Cheng Hong poses with Nigeria's first lady Patience Jonathan in capital city Abuja, on her visit last month. (Photo/Xinhua)

'Iron Girl'

Like her husband and many of China's senior officials, Cheng was sent to the countryside during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). Perhaps such an experience explains why the 57-year-old enjoys positioning herself as a low-profile university professor, even when she became China's "second lady".

Cheng was a zhiqing, a term used to describe educated youth. Zhiqing are a group of people who spent the prime of their lives toiling in the countryside during former chairman Mao Zedong's re-education program in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1974, the same year Li began his zhiqing life in Central China's Anhui province, the then 17-year-old Cheng arrived at a village in Jiaxian county in neighboring Henan province, where the nationwide campaign kicked off in 1968.

"Cheng Hong led a group of 'iron girls' to take on all the hardest work in our commune," says Wang Guangtao, 67, from Banchang village, where Cheng was sent.

"Iron girl" was the one of the best things a female zhiqing could be called at the time, when Mao's famous observation that "women hold up half the sky" prevailed. Women who were strong-willed and could work as hard as men were regarded as beautiful.

Reaping wheat, plowing, firing bricks, even picking up dung - every morning Cheng woke up early to work. She always earned the most work points, which only a few men could manage, according to Feng Xiaodong, a fellow zhiqing of Cheng's.

"I remember on a night of thunder and rain, we were fighting a flood, carrying sandbags on our shoulders to strengthen the river dike. We kept falling down on the muddy road but always got up again," wrote Cheng in an article published in Guangming Daily on Aug 1, 1994.

"Young people today might laugh at our passion back then. But it was our genuine feeling. Who can deny that genuineness is most precious?" wrote Cheng. "On that river bank I shed my sweat and tears. There I strove and pursued, not knowing what was ahead."