By FRAN O'SULLIVAN
"Formidable" is the adjective most frequently attached to Ma Xiuhong - one of China's foremost officials.
Madam Ma, China's Vice-Minister of Commerce, manages China's most important trading relationship, that with the United States.
It was Ma who talked tough on the Chinese Government's behalf during last year's stand-off over US
allegations that China's "over-valued" currency was killing the trade relationship between the two big powers.
She also deals with other "Apec capitalists" - such as Australia and New Zealand, officials say, and is very popular with foreign investors in China.
Raised in Hebei Province on the North China plain near Beijing, Ma, 55, has worked her way through the labyrinthine Chinese bureaucracy to become one of the nation's most powerful women.
Ma was a field worker in Shanxi Province during the Cultural Revolution.
At 22, she joined the People's Liberation Army, studying microwave communications technology at the military's Foreign Languages Institute - recognised as providing higher learning for "special talents."
She then spent seven years as a technician with the headquarters of the general staff of the army.
In her early thirties, she made a strategic shift to take up a two-year sojourn at the State Import and Export Commission before moving to the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations & Trade - a forerunner to the Ministry of Commerce.
Ma is said to be exceptionally focused. She also shares another important trait with China's most powerful woman, Vice-Premier Wu Yi - she is single.
