Liu Ouqing’s life was one of service to his country. At a young age, he joined the Chinese Army. He then worked in a state-owned factory, before becoming a civil servant and a school administrator.
In the 1990s, as China was moving to open up its centrally planned economy, Mr. Liu was party secretary of the Wuhan Grain Bureau, responsible for ensuring that the city had enough to eat. Later, he helped establish what is now known as Wuhan Business University.
Mr. Liu died of complications of the new coronavirus on Jan. 29 at a hospital in Wuhan, said his son, Liu Pei’en. He was 78. Liu Ouqing was born in 1941 into a poor family in Huanggang, a city in the central Chinese province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital.

After finishing high school, Mr. Liu enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army in 1961 and built railways in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang. In 1968, he went to Wuhan to work at a state-owned machinery factory.
Mr. Liu joined the civil service in the late 1980s, and was soon promoted to be party secretary of the Wuhan Grain Bureau. The job involved frequent travel abroad, including a visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York to negotiate prices on the import of grains and oil to Wuhan.
Mr. Liu’s life took a turn in 2000, when he was reassigned to work as a manager at a vocational school. To Mr. Liu, it was a demotion — “the consequence of offending the mayor,” he later said in a memoir he was writing for his family. His son said he had been punished for looking into a bribery case involving a man connected to the Wuhan mayor at the time.
Mr. Liu persevered in his new position, fighting to secure government funding for the school, and playing a key role in merging the institution with several others to establish what is now Wuhan Business University.
He retired in 2006. In recent years, he and his wife began visiting Sanya, a resort town popular among older Chinese for its sunny weather and beaches.
As posted on Hotwnews.com