Li Xiaoyan, a female narcotics cop in southwest China's Sichuan Province, checks a driver's license.[West China Metropolis Daily]

To most people who meet her Li Xiaoyan is just like any normal Chinese woman. After washing herself and putting on light makeup, she walks around the city center, strolling from one shop to another. She stops briefly, to take a selfie with a smile.

However, in the evening, her appearance changes. She puts on police uniform and body armor.

Li is a worker on the forefront of the fight against drug dealers in her hometown, on the Western Sichuan Plateau at an altitude of over 1,000 meters.

With sharp eyes, she has often searched for hidden drugs, and her eloquence can easily expose a lie. Drawing upon her advantages as a woman, she has played various roles or her job, including posing undercover as a highway toll collector, salesperson, or migrant worker, in order to approach suspects.

In a case in 2010, Li disguised herself as a napkin seller, staying around a shop in an alley where a drug trafficker's car was parked. She chatted with the shop owner during the day and pretended to be a diner in the evening whilst monitoring the car until the dealer cropped up and was seized the next afternoon.

Having been a narcotics policewoman for six years, Li has succeeded in many cases, breaking the tacit rule that female narcotics cops should stay at the office. But she almost lost her life in 2011 when she joined a move to seize a drug trafficker near a bus station in Chengdu, capital of southwestern China's Sichuan Province.

While her colleagues rushed to a car of the dealer, Li opened the door first, rushed to the seat beside the driver and grabbed the steering wheel when the car went out of control to the road side, bumping her head on the control board.

Before falling into a coma, she grasped the drug dealer and urged her colleagues to catch him.

When she woke up and was asked by her crying son why she did not run away at danger, she said: "I don't have any idea of fear in my mind."

Li Xiaoyan takes a selfie on the street.[West China Metropolis Daily]

Li Xiaoyan at work [West China Metropolis Daily]

(Source: West China Metropolis Daily/Translated and edited by Women of China)

By Li TianyuEditor: Kate Wu(Women of China)