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Expert on China Passes Away

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) _ Franz Schurmann, one of the world's great experts on China, who also helped found a Bay Area news agency focused on Asia has passed away.

Schurmann died at his home in San Francisco recently of complications from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's at the age of 84.

He was a professor at UC Berkeley who spoke a dozen languages, and was remembered fondly by one of his graduate students at Cal, Orville Schell.

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"He was a man at that point of towering stature, both because of his work on China and Japan and Asia," Schell said. "But also because the Vietnam War was looming large and he was one of the few senior faculty at Berkeley that took a very critical view of the war."

Schell went on to co-found the Pacific News Service with Schurmann. It is now New America Media, an umbrella organization for providing ethnic news from different cultures.

Schell became Dean of the Journalism school at Cal and now directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. He describes Schurmann as the first to penetrate Maoist China and explain it to Americans in a way they could understand.

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