May 18, 2021
Isabel Hilton is a Scottish-born journalist and founder of China Dialogue, a non-profit website that produces bilingual stories about the environment and climate change in China. She was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2009 for “services to promoting environmental awareness in China.”
Hilton’s first exposure to China came as a teenager when, during a high school exchange year in Ohio, she challenged herself to learn Chinese. While that wasn’t very successful, she did manage to learn it upon returning to Scotland in order to matriculate in Chinese at the University of Edinburgh. She then lived in China for three years and studied at the Peking Languages Institute and at Fudan University in Shanghai.