Li was born Li Xizhi in Beijing on 31 October 1923, with her ancestral home in Huanggang, Hubei Province. Her father Li Siguang was a renowned geologist and professor at Peking University, and her mother Xu Shubin was a pianist and schoolteacher. Her father was of Mongol descent, whose grandfather was a Mongolian beggar who migrated to Hubei in search of a better livelihood. Her family originally had the Mongol surname "Kuli" or "Ku". From 1934 to 1936, she lived in England where her father was teaching. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, her family sought refuge in Shanghai and then in Guilin, Guangxi, which was free from Japanese occupation. In Guilin, she changed her name to Li Lin and attended Guangxi University, graduating in 1944 with a degree in mechanics. She worked at the Aviation Institute in Chengdu, and with the help of Joseph Needham, won a British Cultural Council scholarship to study at the University of Birmingham in 1946. After earning her master's degree in 1948, she continued her studies at the Department of Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge, where she met and married fellow Chinese scientist Chen-Lu Tsou. She became also known as Anna Tsou.
Career
After they both earned their PhDs in 1951, Li and Tsou returned to the newly established People's Republic of China. Li worked for the Shanghai Institute of Metallurgy, and Tsou for the Shanghai Institute of Physiology and Biochemistry, both under the umbrella of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She and her colleagues won a prize for their research in spherical graphite in 1956. In 1956, nuclear physicistQian Sanqiang recruited Li to work on China's nuclear energy program. After finishing her heavy water reactor project, in 1958 she was transferred to the Institute of Physics of the CAS in Beijing. She spent the next 14 years working on the nuclear program. In 1972 or 1973, she was transferred again to the Institute of High Energy Physics to work on high-temperature superconductivity. Li was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, and won the State Science and Technology Progress Award in 1992 for her contribution to the research of superconductivity. She also advised dozens of graduate students and published more than 100 research papers.
Personal life
Li married Chen-Lu Tsou, a fellow Chinese student at Cambridge, in 1948. Her father Li Siguang was in England to preside over their wedding. Tsou later recalled the Cambridge years as the best time of the family. Their daughter, geologist Zou Zongping, was born in the 1950s in China. Tsou became a prominent biochemist and was also elected an academician of the CAS, making the Li-Tsou family the only one in China that produced three academicians. Li Lin died on 31 May 2003, at the age of 79.
