Petite, pretty Zhouzhu, host of the Wonderful Life Weekly program broadcast on the BTV Life channel, more commonly known as Jojo, is a postgraduate in International Communications from Columbia University.

Her TV program is widely watched in China, but its viewers probably don't realize that Jojo has abilities that extend far beyond cooking and housework. She is president of the Beijing Huijia Shixun Media Technology Co., Ltd, and also of a Bilingual Kindergarten run on American administrative lines called JoJo Children's English Home.

On her program Wonderful Life Weekly , Jojo presents to her Chinese audiences the western concept of self-motivation, encouraging them to move on from being a dreamer to a doer.

The Fun of Creation
In 1988, 21-year-old Jojo started life as a student, majoring in international relations at Bowdoin College, a private university in the State of Maine, Northeast America. During her senior year she worked as intern at the UN in Geneva. In 1994, Jojo got her master's degree in international communications and international finance from the Columbia University International Relations Institute, and subsequently worked at the Wall Street Weekly and on the United Nations Developments Program. Having lived abroad for more than ten years, she has had the benefit of many different cultural influences.

The Birth of Wonderful Life Weekly
While a student at Columbia University Jojo often held dinner parties for her American as well as Chinese friends, and so would serve both popular western and Chinese dishes. The research entailed in home entertaining became part of her daily life, and it was not long before she became adept at, baking, handicrafts, houseplant cultivation and macrame.

It was in 1999 while she was expecting her first child that Jojo became a full-time housewife and, caught up in the pervading Internet "fever," set up a service website. This sideline gave Jojo valuable experience as to how to run a company and the business procedures it entailed. Eventually, she took the advice of a friend that worked in the media and came back to China to see if she could make a successful business venture on her home ground.

In 2001, Jojo established the Beijing Huijia Shixun Media Technology Co., Ltd. and the TV program Wonderful Life Weekly. Some of her contemporaries were nonplussed as to why she should give up her life of comparative ease as a housewife in the US and take the risk of setting up a business in China. But Jojo is, as the saying goes, more than just a pretty face; she knows that since entering the WTO, China is the place to do for business.

Jojo sees her TV program as the chance to share with Chinese women what she learned during her time overseas, particularly that related to the home. Her research showed that there were few programs on Chinese TV specifically aimed at housewives, so she began to working out a format, based on a combination of Chinese and Western aspects of home and child care, for Wonderful Life Weekly.

Household Ecology
Jojo's latest theme on her program is that of a green lifestyle through utilizing waste for home decorations. She points out that the best way to save resources is to re-use what would otherwise be thrown out.

One example of needless waste, particularly in China, is that of excessive packaging, particularly that of seasonal gifts such as mooncakes, which is useless once the contents have been eaten and enjoyed. Wonderful Life Weekly together with Starbucks recently staged a program showing how to make home decorations from this opulent packaging. As Jojo says, "Housewives know best exactly how much waste is generated from packaging. By showing them how to re-use it in a decorative way I can encourage a green lifestyle that is also inventive as well as pleasing to the eye."
 

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