By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-03-31 13:31:44 | Updated at 2025-04-03 05:11:32
2 days ago
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.
