Hao Jianxiu

Hao Jianxiu (; born November 1935) is a retired Chinese politician. As an illiterate teenage textile worker, she was named a national model worker after inventing the "Hao Jianxiu Work Method".

She later graduated from university and was elevated to the upper echelon of Chinese politics, serving as Minister of Textile Industry in the 1980s. She then became a member of the Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party, thus officially ranked as a "national leader", and served as vice chair of the State Planning Commission. In the People's Republic of China, she was extolled as a symbol of the ideal worker who improves production through innovation, and her political career benefited as a result. Having had only one year's education in primary school, she began applying for jobs at local cotton mills at the age of nine, and eventually entered the state-owned No. 6 Cotton Mill in 1948, when she was 13.

She was said to be obsessively hard working, and devoted her energy to improving productivity and reducing waste at the factory. She took the initiative to observe and analyze the movements of the most productive workers, and propagate their techniques to others. She also studied the widespread problem of broken yarns, and discovered that breakage rate could be substantially reduced if the room was cleared of fluff.

Her work attracted the attention of Chen Shaomin (陈少敏), chairwoman of the All-China Textile Workers' Trade Union, and Zhang Qinqiu, Vice Minister of Textile Industry. Her innovation was officially dubbed the "Hao Jianxiu (Fine-Yarn) Work Method" and it was instituted in textile mills nationwide. She was honoured as a national model worker in 1951, at the age of 16.