Isabel Hilton

I started to teach myself Chinese during an exchange year in the US and continued the following year at Edinburgh. Learning Chinese was definitely a minority sport at that time. In 1973, I was in the first batch of British students to be admitted to Chinese universities and spent a year in Beijing and a year at Fudan University in Shanghai. As a journalist, I have kept in contact with China through regular visits and in 2006, I launched www.chinadialogue.net, a fully bilingual website on environmental and climate change issues that is now read in all regions of China and in 150 countries around the world.