Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies at 84

Madeleine Albright, the first woman US secretary of state, who also traveled with one of the first American delegations to China in the 1970s, died Wednesday in Washington. She was 84 years old.

Albright's family announced her death in a statement and said the cause of death was cancer.  "She was surrounded by family and friends. We have lost a loving mother, grandmother sister, aunt and friend," said the statement.

A refugee from Nazi Germany, she "rose to the heights of American policy-making" and was a "tireless champion of democracy and human rights", the statement said.

Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937. Her father was a Czechoslovakian diplomat. Her family escaped then-Czechoslovakia 10 days after the Nazi invasion and arrived in the US in 1948.

Albright graduated from Wellesley College in 1959 and was married to Joseph Albright from 1959 until 1983, when they divorced. They had three children. 

She attended Columbia University and received a master's degree in international affairs in 1968 and a doctorate in 1976. She then began a decades-long career in government service and foreign affairs work. 

Albright rose to power as an analyst of world affairs and a White House counselor on national security. Under former president Bill Clinton, she became the country's representative to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and secretary of state  from 1997 to 2001. She was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the US government at the time.

Throughout her career, Albright was part of the efforts to improve relations with China. During a forum highlighting US-China relations hosted by the US-Asia Institute in May 2021, she recounted her own experience "as an observer and participant" in the bilateral relationship.

In the 1970s, not long after the historic visit by President Richard Nixon to China, Albright accompanied one of the first US Senate delegations to Beijing and Shanghai as the two countries were working to normalize relations.

In the late 1990s, when she was secretary of state, she said her regular interactions with Chinese counterparts became "integral to many Americans' interest and global policy priorities". 

During her meetings with Chinese officials, Albright recalled, "We saw the potential for cooperation on issues from combating terrorism to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. And we thought that the international system would be stronger with China integrated in it."

Following her tenure as secretary of state, Albright founded what is now the Albright Stonebridge Group, an international consulting firm, and in 2005 she founded Albright Capital Management, focusing on emerging markets. 

She was a professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations.

She also was a prolific author. Her books include a memoir in 2003 entitled Madam Secretary and The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs in 2006 and Fascism: A Warning in 2018.

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

In her last few years, Albright called for cooperation between the US and China and helped promoted people-to-people engagement between the two countries, saying that engagement was "more critical now than ever".

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in spring 2020, Albright endorsed a joint statement by more than 90 former high-level government officials, urging cooperation between the US and China to combat the pandemic. She again said the COVID-19 crisis "requires cooperation, including with China" in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp in 2020.

During another forum held by the US-Asia Institute in October 2021, Albright said, "A more competitive bilateral relationship should not preclude the United States and China from working together to strengthen our economies and meeting the numerous global challenges where our two countries' interests align."

"I've said it so often myself; the US-China relationship is among the most significant in the world," she said at that forum. "The bottom line is that we must make this relationship work."