; the result, inevitably, has been the
burgeoning (and, some say, the spoiling) of the 'little emperors', the
doted-on 'second gen' rich, or fuerdai.

3. Elaine's father made his money in coal and property, and he'd like the
high-flying, high-maintenance Elaine to come home 'for marriage. In
Chinese culture, older than 30 is a little bit late. But in London I have
found lots of international friends just want to enjoy their personal life
and not settle down,' she says - and you just know she means to follow
suit. She arrived in the UK on 27 January 2009, lives in a mews house
off Sloane Square and is keen to sell a large building she brought in
Bayswater in 2010, for cash, and planned to refurbish and open as the
Hotel Elaine. 'But I didn't want to do the development - it takes up a lot
of my energy. I want the building to work for me.' Meantime, she skis -
in Whistler or Gstaad - and she goes out to Loulou's, Annabel's,
wherever. And she rides: her favourite horse is called 'Mr Xiang - Mr
Xiang [a successful businessman] is my ex-boyfriend. When we broke
up, I bought myself a horse.' Does she have a boyfriend now? She
laughs: 'I say my business is my boyfriend. My hobby is my work.'
It's a refrain I was to hear often from the fuerdai. Because the 'second
gens' suffer from negative image. Wang Sicong, the 27-year-old son of
China's richest man, went to Winchester and UCL, where he read
philosophy; back in China last year, he attracted vituperation for buying
his pet dog two Apple watches, on for each front paw, and posting the
pictures on social media. The YouTube show Ultra Rich Asian Girls of
Vancouver is an orgy of 'reality' conspicuous consumption that's
prompted Chinese officialdom to try and stop such programming and has
also spawned a New York Times article with the title of 'My Daddy's
Rich and My Lamborghini's Good-Looking'; Channel 4's Britain's
Billionaire Immigrants featured the sweet-natured but naive Wendy Yu,
her hundreds of rare Barbies, her huge collection of designer gowns and
her shrewd investment in Didi Chuxing, the Chinese version of Uber,
into which Apple pumped £690m in May.

4. Ben Quinton
Ice Min
And May was also the month in which Ling Jihua, once the fourth-
ranking member of the Politburo, was sent to trial for 'massive'
corruption, four years after his son crashed his Ferrari 458 Spider in
Beijing, killing himself and one of his two female companions; one of
them was reportedly semi-naked, the other fully nude. According to
the New York Times, when Ling Jihua visited the mortuary in which his
child's body was being held, he 'coldly denied it was his son's'. None of
which went down well with the authorities.

5. So it's not entirely surprising that bright young things like Ice Min
prefer to cut a slightly more sober figure these days. Ice is a very smart
26-year-old who came from Chengdu to Westminster at 16 to do A-
levels in maths, further maths, Chinese and art history. From there, she
went to the LSE and is now running her own organic-food company,
MightyBee, which started off with coconut water and is currently
moving into coconut jerky; it's highly regarded in a crowded field. As
she tucks into a quinoa salad, she's wearing a charming hat from Maison
Michel of Paris, a navy-blue top with a Peter Pan collar that a Chinese
friend sourced for her, a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace, Stella wedges
and a wicked smile.
Her gang have mellowed, she says, her English all but immaculate.
'The negative image is that the second-generation rich spend money
like crazy, with no conscience.' She certainly knew people like that in
her student years, their Maseratis parked up near 113, a karaoke bar on
Chancery Lane at which Westerners were not overly welcome. But now
work comes first for her and 'most of my friends. They have their own
businesses. And ever since I started to work and understood how tough it
is, I don't do that conspicuous consumption any more.' Not that she
eschews pleasure. She enjoys a party and likes to travel - she put off a
karaoke evening with me in favour of a weekend in Morocco. And, like
many of her contemporaries, she's getting interested in old-fashioned
English pursuits: she's just been clay-pigeon shooting on Sir Edward
Dashwood's West Wycombe estate and enjoyed it so much she
approached an English friend to organise a 'driven birds' shoot. (The
English friend, in turn, has had Holland & Holland on to him, eager for
him to bring them Chinese clients.)

6. Ice's father served in the army for 10 years; was the only one in 'his
camp' to get into a (highly selective) university; then worked for a
government company before starting his own oil, gas and chemicals
concerns. 'Also real estate.' Ice grins. 'What Chinese like to do is buy
properties. They really like to buy properties.' (Interestingly, the Chinese
don't really figure on the radars of either Peter Wetherell, who
specialises in Mayfair, or Sebastian Gibson, the go-to guy for finding
expensive houses off-market for rich clients. They're keener on buying
modern properties, often on the river, and would rather buy 20 units in
Paddington Basin than spend £15m on a mansion in Holland Park. There
are, of course, exceptions: in December 2015, Wang Jianlin, father of
the Apple-Watch-for-dogs-buying Wang Sicong, paid £80m for 15a
Kensington Palace Gardens and is expected to spend another £50m on
doing it up.)
Ice now has a house in Battersea. Is she under pressure to share it with a
Chinese husband? She laughs. Her boyfriends are 'usually Western. I
had one Chinese boyfriend - that didn't go well.' In fact, she thinks she's
now probably too independent for a mainland-Chinese husband. 'It's the
mentality they have. I don't think equality between men and women
exists in China.' As for the pollution there - well, no wonder she sees
herself here rather than there. On the other hand, when she looks at the
commercial possibilities back home...
It's often said that Hong Kong Chinese regard mainland Chinese as
gauche and unsophisticated. That's not what you'd call Ice, or Elly Zhu,
who's 25, gorgeous and doing a master's in luxury brand management at
Regent's University London. She's from near Dalian, far up in China's
north-east, and she's had a mouvementé life: schools in Dalian, Beijing,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, before coming to London at 17 and

