Qian Qichen hailed from a prominent scholarly family from Waigang (),
Jiading,
Jiangsu province (now in
Shanghai). He was a descendant of the celebrated
Qing dynasty historian
Qian Daxin. He was born in
Tianjin on 5 January 1928. From 1942 to 1945, Qian attended the
Utopia University High School in Shanghai. He secretly joined the
Chinese Communist Party 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. He successively served as Second Secretary in the Chinese Embassy, Director of Department of Overseas Chinese Students and Deputy Director General of the Foreign Department of the Ministry of Higher Education, and Counsellor in the Chinese Embassy. During the
Cultural Revolution, Qian was persecuted and sent to perform hard labour at a
May Seventh Cadre School from 1966 to 1972. After his political rehabilitation, he served as Ambassador to
Guinea (1974–76) and concurrently Ambassador to
Guinea-Bissau (1974–75). He went to work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1977 and was vice-minister of foreign affairs from 1982 to 1988 and minister from 1988 to 1998. He was
Vice Premier of the
State Council, under Premiers
Li Peng and
Zhu Rongji, from 1993 until his retirement in 2003. While serving as Director of the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry from 1977 to 1982, he proposed establishing a spokesperson system and became the first spokesperson of the Ministry. Qian became Foreign Minister in April 1988. and was a key player handling the return to Chinese sovereignty of
Hong Kong and
Macau. He was in charge of border negotiations with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which resulted in a successful settlement of the border dispute and the thawing of the bilateral relations between China and Russia. In October 1989, Qian engaged in low-profile outreach when he attended the annual UN General Assembly in New York, seeking to reassure his listeners that China would proceed with reform. He was the first Chinese diplomat to attend an
ASEAN event, going to the 1991 ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in
Malaysia. This marked the first time China formally acknowledged ASEAN as an institution and laid the groundwork for future ASEAN-China cooperation, like the
ASEAN+3 mechanism and the
ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA). In 1992, he was tasked with traveling to
Pyongyang,
North Korea to inform
Kim Il Sung that China would be
establishing formal diplomatic relations with
South Korea. Qian was a member of the 12th to 15th
CCP Central Committee. He was a member of the 14th and 15th
CCP Politburo. In November 2005, Qian was awarded the
Order of the Polar Star, the highest civilian award of
Mongolia, for his contributions to
China–Mongolia relations. ==Personal life==