Huang Hua obituary

An eminent diplomat, he re-established China's links to the US

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• Kerry Brown
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 November 2010 18.50 GMT
• Article history

For more than half a century, the diplomat and statesman Huang Hua, who has died aged 97, played a pivotal role in communist China's relations with the international community. In the early 1970s he was key in facilitating the rapprochement between the People's Republic of China and the US, reopening relations after their effective termination in 1949.

In 1971 Huang was sent to meet Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, who had been mandated by President Richard Nixon to take the lead on these exploratory talks. Transcripts released by the US several decades later showed Huang to be an effective, sharp operator, more than able to hold his own with the clever and devious Kissinger. By late 1971, a deal for the re-establishment of relations had been struck, leading to Nixon's groundbreaking visit to Beijing in 1972.

Huang's reward for this work was to be appointed the first People's Republic of China representative to the UN when the country took up its seat there, supplanting the Republic of China on Taiwan. In 1976 Huang returned to Beijing, where he was made foreign minister. He was able to survive the upheavals associated with the purge of the Gang of Four leaders, being trusted enough by the newly emergent Deng Xiaoping not only to remain as foreign minister, but also to serve concurrently as a state councillor and vice-premier until the mid-1980s, when he retired from all of these positions.

The son of a teacher, Huang was born Wang Rumei, just after the fall of the Qing dynasty, in the province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing. He studied at Yanjing University in Beijing, and joined the Communist party in 1936, just before the war with Japan, which was to devastate the country. It was then that he assumed the name Huang Hua.

His first significant role came that year, when he accompanied the American journalist Edgar Snow to the communist bases around Yan'an, in northern China, resulting in Snow's book Red Star Over China (1937), which was widely credited with introducing the communists and their leadership to the rest of the world. Huang maintained friendly relations with Snow until his death in 1972, serving as Snow's translator when he visited China in 1970 as a guest of Mao Zedong.

Active in the Beijing Communist Youth League and a number of other party posts during his early career, Huang was assigned as an assistant to Zhu De, one of the greatest military leaders of communist forces, in the 1940s. After the end of the Sino-Japanese war, he served as secretary to General Ye Jianying during the civil war against the nationalists. Huang's excellent spoken English meant that, upon the communist victory in 1949, he was placed in the newly established ministry of foreign affairs. He took part in truce talks during the Korean war from 1950 to 1953.

From 1958, Huang spent much of his time outside China. He had a liaison role in Warsaw and served as ambassador, first in Ghana, then Egypt and Canada. He was the sole senior representative of China abroad in the depths of the Cultural Revolution in 1967, an era in which China was at its most isolated. He was finally summoned back, spending a year in the countryside in 1970 before returning to Beijing to become involved in the secret talks with the US.

Huang was subsequently active in three key areas of China's new international diplomacy. First, he negotiated and then signed a friendship accord with Japan in 1978, re-establishing formal relations with a country with which, in his own memory, China had experienced a devastating war. Japan was to prove one of China's key partners for the economic reforms that took place over the following two decades.

Next, Huang accompanied Deng on his visit to the US in 1979, appearing in many of the photographs with his trademark broad, toothy smile, while Deng took centre stage. That year, Huang drafted the accord by which the US formally recognised the People's Republic over Taiwan. Finally, from 1980, Huang was instrumental in the talks with the UK over the status of Hong Kong, parts of which were due to be returned to Chinese sovereignty after the expiry of their leases in 1997.

While foreign minister, Huang was energetically engaged in the re-estabishment of the republic as an international player. He effectively retired in 1985 but remained head of a number of friendship associations. For many major diplomats outside China, from the 1950s onwards, Huang was their first point of contact with the new regime in Beijing and the man mandated with building dialogue and trust. As such, his ability to speak on behalf of the republic, and assert its interests when necessary (he roundly condemned the US for its continuing arms sales to Taiwan from 1979 onwards), did his country huge service.

Huang married He Liliang in the 1930s. She survives him, along with his two sons, a daughter and several grandchildren.

• Huang Hua (Wang Rumei), diplomat, born 25 January 1913; died 24 November 2010