Qian Xuesen, the man widely regarded as the father of China's nuclear missile and space programmes, has died at the age of 98, state-run Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

Qian was born in the eastern city of Hangzhou but left the country in 1935 for studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

He later served as director of the Jet Propulsion laboratory at the California Institute of Technology before returning to China in 1955, six years after the Communist Revolution.

Qian went to work for the defence ministry and helped lay the foundations for a nuclear weapons programme that detonated its first device in 1964 and for a space programme that achieved China's first manned space flight in 2003, Xinhua said.

The report gave no other details on Qian's death.