January 17, 2005
Chinese government fears unrest after reformer's death
By Jenny Booth, Times Online
Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader who helped to launch China's economic boom but was ousted after sympathising with the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protesters, died today in a Beijing hospital. He was 85.
Zhao had lived under house arrest for 15 years. A premature report of his death last week prompted the Chinese government to break its long silence about him and disclose that he had been hospitalised after a series of strokes.
He fell out of favor and was purged on June 24, 1989, after the military used tanks to crush the student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people.
He was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, the day before martial law was declared in Beijing, when he made a tearful visit to Tiananmen Square to talk to student hunger strikers. He apologized to the students, telling them that he had come too late.
"He is the Gorbachev of China, the failed Gorbachev of China," said Oliver August, the Times China Correspondent.
"If he'd been stronger politically, he could have imposed his will on the Communist Party. And if he had succeeded he would have driven a stake through the heart of the Communist Party in China."
Reformist websites in China quickly filled with comments on Zhao's death. Bao Tong, Zhao's one-time secretary, posted a letter on the internet saying that the Chinese Communist party's attempt to erase Zhao from history revealed its weakness.
"The only reason for Zhao's continued ill-treatment was his opposition to the violent solution to end the Tiananmen protests in 1989," wrote Bao, who was himself jailed for seven years after Zhao's downfall for opposing the bloody crackdown on the students.
He continued: "The conditions under which he was living at the time of his death, in complete isolation from the rest of Chinese society because of a 16-year-long house arrest illegally imposed upon him by the government, is a showcase of shame for Chinese justice and for the Chinese Communist Party itself.
"The persecution of Zhao Ziyang is the persecution of a national leader who dedicated himself for more than a decade to the groundbreaking efforts that became the foundations of China's economic reforms."
Bao has been a thorn in the government's side and has remained under tight surveillance since his release from prison in 1996. He has been an outspoken critic of China's human rights record and the slow speed of political reforms.
Fearing a backlash, the Chinese government took steps to minimise any public reaction to Zhao's death. The official announcement to China's people was limited to a two-sentence Xinhua report carried on websites. It wasn't on the midday state television news, and CNN broadcasts to hotels and apartment complexes for foreigners were blacked out when they mentioned Zhao.
Police blocked reporters from entering the lane in central Beijing where Zhao had lived under guard in a walled villa.
Other activists were also placed under close scrutiny. Ren Wanding, a veteran dissident, said police arrived outside his Beijing home this morning and were preventing him from leaving.
The cause of death wasn't immediately announced, but the official Xinhua News Agency said Zhao suffered from multiple ailments of the respiratory and cardiovascular system and died "after failing to respond to all emergency treatment."
"He was very peaceful," said Frank Lu, a Hong Kong-based Chinese human rights activist who said he had spoken to Zhao's daughter Wang Yannan. "He was surrounded by all his family."
Reports said Zhao occasionally traveled to the provinces. He sometimes was seen teeing off at Beijing golf courses or paying respects at the funerals of dead comrades, but otherwise remained hidden.
Usually seen in tailored Western suits, Zhao served as premier in 1980-1987, then took over as general secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful post in China, under Deng, who remained paramount leader.
He helped initiate sweeping changes that invigorated an economy mired in the ruins of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. Austere central planning gave way to material incentives and market forces that made China the world's fastest-growing economy.
"The Chinese leadership owes him a lot," said Yan Jiaqi, a former Zhao aide, in comments broadcast on Hong Kong Cable TV. "I hope to see the Beijing leadership formally express to the entire nation that Zhao Ziyang was the people's good premier."
"He introduced capitalism to China," said David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University. "Deng ... had instincts but not a lot of specific ideas about how to implement certain policies. Zhao gave specificity to those instincts."
Those changes also brought inflation, income gaps between the rich and poor, corruption and other problems that Zhao would be blamed for when the conservatives drove him from power.
Zhao's 1989 downfall was not his first. Mao's youthful Red Guards dragged him from his home in Guangzhou in 1967 and paraded him through the streets with a dunce cap before sending him off for years of internal exile.
The son of a landlord, he was born in 1919 in Henan Province. He joined the Communist Youth League in 1932 and became a full-fledged party member in 1938.
An agriculture expert in a country in which 80 percent of the people are rural, Zhao spent most of his career in regional government and party posts.
In the early 1950s, he directed a harsh purge in Guangdong province of cadres accused of corruption, ties to the Nationalists on Taiwan and opposition to land reform.
In 1957, he oversaw a rectification campaign in which 80,000 officials were sent to the countryside to live, work and receive criticism.
After four years in disgrace during the Cultural Revolution, he resurfaced in 1971 as a party secretary in Inner Mongolia. He won favor for his agricultural management there and in the southern province of Guangdong in 1971-75.
Zhao was named party secretary and governor of Sichuan, China's most populous province, in 1975. With Sichuanese Deng's backing, he dismantled the commune system, restored private plots and sidelined rural businesses, raised farm prices and revived bonuses for extra work.
His pragmatic policies there turned acute food shortages into bumper harvests. Between 1977 and 1980, Sichuan's farm output went up 25 percent and industrial production rose 81 percent.
The "Sichuan Experience" became a model for the nation.
Deng brought Zhao to Beijing in 1980 as a vice premier and member of the party's powerful Politburo. Six months later, he was named premier, becoming a role model for the younger technocrats installed by Deng in key positions to carry out his ambitious modernization plans.
But the reforms' expansion to urban areas sparked overheating of the economy in late 1984 and 1985, forcing Deng and Zhao to slow the pace of growth.
In November 1987, Zhao was named general secretary of the Communist Party after Hu Yaobang, who was blamed for pro-democracy student unrest and deposed.
During the 1989 protests, Zhao called for compromise and expressed sympathy for some of their demands. But his adversaries, led by Premier Li Peng, overruled him, called in the military to quash the protests and used the turmoil to attack Zhao and his supporters.
Little was known about Zhao's personal life. A 40-minute-a-day jogger, he once revealed in an interview that he sometimes argued with his family at the dinner table and liked his grandchildren.
He was known to have been married twice and had four sons and a daughter. His second wife was Liang Boqi.
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