Business Beauties

Hu Ziwei: the most beautiful woman in business broadcasting?

Yet another beautiful-people list is circulating online this month. Unlike the usual celebrity indices, this was a list of nine prominent women in the business media field, the hosts of financial TV shows based in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Basically an excuse for portal EastDay to run some eye candy, the list made the rounds of forums, blogs, and news sites throughout October.

It eventually made it onto a blog at Wall Street Wire, a Chinese business site, where it was retitled "China's Top 10 Financial Beauties of 2005" and claimed to be the results of a contest sponsored by the "authoritative financial website" WSWire.com. Unfortunately, no tenth woman was added to the list, so the empty spot at #10 made it appear that China's business sector had just nine attractive women during 2005 (and, given the current gender ratios, this may not be too far from the actual situation).

A list of names will probably only be meaningful to those familiar with Chinese business TV; Beijing Television's Hu Ziwei, CCTV's Shen Bing, and Jin Yu, host of the Shanghai-based China Business News, made up the top three on the reranked WSWire list. Shen Bing takes the place of Phoenix TV's Zeng Zimo, who was ranked third in 2003 but who here drops to fifth.