7. briefly going to South Bank University - 'It was an agency that put me
there - I didn't like it.' So she moved to Chelsea College of Arts, went to
Tramp and Maddox in her spare time, then buzzed off to Switzerland,
where she did her BA in hospitality at Glion.
Ben Quinton
Casino tycoon daughter (Sabrina Ho)
She'd like to stay here 'at least for the next five to 10 years' but is under
'quite a lot of pressure to go back', largely because her parents - her
father's an oil trader - want her to marry a Chinese man. 'But I don't

8. mind [about nationality] - my boyfriend is Italian.' As is her coat, which
is from Marni, though her style is multinational: she's got a Zara top and
a Céline bag. The pressure to go home, she adds, sipping a pink-
grapefruit juice in Sotheby's Café, is certainly connected to being an
only child. Did she think she'd been spoilt? 'Yes,' she says, with
refreshing candour. 'In many ways. In my family, basically whatever I
say, I get. Within reason.' Meaning that her family would never, ever
buy her a Lamborghini to crash, but they would - and did - buy her a
Range Rover in Switzerland.
Still, she wouldn't have a car in London - public transport's so good,
though she prefers buses to the Tube. (There's a story of a young
Chinese in her first days at Central Saint Martins telling her parents how
grim the Tube was. Why didn't she buy it? they asked.) Indeed, Elly
likes to mix the ritzy with the funky: she'll eat glamorously at Park
Chinois, and munch more mundanely on the hot, hot food of Bar Shu, in
Soho; when she's in India, she'll stay at 'the very chilled place where all
the travellers are going', and when she's in the South of France, she likes
'the very best hotel'. Her mother's not wild about her spending money,
but her father's more 'I want you to go out. Even if it's not for work, just
to make you happy.' But all good things must come to an end, as Elly
knows: 'The goal is to be independent, but it's going to be hard - I don't
know how to work my way up to support myself. I need experience. So
I'd like to get myself a job and have fun for another two years - I'm still
very young.'
So is Wendy Yu. The 25-year-old is an endearing girl who lives in
Knightsbridge, her slightly soulless flat home to a vast toy giraffe, a
baby grand piano - her fiancé, Ji Liu, has released three easy-listening
classical albums and has played Carnegie Hall - those rare Barbies, those

9. Oscar de la Renta, Marchesa and Matthew Williamson gowns and her
collection of limited-edition handbags. She greets me in billowing red
Valentino and nude high heels; her watch is by Bulgari, her rings by
Cartier and Bulgari, again. Her English is surprisingly tentative for
someone who came to school (Taunton) in England when she was just
15, and her manner is anxious enough to have a PR present.
Ben Quinton
Elaine Zhang
She knows - or knows about - the other women in this article. But, like
them, she says she's not part of a Chinese scene in London. She's

10. international, and so are they, and that's the way they like it - it's why
they like to live here most of the time. Her uncle is executive vice
president of the China Construction Bank; her father was one of the first
to graduate after the Cultural Revolution of the late Sixties and then had
a senior government role in the technology sector of Zhejiang province.
From there he went into business, founding the biggest door company in
Asia, with 1,000 stores. Wendy's proud of him: 'It [his firm] has been 27
years and the normal lifespan for a business in China is three years. So
he's achieved a great deal but endured so much.' Wendy's trying to make
her own mark on the door industry - she's got plans to involve Western
designers - as well as investing in Didi and two fashion start-ups,
ASAP54 and Bottletop; she had a spell at the London College of Fashion
and a part in supporting aspiring designers at the British Fashion
Council. 'Fashion,' she says, 'has been my passion since a young age.'
She's eager not to come across as a silly young socialite - there's a lot of
'I want to achieve great things in life', or 'I don't think it's a great thing to
show off ' or 'Everything has to have a purpose and I think my purpose is
to do great business and extend my family's legacy, so it is definitely not
my priority to have fun.' To that end, she listens to TED talks, sets
herself 'six top priorities' a day and has two business coaches. Still, she's
happy to be a co-chair of the Hong Kong amfAR Gala and to have taken
part in last year's Queen Charlotte's Ball. That's social life, made more
palatable by philanthropy.
Philanthropy is Sabrina Ho's bag as well. She's a vice chair of amfAR
Hong Kong, helps fundraise for children with autism, is active in the
LVMH X UNICEF campaign and has just been at the Cannes Film
Festival as a guest of Chopard, where she hung out with 'Leonardo'
(DiCaprio) at the amfAR party - you get the picture. The 25-year-old is
different to the others: she's from Macau, the former Portugese overseas

