Peng Liyuan (Chinese: 彭丽媛; pinyin: Péng Lìyuán; born 20 November 1962) is a Chinese singer who is serving as the first lady of China since 2012 as the wife of Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since 2012. Peng became famous in the early 1980s with "On the Hopeful Fields". Her first and main songs include "Fellow Villagers", "Mount Everest", " I Love You, the Snow of the North", "We Are the Yellow River and Mount Tai", "Yimeng Mountain Ballad", "High Clouds in the Sky", "Heavy Snow in the Cold Winter," and "People of the Five Continents Laugh Together".
In 1986, she received the Plum Blossom Award for her performance in The White-Haired Girl. She also recorded theme songs for television series, including The Water Margin (1998). She was the president of People's Liberation Army Academy of Art between 2012 and 2017, and vice president of the All-China Youth Federation between 2005 and 2010. In 2014, Peng was listed as the 57th Most Powerful Woman in the World by Forbes.
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Biography
Peng Liyuan was born in Yuncheng County, Shandong Province, China. Her father, Peng Longkun, was the director of Yuncheng County Cultural Center, and her mother Li Xiuying was a major opera singer in the Yuncheng County Yu Opera Troupe. Influenced by her mother, at the age of 4 to 5 years old, she was able to sing Yu opera excerpts. In 1976, at the age of 14, Peng Liyuan was admitted to the Shandong Province Yuncheng No.1 Middle School. In 1977, she was admitted to the Shandong Fifty-Seven School of the Arts (renamed the Shandong University Of Arts at the end of 1978), under the tutelage of Wang Yinsuan, specializing in folk vocal music. In 1979, she won the Excellent Prize of the Shandong Province Song and Dance Concert.