Former vice premier Bo Yibo dies aged 98
17 January 2007
Bo Yibo, one of the Chinese Communist revolutionaries who forged the 1949 revolution and a member of the "Eight Immortals" who wielded enormous power over the country's political scene in the 1980s and early 1990s, has died at age 98. A state media report released Tuesday hailed Bo as a "remarkable proletarian revolutionary and a brilliant leader of our party's economic work", the Financial Times reported. He died of an undisclosed illness. Bo was credited with coordinating attacks on the invading Japanese in northern Shanxi province in the 1930s and went on to become a leading economic official in the PRC. He was purged during the Cultural Revolution as one of the "61 renegades" who had spent time in Kuomintang prisons, but was later rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping. His political legacy survives in the form of his son Bo Xilai, currently China's minister of commerce. Read more in the Editors' Blog.