Du Runsheng (1913-2015) Prominent Communist Party liberal Du Runsheng, who helped free Chinese peasants from collective farming and mentored a generation of young reformists - many of whom are now top politicians - died in Beijing Hospital yesterday morning, according to friends. He was 102. Under Du's watch, the party's Rural Policy Research Office - set up as China opened up in the 1980s - became a cradle for young people serious about introducing changes to improve the country. Their suggestions had the ears of ministers and even premiers. Among those young researchers were Wang Qishan, who is now the party's anti-graft chief, and former World Bank chief economist Justin Lin Yifu. President Xi Jinping, then county chief of Zhengding, in Hebei province, was also a guest researcher, according an extensive Southern People Weekly report of the research office two years ago. Former researcher Zhang Musheng praised his mentor as "a top architect of China's rural reform". "Du would ask his mentees to think as if they were Chairman Mao - if you are not seeing an issue from the highest altitude, the world you see will not be comprehensive," Zhang said. Du had been hospitalised for a long time, but developed complications in the early hours yesterday. He died at 6.20am, his grandson Du Fan told Shanghai-based news portal The Paper. Dubbed the "father of rural reform", Du was an ally of late liberal leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, and a supporter of their economic and political reform initiatives. He helped shape national rural policies in the early 1980s, which freed peasants from collective farming, allowing them to directly benefit from their crops after state quotas were met. "To care for the people, you must first care for the peasants," Du once said. Du was born in a village in Shanxi province in 1913. He studied at a teaching training college and, after the establishment of the People's Republic, was involved in land reform and rural policy work. In the early 1950s, he lost his job at the party's rural work unit as he was against Mao Zedong's rural collectivisation drive. During the Cultural Revolution, he suffered political persecution and was sent for forced labour. It was not until 1978 that he returned to rural policymaking. When Du was deputy director of the National Committee on Agriculture and later head of the Rural Policy Research Office, he drafted a series of party documents that officially ended the rigid rural collectives system, a move credited for promoting agricultural productivity. After the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement was crushed in 1989, Du was investigated, alongside some other party elders, for sympathising with the students and siding with liberal leader Zhao Ziyang. But he retained his party membership. Du Daozheng, chief editor of liberal journal Yanhuang Chunqiu , said Du's rural policies lifted millions of peasants out of poverty and that he always had the best interests of the underprivileged at heart. "He was firm in his beliefs and never wavered," he said. According to Zhang, Du said he was proud that none of his mentees turned out to be corrupt. "His regret was that the rural reform he advocated has yet to be completed." Additional reporting by Minnie Chan