Ji-li Jiang was born in 1954 in Shanghai, China. She was a science teacher before coming to the United States in 1984, having graduated from Shanghai Teachers' College and Shanghai University. Jiang worked as an operations analyst for a hotel chain in Hawaii after graduating from the University of Hawaii, and then as the budget director for a health-care company in Chicago. She founded East West Exchange in 1992 to encourage cultural interchange between Western countries and China.