Liu Huan

Liu Huan died at 9:52 a.m. on September 25, 2026, in Shanghai, at the age of 63. UIBE published an obituary the next day stating that the retired teacher and nationally known musician had died of illness in the company of family. The Liu Huan Original Music Public Welfare Fund and Hunan Broadcasting System's Mango V Fund issued a matching notice on the Mango Micro Fund WeChat account, calling his departure a major loss to Chinese original popular music.

No further clinical details about the final illness have been made public. In accordance with his wishes, the university and fund said funeral arrangements would be simple: no memorial committee, no public body farewell, and no formal memorial meeting. Tributes followed quickly across Chinese state and entertainment media, social platforms, and from colleagues who recalled both the Olympic duet and the long teaching career behind it.

Liu Huan was born on August 26, 1963, in Tianjin, China, into a family of teachers. Chinese biographies also note ancestral roots linked to Qingdao, Shandong. He grew up in an urban classroom culture rather than a conservatory household, and music entered his life as a personal obsession rather than a formal training path.

He graduated from Tianjin Yaohua High School in 1981. Friends and classmates later recalled a student who would sit on dormitory stairs with a guitar and sing until midnight, teaching himself songs and technique without systematic vocal schooling. That self-directed habit became a lifelong pattern: Liu remained proud of being largely self-taught even after he became one of China's most famous popular singers.

Liu studied French literature at the University of International Relations in Beijing, graduating in 1985. Language study shaped his public persona as much as his later music career. In lectures he would casually introduce English, French, German, or Italian terms when naming composers and schools, joking that French was his major, English was workable, and German and Italian were mostly professional vocabulary.

In 1985 he won a Beijing university French (and English) song competition, which brought a sponsored trip to Paris. While classmates shopped and sight-saw, he spent evenings in bars listening for musical ideas. Shortly after graduation he was sent to Shizuishan in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region for about a year to help promote local education by teaching music, an assignment that exposed him to northwestern folk colours that later appeared in his television themes.

Liu's national breakthrough came in 1987 with television theme songs. Sun in the Heart for Snowing City and A Young Man's Ambition Needs No Sorrow for Plainclothes Cop made his deep, high-reaching voice instantly familiar across China. He went on to become the defining singer of historical television drama themes, including The One Who Wins the Hearts of the People Gains the Empire for Yongzheng Dynasty (1996) and Heroes' Song for The Water Margin (1998). Asking Myself a Thousand Times, linked to the drama A Native of Beijing in New York era popularity, spent ten weeks at the top of Chinese radio charts.

In 1990 he performed Asian Mighty Winds with Wei Wei at the Beijing Asian Games. On March 19, 2004, he held his first full solo concert after nineteen years of fame, Huange 2004, at Beijing's Capital Indoor Stadium, with guests including Na Ying, Sun Nan, Sha Baoliang and Warren Mok. He followed with a Shanghai Indoor Stadium concert in 2006 and a 2007 Zhenhan programme with Liao Changyong and Warren Mok at the Great Hall of the People, blending popular and classical styles.

On August 8, 2008, Liu and Sarah Brightman sang You and Me, the official theme of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. He was also among the artists featured on Beijing Welcomes You. From 2012 he coached on The Voice of China with Na Ying, Yang Kun and Harlem Yu, later returning on Sing! China, where his finalist Tashi Phuntsok won a season. In 2019 he won Singer on Hunan TV with a final medley dedicated to Yao Beina. Later credits include work connected to The Wandering Earth theme Taking the Earth on a Wander and, in 2024, a promotional collaboration song Bronze for Genshin Impact and the Sanxingdui Museum.

Parallel to his pop career, Liu joined the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing in July 1991 as a teacher in the arts teaching and research office, later associate professor. He taught the history of Western music for more than thirty years and retired in September 2023. He composed the university anthem, which continued to be sung at campus ceremonies.

Liu repeatedly told interviewers that teaching was the stable vocation he refused to abandon. Classes were crowded with students from outside his own courses who stood to listen. He argued that a singer and a teacher need not be in conflict: in the classroom he focused on helping students love music; after class he still had time to write songs. Corporate partners later cited him as an iconic figure for bringing music education to Chinese students because he understood campus audiences as both a star and a lecturer.

Liu married Lu Lu, a Hunan Television host, director and producer, in 1988. Chinese entertainment coverage has long recounted that they married after a very short courtship. Their daughter, Liu Yisi (nickname Sisi), was born on September 2, 1991. She later studied filmmaking at New York University and worked in photography and behind-the-scenes film projects. Reports in 2025 said she married quietly in Chongqing.

Liu's public image stayed remarkably consistent: a round face, long braided or tied-back hair, and a preference for plain black stage clothes, including the black T-shirt he wore while singing at the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony. He said the long hair began as a convenience after overseas shows in the 1990s, when he grew tired of constant salon appointments. Foreign-language fluency remained part of his classroom charm, even when he insisted he was not a polyglot beyond French and English.

Liu often described music as something he pursued without calculation. Ahead of the Olympics he told interviewers that being chosen to sing You and Me felt like a pie falling from the sky, and that the song's gentle pentatonic calm fitted the Games' message of harmony better than a bombastic sports anthem. He defended plain clothes and an unstyled look on stage, saying a real voice mattered more than formal dress.

In later years he put institutional weight behind original Chinese songwriting. On December 26, 2018, alongside his Singer 2019 announcement, he launched the Liu Huan Original Music Public Welfare Fund with Mango TV and Mango V, designed to sponsor emerging original singers with annual funding draws. After his death the fund and Mango V said they would continue the yearly programme according to his unfinished wishes.

Liu's later public life was shaped by chronic health problems. He was diagnosed with avascular necrosis (osteonecrosis) of the femoral head, underwent hip replacement surgery around April 2010 at Peking University Third Hospital, and paused teaching before returning to the classroom on August 31, 2011. Chinese reports in 2019 also described heart-stent surgery. From the 2010s onward he appeared less often in public and sometimes used a cane. In October 2025 he attended a Wuzhen Theatre Festival long-street banquet organised by friend Huang Lei; photographs showed him thinner but in good spirits among friends.

Beyond recordings and drama themes, Liu's late-career fame rested on national television. He was a founding-era coach on The Voice of China (2012), returned on Sing! China, helped create and mentor on The Voice-adjacent original-song show Sing My Song (China's Good Songs), and won Singer 2019 with the highest recorded audience share in that franchise's history to that point. He performed on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, including Heroes' Song in 1998 and a 2014 duet of La Vie en rose with French actress Sophie Marceau.

His catalogue remains embedded in Chinese popular memory: Sun in the Heart, Heroes' Song, Crescent Moon (Wanwan de Yueliang), Asking Myself a Thousand Times, Starting Over Again, and You and Me are still replayed on television montages, karaoke lists and Olympic retrospectives. International audiences mainly know him through the 2008 opening-ceremony duet with Sarah Brightman.

Liu is widely remembered as a pioneer of modern Chinese pop who bridged television drama, stadium spectacle and university teaching. Younger singers cite his drama themes as the soundtrack of the 1980s and 1990s, while UIBE students remember a lecturer who treated Western music history as a living classroom rather than a celebrity side job. The Original Music Public Welfare Fund was designed to outlast any single television season and, according to its posthumous statement, will continue annual support for original Chinese songwriters.

Commentators after his death emphasised the rarity of a national star who refused to quit the lectern, wore the same plain black stage uniform for decades, and used late-career television fame to fund other people's songs rather than only his own catalogue.