As a relatively new agency, at the China Speakers Bureau, never has a shortage of female speakers: women are still a minority at our lists and rankings, but a sizable minority of about 40 percent. We seldom point that out to our clients and potential clients, but want to make for once an exception.

Author Zhang Lijia, author of the bestseller Lotus: A Novel, wrote a short story, the Silk Road, for Discovery the magazine of Cathay Pacific and tells in an interview about her preferences while traveling and a new book project on China’s left-behind children.

The Times Literary Supplement reports on an evening with author Zhang Lijia of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China recently in London. One of the subjects: how did Chinese women fare under the market economy, introduce by Deng Xiaoping. About the government as a big boys’ club.

Prostitution is a mirror of society, tells Beijing-based author Zhang Lijia at the BBC. Her book Lotus: A Novel shows some of China’s most urgent problems related to prostitution: migration, the gap between men and women and moral decline.

Sarah Mellors reviews for the LA Review of Books Zhang Lijia’s Lotus: A Novel. The novel is a telling story of how China’s society works, she says, and both main characters Lotus and Bing illustrate many issues: rural-urban divide, economic development without political liberalization, the post-Mao moral vacuum and money worshiping, and the tension between so-called traditional Chinese values and modern concerns.

Twelve year it took author Zhang Lijia of Lotus: A Novel to write her book on prostitution in China. She sits down with Josh Chin of the Wall Street Journal to discuss how women are caught between the country’s market economy and filial piety.

Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China discusses at TimeOut Shanghai her book, the growth of prostitution and how it relates to women’s lives. “When your stomach is full, you start thinking about sex.”

Journalist Zhang Lijia’s book Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China hides nice jewels in different corners. Sex workers often held very strong religious believes, she tells Karen Ma in AsianCha.”I believe it is their way of cleansing themselves, but also because they feel the deities won’t judge them.”

Zhang Lijia, Ian Johnson and Howard French made it to the top-25 of China books of the Signature website of the US literary agency with the same name. The authors are praised, as they help to move away from the classic monolithic picture the West had from China.

The Asian Review of Books puts author and journalist Zhang Lijia’s book Lotus: A Novel in perspective in their review by Glyn Ford of the widely acclaimed work. “In the end the women are stronger than the men,” Ford concludes.