After that she began her career on Wall Street, where she has worked for, among others, Credit Suisse First Boston and The Franklin Templeton Fiduciary Trust Co as well as hedge funds.

Five years ago, she launched her own business, JL Warren Capital LLC, an equity research firm specializing in China. She combines this with being a columnist for Forbes.com and Bloomberg LP.

In her book, she discusses well-known Chinese companies such as Baidu Inc, Qihoo 360 Technology Co Ltd and Ctrip.com International Ltd as well as banks such as ICBC Ltd and China Construction Bank Corp. She also deals with issues such as China's shadow banking crisis and local government finance.

Li has been accused of being bearish about the Chinese economy - something which she denies - but she is concerned about the current level of debt.

"What most of my clients are really concerned about in China is the credit bubble. I think it has got to the stage where it is at a critical high. It just can't get any bigger."

She says she worries about poor corporate governance being behind another poor performing year for the Shanghai Composite Index. It fell 7.4 percent in 2013 to 2097.30, while the S&P 500 had its best annual performance for 16 years, rising 29.6 percent to 1848.

"It has been down whereas all the other markets have been up. All the Chinese portfolio managers complain to me that they wished they just invested in the S&P 500.

"It is not that there aren't any good businesses in China but a lot of them are privately owned. A lot of the listed companies are young and they don't know how to deal with corporate governance very well."

Li says the book, which took her five months to write, was to focus predominantly on Chinese stock market issues but she soon decided that she wanted to include material about her own background.

"When I first started writing it I was told by the publisher to focus 80 percent of the content on business but I insisted I needed to include some memoir element from the 1980s and 1990s," she says.

Arriving on Wall Street in her 20s, she says, was far less daunting than starting her college education at Middlebury College, Vermont, when she realized she only had a shaky grasp of English.

She says the liberal arts education she got there represented a big departure from a Chinese rote learning education.

"I was doing a history of art course and was completely lost. I went to an office of one of the professors to get him to tell me how to tell whether a particular painting was good. He said you have got to answer whether it speaks to you. It was the first time I realized you have to observe with your heart as well as your head. It is not just about one plus one equals two," she says.

Li has not been someone without setbacks with her Aurarian Capital Management, a hedge fund that specialized in green stocks, crashing after three years in 2008.