11. territory off Hong Kong, and is, she told me over lunch at the Bulgari,
'very definitely not part of the one-child policy'. Indeed: she's one of 17
children from the four wives of Stanley Ho, the gambling and property
tycoon.
At 13, she went to Queen Margaret's in York, though her accent's
American, the product of a year at UCLA and a love of American TV.
She spends a lot of time in Europe, either at meetings in Paris about the
Karl Lagerfeld and Versace hotels the Hos are building in Macau, or on
business with collectors in London for the auction house she's set up
back home. She loved Queen Margaret's - the walking miles, the
shopping in the supermarket, the cooking - and she'd been looking
forward to going to King's College, London. But her father had a stroke
and she went home to look after him. She found media attention when
she was at university in Hong Kong somewhat overpowering: 'I'm
famous there.'
Though she's wearing Chanel at lunch and has 25 pairs of the same
Stella shoes, she likes going to Topshop when she's here and hanging
with old school friends - not Chinese ones. 'If you want to meet
Chinese friends, you can stay in Hong Kong.' Indeed, she was off to
dinner that night with old chums at Sexy Fish. (She had a second dinner
to go to afterwards, at Harry's Bar - perhaps that's why she was still
asleep when Tatler turned up, on time, to take her photograph at noon
the next day.) Anyway, she really likes London and would like to live
here when she's, say, 40, and has a family. It won't have to be a Chinese
family: 'My father's half-Portuguese, his first wife was Portuguese, he's
very open-minded. And I don't care about nationality.' What she does
relish about England is 'the freedom. The freedom to go out in running
shoes, with no make-up. Just the freedom of life.'

12. Ben Quinton
Diana Wang
Not, then, the political freedom, and indeed she's careful often to
mention doing Ho-related business 'with the co-operation of the
government'. Still, she and all the others are happy to talk, unlike those
whose parents are in the government in mainland China. One governor's
daughter, currently resident in the UK, was, I learned, as likely to have
her teeth pulled without anaesthetic as to talk to the press. Even the very
well-adjusted Diana Wang doesn't want to go into her father's oil-drilling
business, because 'you have to deal with the government'. Her father's

13. content for her to do her own thing: 'Dad said to me, just make sure
you're happy, just make sure you can make money - that's the most
important thing.' Not that 26-year-old Diana's unsentimental. She
badgered her mother, who teaches English at Peking University, into
letting her come to school in England because she loved Harry Potter.
Which is how she ended up at the academically strong City of London
School for Girls before heading back to Peking University (no
pushover itself ) and thence to Paris to do her MBA at MOD'SPE, the
fashion business school.
Although she had 'lots of beautiful gowns' when she was '15/16', likes
glamour ('Yes!') and has 'yellow diamonds, pink diamonds' and some
lovely Chopard earrings she's wearing when we take tea in the Milestone
Hotel, Diana is set on making a big thing of her haute-couture business -
she works with Savile Row's Welsh & Jefferies for her menswear and
with Cécile Henri Atelier and Lesage & Lemarié in Paris for her
womenswear. Which means 'I fly too much.' Not that that's a bad thing:
'I need very big clients,' and she has three who spend £1m a year on her
brand whom she met on planes. Not, presumably, when she was
travelling economy - 'I think saving money is important' - or when she's
in 'my own plane', a Bombardier, though actually 'it's owned by the
family, so I can't always use it.' The point is, though, 'I'm not a mess,' as
others in their 20s can be, and she's not a nightclub girl: 'I feel insecure.'
She's known some wild Chinese boys and girls - 'Of course! They drink
a lot, they even opened a karaoke bar in Beijing because they're so into
wine and music' - but 'we're not close'. Almost all of them are now back
in Beijing 'because there are a lot of opportunities there'. As are her
'mum and dad.
I miss them - thank goodness we have FaceTime.'

14. Ben Quinton
Elly Zhu
Diana, though, wants to divide her time between China and London: 'I
won't leave London, for sure.' Even for romance? She prefers the idea of
a Chinese husband - though she's 'open' to a Westerner. She smiles. 'I
broke up with my boyfriend a year and a half ago. I'm dating, but not
properly...' No surprise, really: 'Now, I focus on my business.' And on
the loyal customers she now has who are 'already VIPs of Chanel and
Dior'. She looks excitedly across the table. 'It's three figures now! 101!'
She should hightail it to Signor Sassi, her fave-rave Italian restaurant on

15. Knightsbridge Green, 'because they sing there. I feel happy in that
restaurant. It's not about the food: they're so happy and I feel happy.'
Ah! Happiness! That's the topic that's consuming Elaine Zhang as she
sits eating her veal piccante in the back garden of the Arts Club. She's
rich, she knows, and she used to spend money on 'shopping, shopping a
lot. But I want to be richer inside, in my heart. I want more calm, more
enjoying my body. Sometimes there's no balance in my life.' She sighs
and asks the big question: 'Do you like LouLou? Or Annabel? LouLou's,
I say - I prefer the design. 'We are same!' she cries, flashing her wicked
smile. 'More character!'