Background
Qian Qichen was born in 1928 in Tianjin in north China.
Qian Qichen was born in 1928 in Tianjin in north China.
From 1942 to 1945, Qian attended the Utopia University High School in Shanghai. He secretly joined the Communist Party of China in 1942 at the age of 14. From 1945 to 1949 he worked at the Ta Kung Pao newspaper. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, he was member of the Party Committee and Secretary of the Communist Youth League Committees of the Xuhui, Changning, and Yangpu districts of Shanghai.
From 1955 to 1963 Qian was employed as the second secretary at the Chinese embassy to the Soviet Union. This marked his debut in the Chinese diplomatic service. During this period he acquired a working knowledge of several languages: English, French, and Russian. His knowledge of Russian is of a high proficiency. He returned to China in 1963 and was given a state council assignment in charge of the overseas higher-learning section of the central government.
During the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, Qian Qichen spent time at a May Seventh Cadre School in rural Anhui province doing physical labor as part of the ^downward transfer's movement waged by Mao5s rad-icals. He was rehabilitated in 1972 and was given an assignment as a councilor at the Chinese embassy in Moscow. After a brief stint as ambassador to an African nation, he returned to Beijing as the spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry. By 1982 Qian had risen to his position as the deputy foreign minister responsible for Soviet Union and Eastern European affairs in the foreign ministry in Beijing.
In that capacity, plus the fact that Qian was fluent in Russian and knowl-edgeable about Soviet affairs, in 1982-1983 he was thrust into the task of key Chinese negotiator in the Sino-Soviet bilateral border talks, which paved the way for the subsequent Soviet initiative by Mikhail Gorbachev in his 1986 Vladivostok speech for rapprochement. Qian Qichen led the Chinese delegation in a dozen rounds of bilateral talks that centered on the border demarkation of the disputed boundaries and water system of the Amur and Ussuri rivers, the scene of Sino-Soviet clashes in 1969. At these bilateral talks Qian Qichen's proposal that the middle channel of the rivers should serve as the borderline between the two nations was finally accepted.
In 1988 Qian Qichen succeeded Wu Xueqian as China's seventh foreign minister when Li Peng, another leader trained in the Soviet Union, became the prime minister. However, that elevation to foreign affairs minister also migfit possibly be attributed to Qian’s long-time association with his predecessor, Wu Xueqian, who in the early 1940s was the Party's overall secretary for the Shanghai youth corps underground operation and a supervisor of Qian's early revolutionary student activities.
Qian Qichen was elected to the party’s Politburo in 1992 and reelected at the CCP's Fifteenth Party Congress held in September 1997. He vacated the foreign minister position to Tang Jiaxuan at the Ninth National People's Congress (March 1998), but remained as one of the vice-premiers of the state council, charged with the responsibility of supervising foreign and international affairs in the central government under Zhu Rongji, the new premier.
Qian Qichen was married in 1952 and has two grown children. His son, Qian Ning, graduated with a master's degree in Chinese literature from People's University in Beijing and later attended the University of Michigan for further graduate work. He has written a popular best-seller book in Chinese recounting his experiences in the United States.
12th CCP Central Committee 1982, member 1985, member 13th Central Committee since 1987.
He was married to Zhou Hanqiong. They had a son and a daughter.