Wu Yi

Wu Yi
吴仪
Wu Yi with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China
In office 15 March 2003 – 17 March 2008 Serving with Huang Ju, Zeng Peiyan, and Hui Liangyu
Premier	Wen Jiabao
Personal details
Born	November 1938 (age 78) Wuhan, China
Political party	Communist Party
Alma mater	China University of Petroleum

Wu Yi (born November 1938) is a retired Chinese politician. She was one of the country's most visible leaders during the first decade of the 21st Century, best known for taking on the role of Minister of Health during the SARS outbreak and later becoming Vice Premier of the State Council, a position she served in between 2003 and 2008. She was also a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China. She has since retired and left public life. She was commonly referred to as the "iron lady" by Chinese media, and was known to be a tough negotiator internationally.

Wu was born in November 1938 to an ordinary intellectual family based in Wuhan, but she traces her ancestry to nearby Huangmei County in Hubei province. She was the younger of two children. Her parents died while she was young, so she was brought up by her brother, who was eight years her senior. In April 1962, she joined the Communist Party of China. In August of the same year, she graduated from the Petroleum Refinery department at the Beijing Petroleum Institute, with a degree in petroleum engineering. She spent much of her career as a petroleum technician, eventually becoming deputy manager at the Beijing Dongfang Hong refinery, and assistant manager and party secretary at the Beijing Yanshan Petrochemical Corporation.

She was elected deputy mayor of Beijing in 1988, and held that office until 1991. Following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, she persuaded coal workers threatening to go on strike to continue working after some of their colleagues had been killed. From 1991 until 1998, she held successively the posts of Deputy Minister of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation, and member of the 14th and 15th Central Committees of the Communist Party of China. A protégé of Zhu Rongji, she became a State Councilor in 1998, and was appointed Vice Premier of the State Council in March 2003. She was the first woman to hold the position since economic reforms began in 1978, and arguably the most powerful woman in Chinese politics since Mao's wife Jiang Qing. She helped negotiate the PRC's entry into the World Trade Organization and re-organised the customs service after U.S. complaints over the widespread violation of intellectual property rights.