Profile of China's Iron Lady Wu Yi

November 1938, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.

Wu graduated from Lanzhou Women’s Middle School in 1956, now known as Lanzhou No. 27 Middle School. In China, middle school is equivalent to high school in the United States. She went on to study at the Beijing Petroleum Institute, where she majored in oil refinery engineering and graduated in 1962. She was part of only a handful of women who studied there at that time.

Wu joined the Communist Party the same year she graduated, and worked as a technician at the Lanzhou Oil Refinery. In 1965, she became a technician at the Ministry of Petroleum Industry, Production and Technology Department. Two years later, she worked at the Beijing Dongfang Hong Refinery where she went from technician to deputy director. From 1983-1988, she was deputy general manager of the Yanshan Petrochemical Corporation, also serving as the company’s Communist Party Secretary. In 1987, she was an alternate member of the central committee of the 13th Communist Party Congress.

Wu was elected deputy mayor of Beijing in 1988. A year into her tenure, as protests in Tiananmen Square got bloody, she persuaded coal workers to continue working after some of their coworkers were killed in the protest. From 1991-1998, she served at high levels in the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations, then headed the Ministry of International Trade and Economic Cooperation. She was critical in negotiations for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and gained an esteemed reputation among colleagues and her foreign counterparts for her forthrightness, charm, and deft negotiation skills.

While her government career rose, so did her stature in the Chinese Communist Party. She was a member of the 14th (1992-1997) and 15th (1997-2002) Communist Party Congress central committee, and a member of the central committee’s politburo in the 16th Party Congress (2002-2007), a position only three other women had held before. The politburo is the Party’s second highest governing power. In 2003, she was appointed Vice Premier of China’s State Council, making her the most powerful woman in China.

After the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in 2003 that threatened to shake the Chinese government to the core, Wu was called on to replace outgoing Minister of Health Zhang Wenkang who had been fired for covering up the crisis. She was widely praised in China and by World leaders for her promotion of transparency in China during the SARS crisis. As Health Minister she also met with AIDS activists, who said she asked for their personal accounts, not what they were told to say. She left the Ministry position in 2005.

Her last role as Vice Premier was to better China’s product-safety enforcement apparatus following lead contamination in Chinese exports. In late 2007, she announced her retirement, and joked in a speech to colleagues that she hoped they would totally forget her. She also urged her colleagues to always remain transparent and to remain financially clean. She served out her term in March 2008, and was replaced by rising female politician Liu Yandong.

Wu is highly regarded in China and in the world. She’s known as the “Iron Lady” of China for her tough negotiation skills, but has also been praised for her compassion and honesty. Forbes Magazine named her the second most powerful woman in the world three times. Throughout her career, she excelled in the traditionally male-dominated petroleum industry and in public office. The five-foot-tall Wu never married, and lives with her niece in an apartment near the Forbidden City. She is reported to love Russian literature and fishing.