Liu Huan, the Voice of Chinese Television's Golden Age, Dies at 63
The singer of the 1990 Asian Games anthem, the 2008 Olympic duet and the Water Margin theme died in Shanghai on Friday, three years after retiring from the university classroom he always called his real job.
Liu Huan, the singer whose voice scored the defining broadcasts of three decades of Chinese television — the 1990 Asian Games, the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony, the finale of Water Margin — died in Shanghai on Friday morning, aged 63. The announcement came a day later, in an obituary from the University of International Business and Economics, where he taught, and from the music charity foundation he funded. On Weibo it was shared more than 40,000 times within hours, landing the day after the Mid-Autumn Festival, China's festival of family reunion.
The biography his obituary liked best was the unlikely one. Liu Huan studied French literature at the International Relations Institute in Beijing in the early 1980s — classmates remember him sprinting through lunch to grab the one piano nobody used, an anecdote he retold on a CCTV music programme with the laugh still in it — and only entered a 1985 campus song contest because it was there. Teaching, he always insisted, was his real job: for decades he lectured on the history of Western classical music at the business school, and the obituary repeats the line his students knew, that the classroom came before the stage.
His voice, though, is the soundtrack most Chinese listeners cannot hear without placing it. He sang Beijing's 1990 Asian Games anthem with Wei Wei; he growled 《好汉歌》, the Water Margin theme that turned "the big river flows east" into a national singalong; he stood at the Bird's Nest in August 2008 and sang You and Me with Sarah Brightman to one of the largest television audiences in history; and he wrote and performed the entire score of Empresses in the Palace, the palace drama that carried that sound to streaming audiences worldwide. On the talent show Sing! My Song he wept at Zhao Lei's song Draw, called it the most beautiful lyric he had seen, and then championed the young folk singer all the way to a stadium show — which is why Zhao Lei's name sits beside his on Friday's hot searches, in elegy for a mentor.
The body paid for the voice. From 2009 Liu Huan lived with femoral head necrosis, a condition patients call "the cancer that doesn't kill," endured years of pain before a hip replacement, and had heart trouble besides. His last stage was New Year's Eve on Bilibili's countdown, singing to a waterfront crowd and wishing young viewers a healthy 2026. In a 2021 interview he named his one regret: "I've written too few songs."
The tributes began before the obituary did. Na Ying stopped her concert in Chengdu on Saturday night to sing The Crescent Moon, his old standard, to an arena that answered from the seats. The cellist Jian Wang, closing a reunion recital in Shanghai with guitarist Göran Söllscher, dedicated an encore of Memory from Cats to a man he had never met. The Spring Festival Gala's directors, the Musicians' Association and People's Daily — which said goodbye in his own lyrics — all posted within a day.
A colder count is travelling with the warm one: in thirteen days China has lost the actor You Benchang, the anchor Jing Yidan, and now Liu Huan, and the trending phrase reads like a generation taking inventory. On Zhihu, the top question was how to weigh his standing in Chinese pop; the most-upvoted answers bypassed the hits to land on the obituary's own insistence — that the classroom, not the stage, was his real post.