As bilateral trade and cultural exchanges between China and Latin America continue to deepen, cross-cultural professionals have become a driving force for transnational business expansion and regional market integration. Liyu Zhang, a cross-border operations and management professional based in Bogotá, has built a career spanning education, corporate administration, transnational operations, and independent entrepreneurship, working as a link between Chinese enterprises and local Latin American markets.
With more than a decade of cross-cultural management experience, and proficient in Mandarin, Cantonese, English, and C1-level Spanish, Zhang has long worked within Colombia’s business and cultural scene, developing local market insight, cross-team coordination skills, and cross-border resource networks. Her professional experience covers well-known Chinese multinational enterprises, including Huawei and Honor, along with local Colombian companies and large Sino-foreign cooperative projects. This background helps her understand both the operational logic of Chinese enterprises expanding overseas and the consumption patterns, policy rules, and business practices of Latin American markets.
In her early overseas career, Zhang served as Executive Secretary and Administrative Assistant at Huawei’s Colombia branch, where she handled senior executive scheduling, transnational conference coordination, and multilingual business communication. She supported accurate and reliable information flow between the Chinese headquarters and overseas branches, which laid the groundwork for her later cross-border resource integration work. A move to the Bogotá Metro Line 1 project, a key Sino-Colombian infrastructure collaboration, put her in charge of foreign affairs and human resource management. There, she standardized the full process for Chinese employees’ local certification and entry, and led employee training programs covering nearly 400 people, helping address cross-cultural management and team coordination challenges on large Chinese-funded overseas projects.
Since 2024, Zhang has served as Administrative Manager of Honor’s Colombia business division, overseeing overseas office operations, supplier management, multilingual document review, and Sino-Colombian cultural exchange. She refined the local logistics and administrative systems supporting Honor’s overseas presence, and brought cultural communication into daily operations by taking part in Sino-Colombian corporate cultural activities that strengthened the local presence of Chinese technology brands. During this period, she received the Honor’s Excellent New Employee award for her work in overseas business localization.
Beyond her work with large Chinese multinationals, Zhang has practiced cross-border business connections through her own entrepreneurship. From 2008 to 2018, she independently ran a cross-cultural catering business in Bogotá for a decade. That experience gave her a close understanding of Latin American consumer demand, local market dynamics, and cross-cultural customer service, a perspective that sets her apart from managers with a purely corporate background.
In 2025, Zhang took on a new role as Supervisor and Legal Representative of PROEZA PRODUCTS S.A.S, a Chinese-owned flooring import company in Colombia. She is responsible for the company’s overall operations, sales strategy, team building, and cross-border resource coordination, opening a new channel for Chinese-manufactured products to reach the Colombian and wider Latin American markets. That same year, the China Enterprise Association invited her to take part in Chinese cultural performances, using cultural exchange to strengthen business and personal ties between China and Latin America.
From executive coordination and large-project foreign affairs to running her own business and handling cross-border trade, Zhang has consistently served as a link between Chinese capital, products, and technology and local Latin American markets. Her combination of business operations skills and cross-cultural communication makes her a valuable contributor to Sino-Latin American trade cooperation. As more Chinese enterprises expand into Latin America, professionals who understand both Chinese corporate systems and local market rules will keep playing an important role in supporting cooperation that benefits both sides.
