Liu Huan's Wife Reveals the Singer's 14-Year Cancer Fight in a Farewell Letter
The singer Liu Huan died in September at 63, and his death certificate cited septic shock. A letter published by his wife on the 49th day after his death reveals he had been fighting bladder cancer for fourteen years — and refused bladder-removal surgery to keep working.
The singer Liu Huan died in Shanghai on September 25, at 63. His death certificate cited septic shock. What the public did not know until this week — and what his wife chose to reveal only now — was that he had been fighting bladder cancer for fourteen years.
On November 12, the day Liu Huan was buried at the foot of the Great Wall in Beijing's Huairou district and also the 49th day after his death — the end of traditional Chinese mourning — his wife Lu Lu published an 8,000-character open letter titled "He Was a Man Like This" on the Weibo account of Shui Junyi, the veteran CCTV anchor. The letter is a chronicle of a long illness that was never made public, and a farewell to the man who kept it that way.
The letter says Liu Huan was diagnosed with early-stage bladder carcinoma in situ in September 2012, while filming the first season of The Voice of China. He told almost no one. Treatment controlled the disease for five years before it recurred, and doctors advised removing his bladder — an operation he refused. The letter quotes his reasoning: he would rather die than carry a urine bag. He kept working through it.
The last year of his life ran on two tracks. In December 2025, a CT scan showed suspected metastasis; the next day, his father-in-law died. He was already in Shanghai preparing for the Bilibili New Year's Eve gala, and performed the show anyway. By March the cancer had spread through his body, and he moved to Shanghai for chemotherapy. In April he accepted a commission to compose and perform the theme song for The Wandering Earth 3. In September, what looked like a stomach illness turned out to be a spreading infection; he died on the 25th.
The letter is not only a medical timeline. A section titled "Clarifications on His Behalf" pushes back against rumors that had gathered during the illness, and a closing list thanks the people who helped: Shui Junyi and the singer Mao Amin, who assisted with the funeral. It also names his daughter, Liu Yisi, and tells the story of her name.
Liu Huan was one of the most recognizable voices in Chinese pop — he sang "You and Me" at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The letter's real subject is the fourteen years of privacy he bought with that silence: a star of his generation was not expected to hide a cancer diagnosis, and he did it anyway, keeping the illness out of the public eye while he kept working. The letter ends the mourning period the way Chinese tradition marks it — and it ends the speculation, with the family's own account of how the illness was lived.
