Yang Lijuan was born in 1978 into a poor family in a rural area of Jianyang County, southwest China's Sichuan Province. She began working at Haidilao at the age of 17. At that time, Haidilao was just one of the many local hot pot restaurants. Over the next 24 years, she rose from an ordinary waitress to the COO of Haidilao, which listed its shares in September 2018 on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.