Liu Yandong, China’s Former Vice Premier, Dies at 80
Liu Yandong, who rose to become China’s highest-ranking woman in a male-dominated leadership, died in Beijing on Wednesday at the age of 80, state media reported.
BEIJING, October 28- Liu Yandong, China’s former vice premier and one of the few women ever to sit on the Politburo, has died in Beijing. She was 80. State-run Xinhua news agency reported her death on Wednesday. The brief reports available gave no cause of death and no funeral details.
Liu was born in November 1945 in Nantong, in the eastern province of Jiangsu. She joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1964, the same year she started university. Her path to the top was slow, and it began in a lab, not in an office.
She studied engineering chemistry at Tsinghua University from 1964 to 1970. While still a student, she worked part-time as a political instructor. After she graduated, she went into industry. That training in science and engineering set her apart from many officials of her generation, and it may help explain why she was later trusted with education and technology.
Her next move was into politics. Liu took jobs in local administration and in the Communist Youth League, where she held senior posts through the 1980s. Youth work became her specialty. From 1982, she served as secretary-general of the Youth Ideological Education Research Center, and she also sat on a committee that promoted friendship between China and Japan.
In 1991, Liu joined the Central United Front Work Department. It’s the party body that builds ties with people and groups outside the party, including other political groups, business leaders and overseas communities. She became its deputy head in 1995 and its head in 2002. She held that post until 2007. Over the same years, she served as a vice chairperson of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a major political advisory body.
The biggest steps came after 2007. That year, Liu joined the Politburo, the party’s elite decision-making body. At the time, she was the only woman on it. She was later re-elected to it in 2012. In 2008, she became a state councillor, a senior government post. In 2013, she took the job of vice premier under Premier Li Keqiang. She had also served during the years Wen Jiabao was premier.
Her work as vice premier covered education, science, culture, health and sports. These are some of the largest social areas in the country. In 2014, she was also named a deputy director of the party’s leading group for reform and development of the cultural system. She was involved in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. She also advocated for China’s cultural exchanges overseas, meeting foreign leaders during her years in office. She was photographed in Berlin in November 2016 on an official visit.
Liu rose to prominence in a system that once belonged to men. She is remembered as the most powerful woman in China during most of her time in government service. In the history of China since its foundation in 1949, few women have been appointed to the Politburo, and Liu is among the three. The other two are Wu Yi, who was the vice premier, and Sun Chunlan, who was also the vice premier. Currently, all 21 members of the Politburo are men. Liu retired from politics in 2018. She received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Stony Brook University in the United States.
Her career covered decades of the Chinese Communist Party’s political and administrative system. She went from industrial work to the youth league. She moved on to the United Front Work Department. She finished on the State Council and the Politburo, at the top of the party and the government.
Xinhua, China’s state news agency, said Liu Yandong died in Beijing on Wednesday. The announcement marked the end of a long career in which she rose from grassroots industrial work to become one of the most senior women in China’s political leadership, serving as a Politburo member, State Councilor, and Vice Premier before retiring in 2018.
