Peng Liyuan, First Lady of China - Best First Lady in the World

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As the media of the world has finally recognized, President Xi Jinping of China has a great partner in his wife of 25 years Peng Liyuan.  More than anything else, she has helped President Xi Jinping bring the Chinese into the modern era and to address the many problems facing nations aspiring to be the best in the world.

China is one of the largest nations in the world and has a deep, rich history. Some of the things that make China so popular are its ancient traditions, rich culture, and medicinal practices.  China's alternative and traditional medicines are adapted in western countries and are supported and practiced by western health care professionals throughout the world.

The country's ancient and historical structures are also renowned around the world. The Great Wall of China is considered one of the wonders of the world and attracts tourists from all over the globe. China also holds the largest and most famous snow festivals.

Aside from tourist attractions, the country is also famous for its inventions. The Chinese invented gunpowder during the ninth century, and China is the producer of many famous and potent teas. China remains as the largest exporter and producer of green tea in the world.

Then there is the remarkable rise to power by President Xi Jinping and his success in guiding China into a role as an emerging world superpower and responsible member of the world community.  His wife is a powerful companion comfortable in the role she can fulfill for her husband and her country.

Remember, China has a written record back 4,000 years, and then a couple of mystical cultures and civilization dating back 7,000 - 8,000 years ago. That is pretty old.

Chinese philosophy, religion, medicine, herbs, and other attributes have withstood the test of time and once again are gaining worldwide acceptance.

Here she is in a video to help victims of AIDs.

Here are excerpts from a story about the First Lady by The Daily Telegraph in the UK that offers great insight into her rise in China.  

The First Lady of Mexico, Angélica Rivera de Peña and the First Lady of China, Peng Liyuan, 

visit the children of the Hospital Infantil de México Federico Gómez in Mexico City

The Daily Telegraph - London

China's first lady Peng Liyuan: a perfectly scripted life

China's new first lady has dazzled the world, but who is the real Peng Liyuan

03 Apr 2013By Malcolm Moore, Beijing

After decades of stiff and inscrutable leaders, whose wives have been obediently invisible, China's Communist party has finally revealed a softer side: the gracious and elegant Peng Liyuan.

But while the new first lady was almost unknown in the West until she emerged on Xi Jinping's first presidential tour, in her homeland she has been a superstar for three decades.

Well before she met Mr Xi, Mrs Peng was arguably the most famous singer in China. Even today, an old joke still does the rounds in Beijing: "Who is Xi Jinping? He is Peng Liyuan's husband."

"It is a mission impossible to find someone more appropriate to represent the image of Chinese women than Peng Liyuan," gushed the Southern People Weekly magazine in 2005.

"She has a face like a full moon, shining eyes and white teeth, and she is upright and straightforward, frank and friendly".

Her dazzling appearance in Moscow last month, in a well-tailored coat and sky-blue scarf, was merely the latest act in a drama that has been meticulously scripted by the Party since she was just 15-years-old.

"I felt very excited when I saw her get off the plane. I think she deserved it after all these years of hard work. I even cried a little bit," said Wen Sui, a singer who shared a dorm with Mrs Peng for five years at the China Conservatory of Music.

China remains a country where loose talk about the president's wife can land you in serious trouble, so the handful of people who were willing to talk about Mrs Peng were effusive in their praise.

Nor is there a biography of Mrs Peng. The Communist party firmly believes that the less the public knows about its leaders, the better, and has spent years carefully deleting information about Mrs Peng and crafting a narrative so exemplary it is, at times, hard to believe.

Born in Peng village in 1962, in the eastern province of Shandong, Mrs Peng comes from a poor family and the very opposite end of the Communist party to her princeling husband, whose father was a vice-premier of China.

Mrs Peng's father was a lowly official, a schoolmaster who was put in charge of the county Culture bureau. He earned 40 yuan (£4) a month. Her mother, who has been nearly entirely erased from the record, was 25 when she was born and a member of a small touring opera company.

"She spent most of her childhood on the ox cart of the county's playhouse," remembered Wei Zhongping, her father's deputy at the culture bureau.

"I was a born singer," said Mrs Peng on a visit to Singapore in the 1990s.

By the age of five, she said, she could sing a complete folk song. "As a singer, I have won the highest honours in China. Actually I am like the panda: we are both national treasures," she added.

What she shares with Mr Xi, however, are memories of the evils of the Cultural Revolution. When she was four, Red guards arrived at her house to denounce her family.

Her mother was called a spy for having relatives in Taiwan. Her father was made to clean public lavatories for promoting culture that was suddenly considered "feudal", a vestige of old China.

Both Mrs Peng and Mr Xi saw their fathers imprisoned. Both of them were sent into exile in the countryside. Mrs Peng was denied an education.

But she had a golden gift to fall back on: her voice. She quickly learned to sing patriotic songs and, as a skinny 15-year-old teenager, she beat competition from 10,000 other applicants to land a place at her provincial art school.

From there, her career has progressed upwards in one straight line. First she was picked for the elite performance troupe of the local People's Liberation Army.

Then she attended the Conservatory of Music in Beijing. According to the state media, she was a "three points and one line" student. In other words, the daily arc of her life only had three points on it – the music room, the canteen and the dorm.

"She was very tough on herself. I used to ask her why she studied so hard," said Wen Sui, her dorm mate and fellow singer. "She would also help out her poorer classmates, buying them food coupons. Her father, who I met, taught her a lot. He used to tell her: 'I do not care how famous you are, or how much money you have, you have to be a good person above all'.

"I said to him he did not need to keep ramming it in because she was already a good person, but he said when you get high and comfortable in life, you can forget these lessons."

Each month in Beijing she received 52 yuan from the army and sent 40 yuan of it home to help her parents and younger brother and sister.

