Liu Yang, born on 6 October 1978 in Zhengzhou in Henan province, is a Chinese military transport pilot and astronaut who became the first woman from China to fly in space. She grew up in a working-class family with roots in Linzhou, Anyang, and was an only child. As a girl she is reported to have imagined becoming a lawyer like the characters she saw on television, and later to have thought that working as a bus conductor would be appealing because it meant riding every day. Aviation was not an early fixed ambition, yet in 1997, when the People’s Liberation Army Air Force opened pilot recruitment to women in Zhengzhou, she entered the process and became the only local female candidate that year to clear the full sequence of medical and psychological tests. She joined the air force that year and trained at the aviation university in Changchun, qualifying as a pilot of transport aircraft.
By the time she was selected for astronaut training she had accumulated roughly 1,680 hours of flying time and had risen to deputy head of a flight unit with the rank of major. Chinese state accounts have highlighted an incident in which a bird strike damaged an engine of her aircraft shortly after takeoff; she is said to have maintained control, reported the situation, and returned the plane safely. That episode was later cited as evidence of composure under pressure. In 2010 she entered the second group of Chinese astronaut candidates, alongside Wang Yaping. After about two years of intensive training in spacecraft systems, rendezvous and docking, and space medicine, she was chosen for the crew of Shenzhou 9.
Shenzhou 9 launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on 16 June 2012, carrying commander Jing Haipeng, operator Liu Wang, and Liu Yang. The date was the forty-ninth anniversary of the launch of Vostok 6, which had carried Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. The mission achieved China’s first crewed docking, joining the Tiangong-1 experimental module. Liu Yang’s assigned work included medical experiments that examined how the human body responds to orbital flight. The crew spent just over twelve days and fifteen hours in space before returning on 29 June 2012. She was the first Chinese woman to reach orbit and the first Chinese woman to enter a space station module. Official media presented her as proof that female astronauts were treated the same as their male colleagues in selection and training; she herself said she had been told from the start that she was no different from the men, and that flying in space would simply take her higher and farther than flying in the atmosphere.
The flight made her a public figure in China. She received the honorary title of Heroic Astronaut. In 2013 she attended the National People’s Congress with the military delegation, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping praised her as a symbol that women can hold up half the sky and as an ambassador for the image of Chinese women. In 2016 she was appointed a part-time vice-president of the All-China Women’s Federation and was later re-elected. She married Zhang Hua; the couple have a son and a daughter, with the birth of the first child announced in 2015. Public profiles from the period of her first flight described her as an avid reader and someone who enjoyed cooking, and noted that she used the online name “little Flying Knight.”
A decade after her debut flight she returned to space on a far longer mission. On 5 June 2022 she launched aboard Shenzhou 14 with commander Chen Dong and operator Cai Xuzhe. The spacecraft docked with the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station, China’s permanent orbital outpost. The crew remained aboard for about six months, until 4 December 2022, a stay of roughly 182 days. Their work included supervising and supporting the arrival and integration of the Wentian and Mengtian laboratory modules, testing life-support systems, and conducting scientific experiments as the station moved from assembly toward routine operations. On 1 September 2022 Liu Yang performed a spacewalk, becoming the second Chinese woman to do so, after Wang Yaping’s extravehicular activity on the Shenzhou 13 mission. Combined with her first flight, her total time in space is approximately 195 days.
Her two missions mark distinct stages of the Chinese human spaceflight program. Shenzhou 9 demonstrated crewed docking and short-duration occupation of an experimental module. Shenzhou 14 belonged to the construction phase of a multi-module station intended for continuous habitation. In both cases Liu Yang’s presence was treated domestically as a milestone for women in a field that had been exclusively male in China until 2012. Internationally she is counted among the relatively small number of women who have flown more than once and who have conducted spacewalks. She was not the first woman to fly twice—that distinction among Chinese astronauts belongs to Wang Yaping—nor the first Chinese woman to walk in space, but she remains the first Chinese woman to reach orbit and the first to board a Chinese space station.
Liu Yang’s career also illustrates the military character of China’s astronaut corps. Like most of her colleagues in the early groups, she came from the air force rather than from a civilian scientific track. Selection emphasized flight experience, physical fitness, psychological stability, and the ability to absorb technical training quickly. Her transport-pilot background differed from the fighter-pilot path of some male colleagues, yet the published record presents the same sequence of screening, isolation training, centrifuge work, and spacecraft simulation. After selection she held ranks that advanced with her service; sources have described her as a major at the time of her first flight and later as a senior officer associated with the space program.
Outside the technical record, her public role has mixed operational anonymity with ceremonial visibility. Chinese astronauts are less constantly exposed in Western media than their NASA or Roscosmos counterparts, yet firsts are heavily covered by state outlets. Liu Yang’s 2012 flight was framed as both a technical success and a social signal. Her later appointment in the women’s federation extended that signal into organizational life, while her second flight returned attention to the engineering work of station assembly. Accounts of her personal life remain limited: marriage, two children, origins in Henan, and a childhood that did not initially point toward aviation. The contrast between those ordinary beginnings and two orbital missions is a standard feature of biographical sketches published in China.
As of the mid-2020s she is listed as an active taikonaut with two completed flights. China’s program has since flown additional women, including Wang Yaping, Wang Haoze, and Lai Ka-ying, so Liu Yang is no longer the sole female reference point. She nevertheless occupies a fixed place in the sequence: the first Chinese woman in space, a crew member on the first crewed docking, a participant in the six-month assembly expedition of Shenzhou 14, and the second Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk. Those facts are independent of the ceremonial language that surrounded her. They locate her inside a program that moved, within a single decade, from short visits to a single experimental module to continuous occupation of a multi-module station. Her path from a 1997 pilot recruit in Zhengzhou to a 2022 spacewalker on Tiangong is the concrete record on which that place rests.