Belgian friend of China passes away in Brussels

Henri Lederhandler and his wife were at home in September 2013. Fu Jing/China Daily

Lederhandler's Chinese name is Li Dehan, the same family name as the premier. Last year Li said in Lederhandler's home, "We belong to the same family."

Lederhandler was born in 1933, one of four children of a Jewish Polish family who had moved to Brussels 12 years earlier. His father, a miner, died in a concentration camp, but thanks to a Belgian woman, who hid Jewish children from the Nazis in a remote area near the French border, he and his brother escaped the Holocaust.

Following the war, aged 14, he worked for a leather company before joining the army for two years.

Lederhandler then joined the Belgium Young Communist League, becoming responsible for international liaison, where he developed close bonds with Wu Xueqian, who was in charge of China's Youth League and later foreign minister and vice-premier of China.

"Wu was my first Chinese friend," Lederhandler said of the man who first invited him to visit China in 1957 as part of a 10-member political delegation during an interview with China Daily in September. It was on that trip he met then premier Zhou Enlai.

In 1963, Lederhandler started an import-export business with China and, that same year, met Chairman Mao.

In all that has happened and changed in China over the past 50 years, the Belgian has remained close to its leaders, people and events, having visited his "second motherland" more than 70 times.

In his book, he told why China could only start to reform and open up in 1978, which he describes as "an earthquake", transforming the country's economic and social landscape. That was the year China and the United States made huge progress in bilateral relations.

"From my point of view, the recognition of the People's Republic of China by the US was a very important element, explaining why Deng Xiaoping could start this new policy," he said in his September interview.

As a former young Communist, Lederhandler said he still held a strong belief in socialism. "China's success is for me a kind of realization of what I believed when I was young."

China, he believed, is a socialist country that has adapted Marxism well to today's conditions, while learning from the failures of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. "We are not in the time when Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto; we are now in 2013."

Lederhandler said his book also commemorates the Chinese he started to deal with in the 1950s.

"I am 80 this year and so many of my old Chinese friends have passed away. This is my way to remember our lasting friendship," he said in September. In October, he organized six seminars in Brussels to debate his opinions about China he shared in his book.

fujing@chinadaily.com.cn