Sanny Yuzhen Jiang (left), a UK-based practicing eye doctor, and Suwei Jiang (right), an equity partner at PwC UK, pose for pictures at the Milan award ceremony in London.(Photo by See Li/For China Daily)
Also highly commended was Jiang Suwei, an equity partner at PwC UK. She is the first Mainland Chinese to be made equity partner in a big 4 accountancy firm in the UK. She helped the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW) set up in China and was instrumental in devising a ground breaking PwC/Tsinghua University Flying Start programme for students to take Chartered Accountancy qualifications from ICAEW while completing their university studies.
Ang Swee Chai, founder and patron of Medical Aid for Palestinians, was awarded for contribution to community and charitable causes. As a full time orthopaedic surgeon in an NHS hospital she was able to pursue her humanitarian work for helping Palestinian refugees over three decades, often exposing herself to danger in war torn areas.
Sanny Yuzhen Jiang, a UK-based practicing eye doctor and clinician scientist, was also highly commended for her voluntary work in the community and charitable causes.
She founded Yi Tian Yi Ren, an eye charity that has so far provided free-sight saving surgeries to 1,544 patients struggling with blindness and poverty. She is also a volunteer cataract surgery trainer at Helen Keller International, an organisation which has trained numerous rural doctors to provide cost effective surgeries to serve thousands of patients suffering reversible blindness-leading diseases.
For far too long Chinese women have kept a generally low profile but Mulan aims to address this issue by encouraging Chinese women to use their skills and talents to help others.
"We want to connect the successful Chinese ladies globally to younger Chinese ladies so that they can help each other, but more important, they can help others in society," Lai said. More than 200 politicians, business leaders and media professionals attended the award ceremony.
The Mulan awards were first organized in 2009 by Sonny Leong, chair of the Chinese for Labour political group, Katy Blair, co-founder of the Islington Chinese Association, and Meeling Ng, a Labour councillor who is is currently an Independent Governor on the Board of London South Bank University.
Hoping to assure the public that the award is non-political and open to all, they subsequently decided to establish the Mulan Foundation Network in 2013 as a registered charity and invited Lai to be the chair.