Zhang Hanzhi, Mao’s Tutor, Is Dead at 72


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By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: January 31, 2008

SHANGHAI — Zhang Hanzhi, a former Chinese diplomat who once served as Mao’s English tutor and who also interpreted for President Nixon during his historic trip to China in 1972, died on Saturday. She was 72.
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United Press International

Zhang Hanzhi, a diplomat and interpreter, explained Chinese culinary art to Pat Nixon in Beijing in 1972.

Ms. Zhang’s death was reported in the state-controlled media, and her daughter, Hong Huang, a media entrepreneur in Beijing, posted a notice of the death on her popular blog.

A funeral is planned for Friday, at Babaoshan, the Beijing cemetery for the Communist Party’s elite.

Ms. Zhang, who was reared by a family with close ties to Mao, was selected by him to become a diplomat. She was a member of the Chinese delegation that traveled to New York in 1971, when Beijing took back its seat at the United Nations.

Two years later, she married the head of China’s United Nations delegation, Qiao Guanhua, who served as the country’s foreign minister from 1974 to 1976 and helped open the country to the West. The two traveled together for high-level meetings with United States officials, including George Bush, while he was United Nations ambassador and chief of the United States Liaison Office, as well as Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

Ms. Zhang later wrote a best-selling memoir and became something of a celebrity in Beijing. Two years ago, she even played a small role in a movie alongside her daughter, Ms. Hong, herself a celebrity.

Zhang Hanzhi was born in 1935 to a Shanghai businessman and a shopkeeper who, after a dispute over who would raise the child, allowed her to be adopted by Zhang Shizhao, a lawyer and scholar who at one time was the country’s minister of education.

Among her adoptive father’s close friends was Yang Changji, who was both Mao’s college professor in Hunan Province and the father of his second wife, Yang Kaihui.

In 1918, Zhang Shizhao helped persuade Yang Changji to move to Beijing to teach. Mao followed soon after and found work at the library at Beijing University, where he began organizing revolutionary activities. A student group Mao led even got financial support from the Zhang family.

Zhang Hanzhi, a graduate of Beijing Foreign Studies University, said her own friendship with Mao began in 1963, when, at his 70th birthday, Mao greeted her and, learning that she knew English, asked that she serve as his private tutor.

She was 28, and not sure whether he meant it. A few days later, his office called.

“The chairman wanted the lessons to start the following day!” she recalled in an essay published in Time magazine in 1999. “I was dumbfounded. I was to teach the great leader whom over a billion people worshiped as their god.”

The tutoring, which involved informal talks about the outside world as well as English instruction, ended after a few months; in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, there was little contact with Mao, she said, except a few letters.

But in 1970, Mao summoned her again and asked her to join the diplomatic service. Soon after, she was working in the Foreign Ministry and interpreting for Prime Minister Zhou Enlai during Mr. Kissinger’s secret trip to China in 1971 and for Nixon during his 1972 visit, when the two countries re-established diplomatic ties and signed the Shanghai Communiqué, outlining bilateral relations.

Her first marriage, to Hong Junyan, a professor at Beijing University, ended in divorce in the 1970s. She then married Qiao Guanhua.

After Mao’s death, Ms. Zhang and Mr. Qiao were put under house arrest as part of a purge of people suspected of being close to Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, and the Gang of Four, a group blamed for manipulating Mao and creating havoc during the Cultural Revolution.

Ms. Zhang, who said her family had been victims during the Cultural Revolution, recalled in a 1999 interview with The New York Times that the guards had left hints about what she should do: scissors, then a rope.

“But not for a moment did I ever think of killing myself,” she said. “I knew how to survive.”

She and her husband were released in 1980. Qiao Guanhua died in 1983 at the age of 70.