Wu County
Meng was born in July 1947 in Wu County, a present-day urban district of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. In the 1960s, he headed to Changxing Island in Shanghai to become a tractor operator. For the next 13 years he worked on the rural agricultural cooperative. He graduated from the Shanghai Mechanical College (now part of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology). He joined the Communist Party of China in 1971. He became head of the rural cooperative in 1981.