When she graduated, she was headhunted by the most prestigious arts company of all, the General Political Department of the PLA, which essentially laid the path for her to become China's top propaganda singer.

Here is another beautiful performance by the First Lady.

"Even there," said Mrs Wen, "She put herself in charge of organising the housing for the workers there. She is a perfect leader".

Indeed, her career is utterly blemish-free. She had no boyfriends until she met Mr Xi. She never took money for sponsorship or advertisements. The only deception on record is that she wears five-inch platform shoes underneath her costumes on stage to seem taller.

The only critic who has ever given her a negative review, Jiang Li, said she had sought him out after he wrote that the constant and effusive stream of floral tributes to her on stage as she sang was a distraction.

"She was a little angry when she spoke to me at first. She asked what was wrong with people applauding her and giving her flowers. So then she arranged for me to come and meet her. Her brother picked me up and drove me to her teacher's house, where she was cooking dinner," he remembered.

"We became friends. She is an outstanding singer. The difference between her and others is that she does not have any pretension to her singing, or artificiality or techniques. And she does not compromise for the audience or the market."

"I used to see her walking on the street sometimes, even after she got married to her husband. He could easily have arranged a car for her, but she always took the bus and carried her own shopping," he added.

Her place at the top table of the Chinese establishment was cemented in 1985 when she spent 20 days on the front line entertaining troops as they fought a border conflict with Vietnam.

The following year she was accepted into the Communist party and made her first appearance on the flagship Spring Festival gala show.

Her Prince and the Showgirl relationship with Mr Xi was also carefully scripted, the work of a meticulous, but unknown, matchmaker. The marriage of a famous army singer was of course a highly political matter.

They were introduced in Beijing in the winter of 1986. It was bitterly cold and Mrs Peng wore her green army uniform. She later told the state media that she had dismissed Mr Xi as a "xiang ba lao", a coarse country bumpkin.

Mr Xi was rising fast in the Party, and had an impeccable background, but was scandalously a divorcee. He had married the daughter of China's ambassador to the UK but the couple broke up when his wife wanted to return to England to study.

In the end, the courtship was brief. On September 1, 1987, a few colleagues were invited to the Red Lady French restaurant in the five-star Yeohwa hotel in Xiamen, where Mr Xi was the deputy mayor. The dinner was a wedding banquet.

For years, their union was a secret from all but a handful of top Party officials. But Mrs Peng later revealed she had eaten so many snails that night she had made herself ill.

Four days later, she went on a singing tour with the PLA, and the couple lived largely separate lives for two decades. Mr Xi was in the south of China and Mrs Peng was in Beijing or on the road, singing as many as 350 shows a year.

It is not uncommon in China for husbands and wives to live apart, and Mr Xi and Mrs Peng pragmatically pursued their own careers.

"I have never done anything for her work and life, and I am not able to do anything. Therefore how could I demand her to do this or that? If everything is fine with her, I am happy," said a surprisingly tolerant Mr Xi, in 2007, to the Youth Express newspaper.

Mrs Peng battled through severe morning sickness and dehydration to perform on the Chinese Spring Festival Gala, perhaps the most watched television show on earth.

"In a way, she was Kate Middleton before Kate Middleton was Kate Middleton," wrote Martin Macmillan in his biography of the couple Together They Hold Up the Sky.

Mr Xi, meanwhile, missed the birth of their daughter, Mingze, because he was busy fighting floods.

For some, the script was too perfect. A cable from the US Consulate in Shanghai from 2007, noted that High Court judges from Zhejiang province, where Mr Xi had been based "reported rumours that Xi was preparing to divorce his wife".

There were enough rumours that Mr Xi was having an affair that the Chinese media issued articles stressing the couple's enduring love and that their "feelings for each other stabilised" after Mingze's birth. Those articles, of course, raised more questions than they answered.

For her part, Mrs Peng described her husband as a "safe harbour" that she longed to return to, and told folksy tales about carrying a special quilt for him all around China while she was on tour.

When asked about her hobbies, she said she liked being at home, sitting on the sofa, watching television with her husband and cooking. Mr Xi likes watching football and playing the Chinese game Go. China's first family is just like any other, according to the state media.

"She can relate to people, but what is unique here in China for a first lady is the people can connect to her. She has been well known for 30 plus years. An entire generation has grown up with her." said James Chau, one of the few journalists who has interviewed Mrs Peng. "She is a tangible face they can hang their hopes and dreams on".

In 2007, as Mr Xi was anointed as China's next leader, she began cutting back her singing appearances and instead took on more charity work.

Ruby Yang, a film director who shot a series of public service advertisements with Mrs Peng remembered how, stranded in tiny Aids-ridden village in Henan province, Mrs Peng had met a young boy, infected with HIV, who had been forced to live in a pigsty. "She was obviously deeply affected," she said. "As a Chinese American, I had no idea she was such a star. I made her do her make-up by the side of the road. But she was professional about it".

But while Mrs Peng's emergence on the world stage has been greeted with delight in China, there are already signs that the Party is uncomfortable at the enormous buzz around her.

While the Chinese media has been giddily comparing Mrs Peng to Jackie Kennedy, Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni this week, the censors have been wiping her name from the internet. Copies of her clothes that were selling on Taobao, an online marketplace, have been removed.

While her glamour may counterbalance her husband's often gruff appearance, and lend him plenty of popular support, there is a fear that a curious public may question why her official biography is so neat and tidy.

"After this trip, the Party will analyse how best to use her going forward, and how to make sure she does not outshine her husband," said Cheng Xiaohe, a professor of International Relations at Renmin university. "She is probably more influential than Michelle Obama since she will be around for ten years and was famous before her husband came into office," he added.

For Chinese viewers in particular here is a video of her life story.

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