Tag: Deaths (Obituaries)

Zong Qinghou, Beverage Tycoon in China, Dies at 79

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Zong Qinghou, a self-made beverage entrepreneur who was once the richest person in China, died on Sunday. His death was announced by his company, Wahaha Group, which said that Mr. Zong had died from an unspecified illness and gave his age as 79. The company statement provided no further details. Mr. Zong’s rags-to-riches story had made him prominent in China even before a public feud with his foreign business partner considerably raised his profile — and his wealth. He founded a beverage company in the 1980s, and in the 1990s,…

Angela Chao, C.E.O. of Foremost Group, Dies in a Car Crash

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Angela Chao, the chief executive of a shipping company and part of a family prominent in American politics and business deals with China, died in a car crash on Sunday, in Texas. She was 50. Her family confirmed her death. Details about the accident were not immediately available. Ms. Chao had since 2018 been the chair and chief executive of the Chao family’s Foremost Group, which operates a global fleet of bulk carrier ships. The vessels are used to transport commodities like iron ore and soybeans. She was a sister…

Shih Ming-teh, Defiant Activist for a Democratic Taiwan, Dies at 83

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Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong campaigner for democracy in Taiwan who spent over two decades in prison for his cause and later started a protest movement against a president from his former party, died on Jan. 15, his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island’s capital. The cause was complications of an operation to remove a liver tumor, said his wife, Chia-chiun Chen Shih. Mr. Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally broken up by the police and that is now viewed as a turning point in Taiwan’s…

Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92

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Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 in Beijing. He was 92. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the China University of Political Science and Law, where he had served as president and was a longtime professor. Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and…

Merle Goldman, a Leading Expert on Communist China, Dies at 92

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In November 1974, a small group of American college presidents spent three weeks traveling through China, visiting universities, communes, factories and even the office of Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, who was still four years away from taking over as Communist Party leader. Though the United States had recently re-established relations with China, it was an insular, even forbidding place, utterly foreign to these Western visitors. Fortunately, the delegation had a famed Sinologist as a guide: Merle Goldman. A historian at Boston University, Dr. Goldman was still relatively early in her…

Li Keqiang, Former Chinese Premier, Dies of Heart Attack at 68

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China’s former premier Li Keqiang died of a heart attack on Friday, Chinese state media announced — an abruptly early end to a leader who had served alongside Xi Jinping for a decade until March. Mr. Li, 68, was visiting Shanghai when he suddenly suffered the heart failure near midnight on Thursday, a report on Chinese state television said. “All efforts to resuscitate him failed,” said the report. Mr. Li was once considered a potential top leader of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. But in the end, he was overtaken…

Ed Young Dies at 91; Infused His Illustrations With Chinese Tradition

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Ed Young, whose illustrations in some 100 children’s books, many of which he also wrote, mesmerized young and not-so-young readers with intricate depictions of fairy tales, poetry and his own life story as a Chinese immigrant, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 91. His daughter Antonia Young confirmed the death. Mr. Young trained as an architect and worked as a graphic designer; he never intended to become an illustrator of children’s books. But a chance opportunity to work on the book “The Mean Mouse…

Isabel Crook, Whose Life in China Spanned a Century of Change, Dies at 107

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Isabel Crook, a China-born daughter of Canadian missionaries who became one of her adopted country’s most celebrated foreign residents, beloved as an educator, anthropologist and articulate advocate for the Communist state, died on Sunday in Beijing. She was 107. Her son Carl Crook said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pneumonia. Mrs. Crook was among the last of a generation of Westerners born to missionaries in China in the decades before the Japanese invasion, World War II and the subsequent Communist revolution. The experience defined them. Some, like…

Seiichi Morimura, 90, Who Exposed Japanese Wartime Atrocities, Dies

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Seiichi Morimura, who wrote a searing exposé of the Japanese Army’s secret biological warfare program in occupied China, describing how it forcibly infected thousands of prisoners with deadly pathogens, died on July 24 in Tokyo. He was 90. The announcement of his death by his publisher, Kadokawa, was cited in Japanese media. Mr. Morimura detailed the atrocities committed by the Japanese program — called Unit 731 — in a widely sold book, “Akuma no Hoshoku,” or “The Devil’s Gluttony” (1981). Among the horrors he described were vivisections performed without anesthesia…

Yan Mingfu, Who Tried to Defuse the Tiananmen Powder Keg, Dies at 91

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Yan Mingfu, the son of a Chinese Communist Party spy who became Mao Zedong’s interpreter and a negotiator who sought to defuse the standoff between the party and student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square in 1989, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 91. His daughter, Yan Lan, confirmed the death in a statement in the Chinese magazine Caixin. She did not specify a cause, but Mr. Yan had endured a succession of illnesses in old age. “Dad passed away peacefully, putting a full stop on a life filled with tumult…