Chinese political adviser and writer, born in 1973 in Wenzhou as the third daughter in her family. Many urged her mother to keep trying for a son; she refused and named her daughter Shengnan, meaning "better than men".
Jiang began writing online novels in the 1990s. Her later historical work, about a concubine's rise to become China's first empress dowager two millennia ago, was adapted into the drama series "The Legend of Mi Yue", which racked up 700m views within 24 hours of its release in 2015. She also works as a humanities researcher at Wenzhou University.
Jiang entered politics in 2018 as a legislator in the National People's Congress (NPC) and became one of the most prominent champions of women's rights. After serving a five-year NPC term, she joined the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in 2023. Women make up a quarter of the NPC and a fifth of the CPPCC, but none are currently in the Politburo.
She aligns her proposals—such as extending paternity leave and curbing overtime—with government goals, particularly the party's desire for women to have more children to stem demographic decline. She steers clear of the label "feminist", associated with outside-the-system activism. "We're fighting against uncivilised old ideas, habits and harmful perspectives that linger, we are not fighting against gender," she told The Economist.
In 2022 a video was posted online showing a woman chained in a shack in China. She turned out to have been trafficked and had given birth to eight children; the case ignited fury across the country. In 2026 Jiang started a campaign to ban the forced marriage of rural women with learning disabilities.
A breakthrough came in her push for rural women's land rights. Chinese tradition had meant that women lost their rights to land if they married men from outside their villages. In 2024 Jiang recommended legal protections for "married-out women"; later that year the government passed a provision stipulating the equal rights of rural women regardless of marital status.
For several years, men and women wrote to Jiang about widespread discrimination in hiring people over 35. In 2022 she recommended amending the age limit for civil-service recruitment. Her proposal was not initially adopted, but many other CPPCC members raised the issue and civil-service recruitment policies have since begun relaxing the age limit.
Jiang has 1.3m followers on Weibo.
If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.