Another chapter of the Mao Zedong era ended late on Tuesday night with the death of Shao Hua , Mao's daughter-in-law.
Shao, originally known as Zhang Shaohua, died of an undisclosed illness in a Beijing hospital, aged 69, less than a year after her husband, Mao Anqing , passed away, state media reported.
Born into a revolutionary family at the Communist Party's base in Yanan , Shaanxi province , in October, 1938, Shao had a difficult childhood but her close links with the party's first generation paid off later in life. Her father, Chen Zhenya ,was a Red Army official who was killed by a warlord in Xinjiang and her mother, Zhang Wenqiu, was a 'party heroine' who joined the nascent Communist Party in the 1920s.
She spent four years with her parents in the Xinjiang warlord's prison after the family was captured on its way to the Soviet Union for medical care. She was rescued by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1946.
Her revolutionary background was valuable political capital and helped her forge a relationship with Mao Anqing, a quiet Russian linguist, under the personal intervention of Mao. Shao married Mao Anqing, the second son of Mao and Yang Kaihui , in 1960 and the couple's only son, Mao Xinyu , was born in 1970. He is a researcher at the People's Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences, specialising in Marxism and Mao.
Shao graduated from Peking University's Chinese department and spent most of her time compiling a history of the party and Mao Zedong's documents. She also published a series of books about Mao Zedong. She was a PLA major general and a deputy director of the military encyclopedia department of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences.