Huang Hua (黃華), a former translator for Mao Zedong (毛澤東) who oversaw China’s formation of diplomatic ties with the US in 1979, died on Wednesday aged 97.
State broadcaster CCTV said Huang died of an undisclosed illness.
Huang helped lay the foundation of China’s modern foreign policy, meeting secretly with then-US National Security adviser Henry Kissinger and helping draft the announcement of then-US president Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to the country in 1972.
Huang’s reward for this work was to be appointed the first People’s Republic of China representative to the UN when the country took up its seat, supplanting the Republic of China.
In 1976, Huang returned to Beijing, where he was made foreign minister. He was able to survive the upheavals associated with the purge of the Gang of Four leaders, being trusted enough by the newly emergent Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) not only to remain as foreign minister, but also to serve concurrently as a state councilor and vice premier until 1985, when he retired from all the positions.
The son of a teacher, Huang was born Wang Rumei (王汝梅) just after the fall of the Qing dynasty in Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing. He studied at Yanjing University in Beijing and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1936, just before the war with Japan, which was to devastate the country. It was then that he assumed the name Huang Hua.
His first significant role came that year, when he accompanied the American journalist Edgar Snow to the communist bases around Yan’an, in northern China, resulting in Snow’s book Red Star Over China, which was widely credited with introducing the communists and their leadership to the rest of the world.
In 1958, he took part in tentative initial contacts with the US in Warsaw, Poland, that at the time were the only conduit for direct contacts between the sides.
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