Li Huang; Signer of U.N. Charter for Republic of China

Li Huang, 97, the last surviving member of the 10-person Republic of China delegation who signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. Li was a student in Paris when he helped found the Young China Party in 1923. It became China’s third party with the Kuomintang and the Communists. Although all three were ideological rivals, they joined forces in the war against Japan in the 1930s. After the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the Young China Party became closer to the Chinese Communist Party and, in 1946, Li helped U. S. Gen. George C. Marshall in failed Kuomintang-Communist peace negotiations. After the Communists came to power in 1949, Li moved to Hong Kong, where he taught. In 1980, he went to Taiwan and resumed leadership of the party he had founded nearly 60 years earlier. In Taipei on Nov. 15.