Liu Yandong, formerly one of China’s most senior officials in the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, has died, according to state media. She was 80. 

The former senior Party member passed away in Beijing on Wednesday afternoon local time due to an unspecified illness, official Xinhua News Agency reported. 

Liu was among a handful of women who have secured a seat in the Politburo, the Communist Party’s second-most powerful body. The current Politburo has 21 members, all of them men.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) highest decision body is the Politburo’s Standing Committee. In the more than 70 years since the CCP came to power, not a single female official had ever entered the elite body. 

Liu was considered a protégé of two of China’s successive leaders, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, according to a 2012 study published by the Hoover Institution.

Born in Jiangsu Province in central China, Liu was considered one of the so-called princelings—the children of senior Party cadres who had served under Mao Zedong. Her father, Liu Ruilong, was China’s former vice minister of agriculture and had connections to the families of Party elites such as Jiang and his close associate Zeng Qinghong.

After graduating from China’s Tsinghua University in 1970, Liu spent nearly a decade in China’s industrial system, starting as a laborer and rising to deputy secretary of the Party committee at a state-owned chemical factory.

In 1982, Liu joined the Central Committee Secretariat of the Communist Youth League, where she worked alongside Hu, who served as the League’s first secretary before rising to China’s top job. 

Hu appointed Liu to the 25-seat Politburo at the Party congress in late 2007. 

After Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, Liu was named one of the four vice premiers, serving under Premier Li Keqiang. 

As the second-ranking vice premier, Liu oversaw policies related to education, technology, and healthcare, as well as work focused on women and children. 

Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong (R) leads U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to tour the Forbidden City's Qianlong Garden in Beijing on June 5, 2016. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Her previous assignments also included heading the United Front Work Department, a Party agency that advances the regime’s interests abroad, including by carrying out foreign influence operations, suppressing dissident movements, gathering intelligence, and facilitating the transfer of technology to China.

In late 2017, Liu retired from the Politburo at age 71 and the next year stepped down from the vice-premiership. 

The announcement of Liu’s death came as the CCP convened its most important meeting of the year in Beijing. Known as the fifth plenum, the four-day conclave brought together hundreds of senior Party officials to approve a blueprint for the CCP’s ongoing ideology and governance. With next year’s Party congress approaching, a reshuffling of personnel is expected to be high on the agenda.