The Women Who Want to Run the World

To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. The story chronicles the adventures of the fictional Miss Du as she moves up the corporate ladder. The book spent 141 weeks on the Chinese bestseller list and spawned two sequels, one of this year’s top films at the box office, and an online drama series that has had more than 100 million page views since starting in mid-August. One fan, Liu Danhui, a 28-year-old with a marketing job at a foreign company, says she admires Du’s persistence and believes that “there will be more and more women like her in China in the future.” In fact, there are so many people like Liu that Du Lala’s Rise has left in its wake a thriving subgenre of Du-inspired literature portraying the aspirations and dilemmas of the country’s ambitious young urbanites.




Decades after Mao Zedong declared that “women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts in the United States. According to a study completed earlier this year by the New York–based Center for Work-Life Policy, just over one third of all college-educated American women describe themselves as very ambitious. In China that figure is closer to two thirds. What’s more, over 75 percent of women in China aspire to hold a top corporate job, compared with just over half in the U.S., and 77 percent of Chinese women participate in the workforce, compared with 69 percent in the U.S.