Posted for Stephen Wilson from ERM
Leiping, it was a great privilege to have known you, and to have worked with you. And tragic that you have been taken from your family and from the world so young.
Gracious. Humble. Thoughtful. Intelligent. Patient. Hard-working. Intelligent. Generous. Kind.
Leiping you were all these things and more. A true role model. Without doubt you were one of China's finest sons.
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I first met Leiping in Zhengzhou in Feb 1997, just after Deng Xiaoping had passed away.
Leiping was Deputy Director of the Beijing Economic Research Institute for water resources and electric power. Leiping was running the peak power consultancy body in the biggest country in the world in his 30s. I was a young consultant on my first trip to China.
Several years later I worked with Leiping in Hong Kong. He had completed his MBA at Cranfield and worked for a time in London. I persuaded him to come and work with me in Hong Kong in energy consulting.
At that time I learned of Leiping's spirit of service to society. How he had been chosen for an Air Force career, and would have been trained as a bomber pilot, but that he had told the authorities that he didn't want to learn to drop bombs to destroy things and kill people. Instead he wanted to help to build his country. And so he went to engineering school and became a power system planner. He was in the first university class in China to study western market economics.
Leiping told me he was the son of medical doctors. The youngest child and the only one whose education was not disrupted by the cultural revolution.
Leiping was there in June 1989, and lost some of his university friends. He didn't speak much about that, but it was clear that the heady idealism of youth had been quietly and thoughtfully channelled into quiet work of lasting benefit to others.
Through the World Bank, other countries throughout Asia were to benefit from Leiping's knowledge and wisdom and hard work.
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Leiping, I have often found myself speaking of you as one of the people I respect most. As one from whom I learned many things. You had the ability to communicate much with few words. You are greatly missed.
May you rest in peace, dear friend. Rest in peace.