MEIHUA CHEN

Wenzhou shoe-factory founder who began with one sewing machine and employed 300 women

Chen Meihua started with one second-hand sewing machine, a bag of off-cuts and the stubborn belief that a woman who could stitch a straight seam could do anything. Born in 1952 in a village in Yongjia County, outside Wenzhou, she left school at fourteen to work in a collective shoe workshop, where she earned thirty-six yuan a month and learned to sole a shoe faster than the foremen.

In 1984, as private enterprise slowly opened in Wenzhou, she borrowed two thousand yuan from her brothers and set up a workshop in her mother's front room with four neighbours. Orders came slowly, then all at once. By 1996 her company, Meihua Footwear, filled three floors of an industrial estate in Lucheng and employed three hundred people, two-thirds of them women, many of them migrants from Jiangxi and Guizhou for whom she arranged dormitories, night classes and a nursery. In her forties she studied business management in evening courses at Zhejiang University of Technology, taking notes beside students half her age. When the export market faltered in 2008, she refused to lay off her workers and instead drew no salary for a year.

A devoted member of her local church, she led the women's choir for twenty years and quietly paid school fees for more than sixty workers' children. She loved hot-and-sour fish soup, bright silk scarves and teasing her husband Lin Guoqiang about his terrible singing. She died peacefully on 26 October 2023, aged seventy-one, after a short illness. She leaves her husband, her son Lin Hao, who now runs the company, her daughter Lin Xia, four grandchildren, and hundreds of people who say they owe her their livelihood.

“A shoe is honest: it fits or it does not. Be that honest with people.”