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 and drama,” Ms. Yan wrote.
Mr. Yan was thrust onto the center stage for key moments in China’s Cold War years. He was a Russian-language translator for Mao as he built an alliance with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and later as the alliance slid toward bitter animosity. He accompanied Chinese leaders again in 1989, when the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, visited Beijing to heal the rupture.
But the most dramatic and perhaps most painful episode of Mr. Yan’s life involved the pro-democracy protests that occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989, overshadowing Mr. Gorbachev’s visit. Mr. Yan became an envoy to the protesters and to the Chinese intellectuals who were trying to head off a bloody clampdown.
“All his life, Yan Mingfu stayed inside the system as a follower of the Communist Party, but at that crucial moment in 1989, his humanity overcame his party-mindedness,” Wang Dan, a former student leader of the 1989 protests now living the United States, wrote in a tribute. “People like him are very rare inside the Communist Party.”
Mr. Yan was born in Beijing on Nov. 11, 1931, the youngest of six children. His father, Yan Baohang, was an official of the ruling Nationalist Party who secretly joined the rival Communist Party in 1937 and became a clandestine agent. His mother, Gao Sutong, was a homemaker.
The family moved from city to city as the Japanese invasion expanded across China, Mr. Yan recalled in a memoir published in 2015, and settled in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, which became the wartime base for the Nationalists.
The young Mingfu watched as mysterious visitors — Communist Party contacts — slipped into a second-floor room of the family home to meet with his father.
“Ostensibly, they were playing mahjong,” Mr. Yan wrote in his memoir. “In fact, they were holding meetings.”
The family later moved to northeast China, near the frontier with the Soviet Union, and Mr. Yan decided to study Russian. After Mao’s Communists took control in 1949, he became an interpreter for government officials. It was an era when China looked to the Soviet Union as an inspiration, and Mr. Yan became an interpreter for the Soviet advisers helping Mao’s government.
In 1955, he married Wu Keliang, a fellow interpreter. She died in 2015. In addition to their daughter, Ms. Yan, he is survived by a grandson, according to a memoir that his daughter wrote about her family.
Mr. Yan accompanied Chinese leaders on visits to the…
2023-07-07 10:24:36
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