Cheng Hong
Cheng Hong (程虹) is an English professor and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's wife.
Cheng was born to a family of intellectuals in 1957 in Henan Province. Her father, Cheng Jinrui, was leader of the Henan Communist Youth League, and her mother, Liu Yiqing, was a journalist for Xinhua News Agency.
Cheng went to the countryside as a youth during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Later, she went to Peking University for English studies, where she met her husband Li Keqiang, the then leader of the Communist Youth League at Peking University.
Shortly after their marriage, Cheng took a teaching post at the Capital University of Economics and Business. She got opportunities for mid-career studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and received a degree of Doctor of Letters in 2000. She was appointed a full professor one year later.
Cheng is one of the forerunners in Chinese study of U.S. nature writing. She was a visiting scholar at Brown University in the United States and developed her interest in U.S. and British writings on nature and ecology.
She has been writing books, translating American authors, and writing columns to introduce the school of literature and its relevant literary theories to Chinese readers.
Cheng's monograph Returning to the Wilderness is the first Chinese research work to serve as a systematic introduction to American nature writing.
Her translations of natural writing masterpieces include Wake-Robin, The Outermost House, well conveying a sense of peace of mind resulting from man/nature harmony
Family
Cheng met Li at Peking University. The couple have one daughter.