Cheng Hong, wife of Chinese premier Li Keqiang

Want China Times, Staff Reporter 2014-05-05

Cheng Hong, who is accompanying her husband Li Keqiang during
his Africa tour, arrives in Ethiopia on May 4. (Photo/Xinhua)

Cheng Hong, the wife of Chinese premier Li Keqiang, accompanied her husband for the first time on a state visit to Africa this week, sparking renewed interest in the background of the low-profile academic.

The 57-year-old Cheng is a former professor of English at Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing who is responsible for translating several nature writing classics into Chinese, such as Wake-Robin, The Singing Wilderness, and The Outermost House.

She was born into a family of intellectuals in 1957. Her father, Cheng Jinrui, was the leader of the Communist Youth League in central China's Henan province in charge of anti-poverty efforts, while her mother, Liu Yiqing, was a reporter at China's official Xinhua news agency.

Cheng was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, after which she went to Beijing to study English at the prestigious Peking University. That is where she met her future husband, then-leader of the Communist Youth League at the university, who would eventually go on to become premier of China last March.

Shortly after they married, Cheng began teaching at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing. Later, she pursued a doctorate at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and was appointed a full professor in 2001.

People who know Cheng describe her as "low-profile, humble and nice."

"Teachers and students have a very good impression of her, and some of her translation work has won high praise among professors," said Tuo Guozhu, one of Cheng's colleagues at the university. "She never talks about her husband in public and we only knew who her husband was after 2008, when Li became the vice-premier."

"She stopped appearing at the university sometime after 2008, mainly due to security reasons. But she still coaches some postgraduate students at home," Tuo added.

"Professor Cheng impresses me with her attitude toward academic research," said Li Xuejun, a veteran editor with SDX Joint Publishing in Beijing. "She's a conscientious and arduous worker. She's strict with academic norms, showing her respect for research."

"Professor Cheng is indeed one of the forerunners in Chinese study of US nature writing," said Wang Yufeng, a lecturer on English literature at the Xiamen University of Technology. "And she's able to present scholarly ideas with elegant and well-written language."

Not much was known about Cheng apart from her US nature writing research until Xinhua published a feature story about herself and her husband in December 2012. Meanwhile, in the abstract of her 2009 book, Tranquility Is Beyond Price, Cheng said she developed an interest in American and British writings on nature and ecology when she was a visiting scholar at Brown University in the United States.

Cheng and Li Keqiang have a daughter who graduated from Peking University like her parents and is currently undergoing postgraduate studies in the United States.

Related Article:

Li Keqiang's Africa visit set to promote new ties