John W. Lewis, a political scientist whose unconventional peace overtures — engaging in Ping-Pong diplomacy with China and providing antibiotics to North Korea — helped lift the Bamboo Curtain, died on Sept. 4 in Stanford, Calif. He was 86.

The cause was urothelial cancer, his daughter Amy Tich said.

Professor Lewis served as an adviser to the Defense Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had made scores of visits to China since 1972 and to North Korea since the mid-1980s.

In 2002, he was allowed to tour a North Korean plant where uranium was being enriched, ostensibly to fuel power plants. He also brought Stanford researchers to Korea to help contain a strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis there.

Remembered as a pre-eminent scholar of contemporary China, an inspiring teacher and an unofficial diplomatic conduit, Professor Lewis achieved national recognition in 1967 by becoming what he described in an oral history as “the first major China specialist who came out against the Vietnam War.”