On 22 September 2001, Jürgen Domes passed away after a week of fighting a sudden illness. It was six months before his 70th birthday. Within hours of the news spreading, tributes flooded in from China scholars all over the world, colleagues and friends mourning his passing and paying their respects to one of the leading figures of contemporary China studies in Europe. Indeed, Jürgen Domes was one of the first German political scientists to work on contemporary China. He approached his subject from a strictly disciplinary perspective, his fluency in Chinese allowing him to base his analyses on primary sources. For almost four decades, he was one of the most internationally renowned German scholars working on contemporary China.