Should economists be right, the world will soon be entering an era of “womenomics”, in which women will have serious spending power - and, if that is the case, then China is the perfect Petri dish in which to view the future. Judging by a recent V&A exhibition on Chinese design, featuring dozens of upwardly mobile female creatives, if you are a woman of working age with big plans, then China really is the place for you.

We won't get ahead of ourselves, of course. China's womenfolk aren't running the show quite yet - but they soon might be. According to the Hurun Report, the local equivalent of The Sunday Times Rich List, the two self-made richest women in the world are a Chinese paper queen and a Chinese property developer. Last year, a study claimed that, by 2015, Chinese women would control $260 billion of the country's purchasing power (there is even a name for it: the pink yuan).

Neither a glass ceiling (under Maoism, men and women workers were made equal) nor fertility anxiety (China enforces a one-child policy, and mothers are expected to pass their offspring to granny for rearing) will stand between who you are now and who you want to be. None of the usual excuses apply. The playing field is level. Women finally have the freedom to take on the world. The question is, what to do?

The answer, it appears, is work, work and, er, more work. “I've been married and divorced, and now I spend time developing myself,” says Cathy Hau, 42, the manager of Times Square, one of Shanghai's most luxurious shopping centres. “My friends and I aren't embarrassed to be independent. We work a lot. I leave the house at 8.30am and work until 11pm. I go out three or four nights a week. There is my charity work. I don't have time for a family.”

Yue-Sai Kan is the Chinese Oprah Winfrey, a television personality and entrepreneur so famous, they put her on a postage stamp. Kan was credited with bringing cosmetics to Asia, and she has just expanded her empire to include a lifestyle W brand, House of Yue-Sai. “I don't do downtime,” she says. “I went to Sardinia for four days last summer, but I worked. I was in Milan and Paris, and next week I go to India - but it's work. I'll spend a week at Chiva-Som. The food is healthy and the air is fresh, but I like it because I can work.”

Hau, Kan and their peers spend their cash doing everything their parents couldn't do. They travel, they party, they outsource the parts of their lives that don't interest them - and they shop. “I have a maid, I have massages and go to spas,” Hau says. “I take only one-week holidays, but I go everywhere. I go on yoga retreats to Greece and Thailand. Skiing in Japan is so fab - hot springs, snow and sake. Such freedom!”

Beijing-based Chenman, 26, is China's top fashion photographer. First inspired to take photographs by seeing the work of Nick Knight on the internet, she is part of the “me” generation, China's first truly global citizens, with the money and, most important, the freedom to do it all. “The 1980s generation is very self-centred,” she says. “We don't feel different to the rest of the world, we're equal.”

Today's twentysomethings, inspired by their peers in America (on Chinese television, they catch Gossip Girl, Project Runway and their own version of Ugly Betty), get to invent themselves from scratch, and the result is a sense of self even more advanced than that of their fortysomething sisters. While the icon of the generation above is the beautiful, restrained actress Maggie Cheung, theirs is the singer and actress Faye Wong, a contrary, pixie-like character who has become one of the most successful Chinese entertainers of all time. And, three years ago, the winner of the first Super Girl, a television talent show based on Pop Idol, with 8m votes sent by text, was Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old lesbian who dresses like Patti Smith.

“The coolest thing is to not be controlled by anybody, to be your own boss,” says Fiona Zhang, 27, the fashion editor of a Bejing magazine. “We live in a different time from my mother and grandmother,” says Du Juan, 24, China's first supermodel, who has fronted ads for Louis Vuitton, YSL and Roberto Cavalli. “The opportunities that have opened up for my generation of women are amazing. The notion that anything is possible is such a powerful feeling.”

“Girls I know want to be on top of things,” says Lu, a fashion designer who returned from studying in New York to set up her own label in China. “They want to be the coolest person on the planet, to know everything that's going on: the fashion, the trendy clothes, the big designers, the latest gadgets. They want to live the same way as people in Europe and America. Girls are more open to that sort of change than boys.”

Comfortably middle-class, educated Chinese women, living in urban centres, are finding themselves not only equal to, but far outstripping, their male counterparts. So, if the world is yours, who do you enjoy it with? The coutnry's rising divorce rate and increasing numbers of single women are a loose reflection of what also seems to be happening here in the West: the men just can't keep up.

“Modern Chinese women feel smarter than men,” says Angelica Cheung, the editor of Vogue China. “They're more liberal, more freewheeling and can change with the times. In the big cities, though, it is difficult to find a boyfriend. At Vogue, we have brilliant girls - beautiful, fashionable, worldly - but the men have stayed traditional.

Like Japanese women in the 1990s, Chinese girls go travelling and experience life in other countries, then it's even more difficult for them to find someone.”

What is the lesson here? That “doing it all” can be a lonely road? Perhaps it is too early to tell. “I find Chinese women very confident,” Kan says. “They can have anything they want. Take plastic surgery, which is on the rise[: the debate is not whether it is right, it is whether or not you want it.”

Xiaolu Guo, a 35-year-old novelist and film-maker, sounds a word of caution. “I still think women are searching for their individual voice,” she says. “They are working in a landscape where everything is possible, but they are completely reliant on materialism. This growth is not about a spiritual journey, it is about consuming.”

Does Kan agree? Not exactly. “You can get good maids, these days, but you have to train them carefully,” she says with a sigh. “They don't see dust.”

Explore Women

• Fashion

• Beauty

• Diet & Fitness

• Relationships

• Families

• Celebrity

• The Way We Live

• Horoscopes

Times recommends

• Ask me about sex, not pay
• Culture clubbing
• Honor Blackman: Words from the wise