Looking back to JUCCCE's establishment in 2007, Liu is proud of her team's achievements.

"I think everybody has been surprised by how much progress JUCCCE has made, as a very tiny NGO," she said.

Although the team never had more than 10 full-time staff, JUCCCE has many more dedicated volunteers, many of whom are university students and graduates from the US and Britain.

Liu was born in Michigan in 1968. A graduate of MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, she went on to become a dotcom entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, before going to Shanghai to found a venture capital firm with her husband eight years ago.

She recalled that the founding of JUCCCE was "a bit of an accident". In the spring of 2007, Liu organized the MIT Forum on the Future of Energy in China, which was attended by government representatives, business leaders and technology experts of both countries.

The attendees suggested that a NGO to facilitate climate change initiatives focusing on China would be useful, so Liu took the lead and founded JUCCCE.

Without much previous knowledge or experience in the environmental sector, Liu made JUCCCE possible through exercising her leadership skills, and matching Western scientists and engineers with the right channels in China.

One story that greatly inspired her is the old folk story in which a hungry stranger persuades local people of a town to give him food by pretending to be cooking soup from a stone. The curious villagers bought him additional ingredients, which together cooked a tasty soup they all believed was made from the stone.

"We're the people that bring everyone together. Somebody brings an onion, somebody brings a carrot, and somebody brings a meat bone, we're just the pot, and we are more than happy to share the soup when it's done," Liu said.