AT DAWN on May 19th 1989, when the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were at their height and looking like a serious threat to Chinese Communist Party rule, the party’s leader, Zhao Ziyang, suddenly appeared among the protesting students. Addressing them tearfully through a megaphone, he said he had come “too late”. He did not say what he meant but, in the coded language of Chinese political rhetoric, his message was abundantly clear. He had come too late to save the demonstrators—and he wanted them to leave the square before it was too late for them. The next day, martial law was declared in Beijing. Fifteen days later, with the protesters still ignoring Mr Zhao’s warning, soldiers from the People’s Army opened fire on them, killing hundreds.
The party’s hardliners, having brushed aside Mr Zhao’s pleas not to order the crackdown, removed him from office and put him under house arrest. He never appeared in public again. Nevertheless, the Chinese leadership remained worried that his death might trigger fresh protests—just as the Tiananmen Square unrest had itself been triggered by the death of Hu Yaobang, another reformer. Premature rumours of Mr Zhao’s death had circulated a number of times in recent years and were thought by some to have been put about by the authorities, to gauge the public’s reaction. In the days leading up to his death on Monday January 17th, security was tightened in Tiananmen Square and outside Mr Zhao’s home—apparently to prevent either becoming a focal point for renewed protests. The authorities now face the difficult decision of whether it would cause less of a stir to grant or deny Mr Zhao a state funeral.
There does not seem much chance of unrest now. The passage of time, the hardliners’ success in snuffing out the nascent democracy movement, and not least China’s considerable economic progress since 1989, have all helped the memories to fade. Public discussion of what happened between April and June that year remains completely taboo. Notwithstanding the supposed power of the internet to provide uncensored information, Chinese outside Beijing, and even younger residents of the capital, often appear unaware of the scale and ruthlessness of the military action that ended the protests. The 15th anniversary of the crackdown, last June, passed almost unnoticed in mainland China, though there were demonstrations in Hong Kong.
Had he not been deposed and made a “non-person”, Mr Zhao might have transformed China into a country very different from the one it is today, politically if not economically. The party prefers to believe that the course China took then was right: brutal repression followed by an explosion of capitalist energy that has propelled it into the front ranks of the world’s economic powers. Mr Zhao, by contrast, believed that capitalism was possible without terrifying the party’s critics into silence.
That said, his behaviour during Tiananmen was never that of a hero. Students in the square did not especially admire him, and his appearance there may have been designed to further his own political ambitions. He showed no sign either before or after Tiananmen of opposing one-party rule. But in a political environment that brooked no dissent, he was undoubtedly a reformer.
The son of a landlord from Hunan province, Mr Zhao was born just eight years after the end of China’s last imperial dynasty in 1911. He joined the Communist Party aged 20 and, after its victory in the civil war in 1949, he rose through the party ranks. When Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, Mr Zhao was among the many party officials to be purged, and was dragged through the streets in a dunce’s cap. But after a few years he regained his position in the party, and in 1975 he was made party secretary in Deng Xiaoping’s home province of Sichuan.
Despite its fertile soil, Sichuan’s economy was such a mess when he took over that some peasant families were having to sell their daughters. Mr Zhao realised that the centralised and bureaucratic collective farming imposed by the party offered few incentives to boost production. So he allowed individual households to grow their own produce and sell it in markets. The province’s factories were also allowed to use their profits as they saw fit, rather than offering them up to the state. The province’s output soared, giving rise to an oft-quoted ditty, Yao chi liang, zhao Ziyang—If you want to eat grain, look for Ziyang. (Mr Zhao’s surname is a homonym of the Chinese for “look for”.)
In the early 1980s Mr Zhao served as China’s prime minister, advocating for its cities the same loosening of the state’s deadening grip on the economy as he had introduced in Sichuan’s countryside. In 1987, Deng, then China’s paramount leader, promoted Mr Zhao to secretary-general of the Communist Party. He showed no sign of unwillingness to follow Deng’s desires—economic reform, plus a bit of political reform as long as it kept the party firmly in power. But Mr Zhao impressed foreigners. He appeared lively, well informed, keen on capitalist ideas—and keen to debate them with the foreign press, something unseen either before or after him.
After his downfall, Mr Zhao never resigned from the party. He did not court the media. Yet, to many, his nuanced non-conformism with the post-Tiananmen order was an inspiration. He could have salvaged something of his political career by publicly acknowledging his “errors”, but refused to. In his guarded compound in a quiet alley close to Beijing’s main commercial district, he lived out his last years without openly challenging the party. Foreign leaders politely avoided mentioning him when visiting Beijing. Yet the party remained in fear of Mr Zhao until his dying breath.
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