Beijing Billionaire Who Grew Up With Mao Sees No Housing Bubble

From her leafy, 11th-floor rooftop terrace at the headquarters of Soho China Ltd., billionaire Zhang Xin scans the relentlessly expanding Beijing skyline she helped create. Zhang’s avant-garde buildings -- some sleek as chopsticks, others stepped like rice terraces -- became part of the hottest real estate market on Earth in 2010.

Zhang says she’s well aware of the chorus of investors and economists who predict that China’s property boom is about to go bust, taking the global economy down with it. The doomsday scenarios don’t intimidate Zhang, a onetime penniless sweatshop worker who ascended to Wall Street by defying the odds. She hopes to prove skeptics wrong again this year by betting hundreds of millions of dollars on new buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.