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Yuanyue Dang

Jun Mai

Hu Dehua, son of the former Chinese leader Hu Yaobang, has died at the age of 76.
He died on Sunday in Beijing due to a heart attack, sources told the South China Morning Post.
Hu was a liberal businessman who repeatedly spoke out for political reform and press freedom in China – rare among the descendants of the Communist Party’s early top officials, a group known as “princelings”.
In 2016, he became vice-director of the outspoken magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu. But he was in the role for less than three months as he and other senior staff were replaced in July of that year in a management reshuffle that led to a sweeping shift in the magazine’s editorial direction.
The magazine’s articles touched on sensitive events in the party’s history and advocated political reform.
Hu’s father was a widely respected liberal leader who died of a heart attack on April 15, 1989 – two years after he was ousted by party conservatives for tolerating “bourgeois liberalisation”.
Mourning over the former party general secretary’s death sparked one of the largest pro-democracy movements in modern China. Because of this, the elder Hu’s name became taboo in China and was censored by the official media for many years.
Hu Yaobang also played a leading role in vindicating those persecuted and punished during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, a period known as the “decade of catastrophe”.

Hu Dehua was born in 1948 on a coal truck in the middle of an evacuation during the Chinese civil war. His exact place of birth is unknown.
Because his father was targeted during the Cultural Revolution, Hu Dehua spent two years working as a road builder in Beijing after graduating from high school. He eventually joined the People’s Liberation Army in the early 1970s and studied radio communication at a military academy.
Hu then taught at the PLA Telecommunication Engineering College in Nanjing in the 1980s, and later headed a software development centre at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where his father briefly served as vice-president in 1975.
He set up his own software company in 1994 and gradually expanded the business into investment in the environmental and energy sectors.
Hu Dehua was among the relatives of Chinese political elites named in the “Panama Papers” leak in 2016. He later admitted having an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands.
He is one of the few princelings to have openly spoken out about what he viewed as a lack of progress in China’s political reform towards democracy and rule of law, and warned of the return of Maoist ideology.
His mother, Li Zhao, the wife of Hu Yaobang, died in 2017 at the age of 96.
His elder brother, Hu Deping, retired from official posts after serving as a senior official in the United Front Work Department, the National People’s Congress and the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.
Additional reporting by Liu Zhen


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Hu Dehua, son of former liberal Chinese leader Hu Yaobang, dies at 76

Hu Dehua is one of the few princelings to have openly spoken out about what he viewed as a lack of progress towards democracy and the rule of law in China. Photo: Simon Song

Hu Dehua poses in front of a portrait of his father, Hu Yaobang, at his home in Beijing in 2014. Photo: Simon Song 

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The younger Hu is remembered as an outspoken proponent of political reform and press freedom – rare among China’s princelings


The younger Hu is remembered as an outspoken proponent of political reform and press freedom – rare among China’s princelings.


Hu Dehua, son of former liberal Chinese leader Hu Yaobang, dies at 76

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The younger Hu is remembered as an outspoken proponent of political reform and press freedom – rare among China’s princelings

The younger Hu is remembered as an outspoken proponent of political reform and press freedom – rare among China’s princelings