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       Yan Mingfu, a former top Chinese official who held talks with reform-seeking protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 and offered to become a “hostage” to help ease the standoff, but was ousted after Chinese leaders ended dialogue and ordered security forces to crush the demonstrators, died July 3 at a hospital in Beijing. He was 91.

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       His daughter, Yan Lan, confirmed the death but cited no specific cause.

       The scion of a prominent family in China’s modern political history, Mr. Yan spent years out of the public eye after China’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, ordered tanks and troops to move against protesters in early June 1989. Though there is no official death toll, estimates range from several hundred to more than 10,000 — while also wiping out hopes of any major political changes in China.

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       Mr. Yan was among the few top officials who had ongoing contacts with the Tiananmen protesters, making him one of the most internationally known figures forced out in the Communist Party shake-ups after the bloodshed.

       A terse mention on state-run media in late 1989 announced that Mr. Yan had been dismissed from his role as head of the party’s United Front Work Department, which directs outreach to non-Communist groups and others.

       There was no official cause given for Mr. Yan’s ouster, but it was widely interpreted as punishment for overstepping his mandate. Mr. Yan appeared at times to express sympathy for some of the protesters’ demands, including greater openness in the media.

       On May 16, 1989, Mr. Yan made the surprising — and possibly unilateral — move of offering himself as a voluntary captive for a group of hunger-striking protesters. He framed it as a good-faith gesture that authorities would find a negotiated settlement. The offer was rejected.

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       “The only issue I am concerned with is that of saving the children who are hunger striking in the square, who are now in a very weakened state, their lives gravely threatened,” Mr. Yan told Chinese Premier Li Peng after returning from the talks, according to a transcript cited in the 1990 book “Cries for Democracy” by Han Minzhu and Hua Sheng, pseudonyms of two people who took part in the protests.

       Mr. Yan was portrayed as “the chief lobbyist for restraint” in a 1990 study of Tiananmen by the Contemporary Asian Studies Series, published by the University of Maryland’s School of Law.

       Mr. Yan also had a powerful channel to the top. He served as Deng’s Russian-language translator and was on hand during a Beijing summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in mid-May 1989 amid the Tiananmen crisis. Deng, however, was already moving to the side of Chinese hard-liners urging the use of force to quash the demonstrators.

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       The end of Mr. Yan’s efforts for an exit strategy through dialogue was clear on May 19, 1989, when his most influential ally, Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang, made a pre-dawn visit to the square and pleaded with the protesters to disperse. His underlying message was that Deng’s government had given up on negotiations.

       “We have come too late,” Zhao said with tears welling in his eyes, according to an account by The Washington Post. “I am sorry, fellow students. No matter how you have criticized us, I think you have the right to do so. We do not come here to ask you to excuse us.”

       It was the last public appearance for Zhao, who was soon removed from his position and placed under house arrest. (Zhao was replaced by Jiang Zemin, who would later become Chinese president.) Mr. Yan’s missions into the protests were called off. Troops and tanks rolled in less than two weeks later.

       Mr. Yan returned to a government role in 1991 as vice minister of civil affairs, a position with considerably less influence than his previous title. The move to bring back Mr. Yan and two other liberal-wing officials purged after Tiananmen — Hu Qili and Rui Xingwen — was seen as Deng’s intention to dilute the power of conservatives questioning his push to advance China’s economic openings to the world.

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       Deng was also signaling the history-erasing attempts of China’s leadership. Mr. Yan never publicly mentioned the Tiananmen massacre or his time as a liaison with protesters. Even his 2015 autobiography, “The Memoirs of Yan Mingfu,” sidestepped Tiananmen. But he gave a sense of the tenuous nature of power and privilege in China at times in the past.

       As a young man, Mr. Yan had served as a Russian interpreter for Chinese leader Mao Zedong in meetings with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and others. Mr. Yan then spent nearly eight years in detention (from 1967 to 1975) during Mao’s brutal purge known as the Cultural Revolution.

       “My father was almost driven crazy and suffered all kinds of inhuman treatment,” Mr. Yan’s daughter Yan Lan wrote in a remembrance of his life.

       Yet one of the first things Mr. Yan did after gaining freedom in 1975, she recalled, was to go shopping for a present. He waited for more than three hours in line at a store in Beijing. He returned with something she had craved for years: an accordion.

       Influential family

       Yan Mingfu was born on Nov. 11, 1931, in Liaoning province in northeast China. His father, Yan Baohang, was a supporter of Mao’s foe, premier Gen. Chiang Kai-shek, but then switched to the Communist side and worked as a secret agent during World War II for Zhou Enlai, who served as China’s premier from 1954 to 1976.

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       Mr. Yan’s father went on to head the United Front Work Department, the same position Mr. Yan held during the Tiananmen upheavals.

       Mr. Yan graduated from the Harbin Foreign Language College in 1949. He was Mao’s translator in Russian for many key meetings and policy discussions, including China’s break with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s in one of the major geopolitical rifts of the Cold War.

       Mr. Yan and his father were arrested in 1967 after Mao began the Cultural Revolution that jailed, exiled or killed millions of people in an attempt to eliminate ideologies seen as contrary to Maoist Communism. Mr. Yan was accused of spying for the Soviet Union. His wife, Wu Keliang, was branded a counterrevolutionary and forced into a “reeducation camp” with their daughter for more than seven years.

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       In 1985, a decade after Mr. Yan’s release from prison, he was put in charge of the United Front Work Department. In that role, he began to give greater space to political groups not formally under the Communist Party.

       Mr. Yan officially retired in 1996 but served as chairman of China’s Charity Association, whose work included raising money for disaster relief. In 2007, Mr. Yan played a brief role as envoy for outreach with Taiwan because of his family’s past connections to Chiang’s Kuomintang party. (Beijing considers Taiwan part of its historical territory.)

       Mr. Yan’s wife died in 2015. Survivors include his daughter and a grandson.

       During the Tiananmen standoff, Mr. Yan was sometimes seen as improvising during his dialogue with protesters. It also was clear that he could only go so far. In the May 1989 summit between Deng and Gorbachev, Mr. Yan was tasked with giving reporters a sign that Deng’s patience was running out with the defiance in Tiananmen.

       “The fact is,” said Mr. Yan, “there has been a negative impact on the dignity of the country.”

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