Zhang Yin (Cheung Yan) on Founding and Origins

Zhang Yin (Cheung Yan) — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: former Guangdong textile-factory bookkeeper who moved to Shenzhen to work in paper trading, then founded Nine Dragons Paper, a recycling company that imports US scrap paper into China and turns it into cardboard for export packaging, becoming China's biggest paper maker. The profile is grounded in the 1 sources indexed for this founder.

Zhang-yong belongs to Group 6 - Consumer/retail/real estate. The consumer, retail, and real-estate group covers founders who built mass-market consumer brands (Nongfu Spring, Muyuan Foods, Haidilao), paper packaging (Nine Dragons), education (New Oriental), and property (Evergrande, Country Garden) — a cohort shaped by urbanization, the 1998 housing reform, and, for several, the 2021-2023 property-sector deleveraging.

Zhang was born Zhang Xiuhua in 1957 in Shaoguan, Guangdong, the eldest of eight children; her father, a Red Army lieutenant, was jailed for three years during the Cultural Revolution for 'rightist activity,' which meant Zhang never attended college and began working young to support her family.

After working as a bookkeeper in a Guangdong textile factory and studying accounting at trade school, Zhang moved to Shenzhen to manage the accounting and trading departments of a paper-trading company as Shenzhen was becoming a special economic zone and export hub.

Founded Nine Dragons Paper Holdings, building a recycled-paper and cardboard manufacturing business tied to US scrap-paper imports.