Nora Sun, former U.S. trade consul, dies at 72

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Nora Sun, a former U.S. trade consul and granddaughter of the founder of Asia’s first republic in China, has died in Taipei, Taiwan, from injuries sustained in a car accident. She was 72.

Sun died Saturday, Taiwan’s government-owned Central News Agency reported. She was the granddaughter of Sun Yat-sen, who led a revolution to topple China’s Qing dynasty and establish the Republic of China.

Sun Yat-sen’s efforts were followed decades later by a bloody civil war between his follower Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong’s communist forces. After their defeat in 1949, Chiang’s Nationalists resettled in Taiwan.

Nora Sun was born in Shanghai in 1938, spent her youth in Hong Kong and Taiwan and moved to the U.S. in 1962.

She began a career in the U.S. diplomatic service in the late 1980s, serving as a U.S. trade consul in Ghougzhou, Shanghai and Paris. She quit in 1994 to start her own trade company in Hong Kong, helping U.S. and European companies invest in China.

In recent years, she split her time between Shanghai, Hong Kong and the U.S.

The Jan. 1 car accident occurred while she was in Taiwan for the centennial celebration of the 1911 Chinese revolution led by her grandfather.

-- Associated Press