BEIJING — Zhang Hanzhi, an elegant Chinese diplomat who was Mao Tse-tung’s English tutor and President Nixon’s interpreter during his historic 1972 trip to China, died Saturday, state media reported. She was 72.
Born in Shanghai in 1935, Zhang was the illegitimate daughter of a shop assistant and the son of a prominent family. She entered the Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1953, where she taught after graduating with a master’s degree.
She met Mao in 1950, at a party to celebrate the first anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and again in 1963. He asked to be her student when he found out she taught English.
“The chairman wanted the lessons to start the following day! I was dumbfounded,” Zhang wrote in 1999 for Time magazine. “I was to teach the great leader whom over a billion people worshiped as their god?”
In 1971, Zhang joined China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and attended a series of landmark meetings, including the ones with Nixon.
