Writer, journalist, social commentator

Travels from Beijing

Zhang Lijia is a surprise appearence in the China Speaking scene, where people are wondering why they did not notice this prolific speaker and author before. As a UK-educated Chinese she knows how to bridge the differences between cultures better than those who remained on one side of the divide.
Started as a worker in a state-owned company, Zhang Lijia symbols the Chinese equivalent of a self-made citizens who released herself from a cage and became free.

Reference:

"If David Copperfield had been a Chinese girl in the 1980s, in the city of Nanjing, he might have ended up on the assembly line at Liming Machinery Factory, under the authority of the Ministry of Aerospace Industry, making missiles capable of reaching North America. Has the blacking factory ever seemed so benign in comparison? In ‘Socialism is Great!' Lijia Zhang has written a beautiful memoir of this important period, when China began to recover from its political traumas and open to the outside world. Our current China literature is heavy with victim memoirs, but this is a true tale of aspiration: a young woman coming of age in a nation desperately trying to do the same."
—Peter Hessler, Bejing correspondent for The New Yorker and author of Oracle Bones and River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.

In our speakers' corner and weblog:
Time to stop criticising China - we've already come so far

In the media
The Australian: Dynamo defies predestined life

New Statesman: Spitting image

The Guardian: Time to stop criticising China - we've already come so far

Danwei: Long Hair Drama, by Zhang Lijia

BBC: Zhang Lijia (download)

The China Beat: A soulful memoir of the 1980s

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