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Zhao's death puts Hu in a
quandary
By Tian
Jing
HONG KONG - For Chinese communist
leaders, a paper political epitaph is historically
more durable than a gravestone - and more
powerful: it has the ideological strength to make
or break reputations and those of entire innocent
families. It is a political document and legacy
handed down from generation to generation of
communist leaders and cadres, often visiting the
sins - and the perceived sins - of the fathers on
the sons. What's on paper is far more powerful
than what's carved in stone.
And so it
will be with Zhao Ziyang, the economic and
political reformer who supported peaceful students
in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, pleaded with
them to go home and be safe - and then condemned
the massacre of hundreds or more who stood up for
their principles. He was placed under house arrest
in an old courtyard house in Beijing, and died in
a hospital in the city on Monday at the age of 85.
There were fears - so far unrealized - that
popular support for Ziyang could erupt into
popular unrest in a nation already beset by
tensions, such as the inequitable distribution of
wealth and the yawning gap between the relatively
few rich and the vast numbers of poor.
It
is customary for Chinese authorities to write an
official evaluation - a kind of political epitaph,
though not in stone - into the records of deceased
Communist Party veterans or senior leaders. Now
public focus is on how Beijing will rate former
party chairman Zhao. This required - though it
could be delayed - evaluation of his controversial
predecessor poses a major challenge for Communist
Party chairman, president and military commander
Hu Jintao, himself an economic reformer. Hu must
tread carefully.
The problem is that Zhao
was an economic and political reformer - good
characteristics - but he was sympathetic to the
June 3-4, 1989, pro-democracy student protests in
Tiananmen Square. He urged the thousands to go
home for the sake of peace, and he also was highly
critical of the bloodshed ordered by Deng
Xiaoping, who unleased the People's Liberation
Army to crush the movement of students,
intellectuals and others who sought more
democracy. They were branded
counterrevolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the
government.
This is an especially
difficult task for Hu, a relatively new party
chief and president still consolidating his grip
since he finally grasped all three key reigns of
power in September last year at a major party
meeting.
The official Xinhua news agency
said that Zhao "had long suffered from multiple
diseases affecting his respiratory and
cardiovascular systems". He was hospitalized in
early December for pneumonia, and fell into a coma
Friday night after suffering a series of strokes.
As premier from 1980 to 1987, and the
party's general secretary from 1987 to 1989, Zhao
pioneered market reforms that transformed China's
economy, but he was stripped of all his official
posts and kept under house in 1989. Zhao was in
line to succeed Deng when the Tiananmen
demonstrations erupted. In the power struggle that
followed, party rivals accused him of being too
soft on the protesters. Deng eventually took the
side of the hardliners and ordered the military to
clear the square by use of force. Zhao refused to
go along.
He last appeared in public on
May 19, 1989, soon after failing to persuade Deng
to negotiate a settlement with the protestors who
had assembled, together with hordes of sympathetic
civilians, in Tiananmen Square, demanding
political reforms and a purge of corrupt
officials. In a surprise pre-dawn visit to the
square, he pleaded with students to go home and to
avoid violence.
"We have come too late,"
he said, weeping on nationally broadcast
television. "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."
On the night of
June 3, troops opened fire in central Beijing,
killing hundreds, perhaps thousands. That's what
historians have named the June 4 incident.
For Hu, who is said to represent the mild
reform-leaning faction in the current leadership,
assessing Zhao's role in the 1989 movement could
stir conflicting and antagonistic memories of
Tiananmen. Zhao was condemned by the party, but
still enjoyed popular support, even after his
death, something of which Hu is well aware. But
praising Zhao too much, as well as doing too
little to honor him, could draw attention as well
to the Tiananmen massacre, and perhaps provoke a
backlash from those who have long been requesting
a reappraisal of the official policy on Tiananmen:
the Communist Party condemns the demonstrators "as
counterrevolutionaries who sought to overthrow the
communist regime'. To date, that's their official
epitaph, despite pleas from distraught mothers and
relatives and a distinguished army doctor.
Moreover, Hu, and even his successor Jiang
Zemin, have inherited from Zhao some of his
economic policies. China experts claim that such a
task of full and balanced evaluation represents a
test of the political acumen of the current
leadership of Hu and his ally, premier Wen Jiabao.
Deng's market economics had been
challenged by conservatives inside the party over
whether they were socialistic (good) or capitalist
(bad) in nature. To ideologically rationalize
economic reform, Zhao came up with the theory of
"the premature stage of socialism". Seldom does
the ruling party refer to the theory, but it is
the last and only officially documented attempt to
include those economic market issues into Marxism.
At the 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist
Party, Zhao's successor, Jiang Zemin, tabled a
proposal to "establish a socialist market
economy". This was regarded by some political
analysts as a continuation of the policies of
Zhao's era.
Zhao also contributed much to
the country's economic reform, transforming the
command economy into a largely market one. In the
1990s, the authorities completely decentralized
the pricing of most goods, letting market forces
decide. In 2001, Beijing acceded to the World
Trade Organization, prompted by hastened
globalization and broadened economic cooperation
between countries.
Zhao was the first in
the party to put forward the concept of "joining
the international economy cycle", and made the
government's case to change the pricing of
ordinary commodities - something that had been on
top of the agenda of the economic reform program.
The third session of the 13th Communist Party
Congress saw Zhao formally ascend to the party
throne. Zhao set out a few major principles for
the commodity economy under socialism. Some
policies echoed and elaborated by Hu and Wen today
are actually advanced versions of the glittering
visions contributed by Zhao some 20 years ago.
Zhao also pushed forward intra-party
self-improvement - still an issue today. During
his term as the party secretary general, Zhao
established a tradition that the party boss should
report to the party's central committee what he
had accomplished in the previous year. The
practice is still in effect.
China experts
advise that the Hu Jintao administration should
take all these factors into consideration when
drafting Zhao's official evaluation. Failure to
fairly evaluate Zhao's economic and party reform
contributions - because of the cloud of Tiananmen
- would only discredit the two fledgling leaders,
Hu and Wen.
Though the positions and
dynamics of party leadership remain unclear for
the moment, as Hu consolidates his power, one
thing is for certain: Zhao valued the assessment
that history would finally accord him. In an
interview before he was ailing, in a discussion
with Yang Jisheng - a former journalist with
Xinhua - Zhao elaborated on the internal struggles
between the top leadership in 1989 and defended
his role and decisions. Yang later included his
interview in a book titled Political struggle
in China's top leadership during its reform
age, which was published at the end of 2004.
Seemingly in accordance with his pro-student
attitude, Zhao held a far divergent view on
redefining the June 4 Tiananmen massacre - now
called an "incident".
Yet to historians,
June 4 is not the most controversial in Zhao's
chronicle - there are two other events. When
chairing the Chinese Communist Party Guangdong
Committee in the 1960s, the then-extreme leftist
Zhao promoted a series of purges against those
accused of corruption or connected to the
Kuomintang. Zhao was also alleged to have struck
Hu Yaobang when the latter was demoted from his
post. Zhao himself denied the second accusation,
though it was well known that Zhao's group could
not mesh or cooperate with Hu's.
As
premier (1980-87), Zhao sought to develop coastal
provinces with special economic zones that could
lure foreign investment and create export hubs.
This led to rapid increases in both agricultural
and light-industrial output throughout the 1980s,
but his economic reforms were heavily criticized
by many pundits for causing inflation.
Zhao is branded by many as a Marxist
revisionist. Unlike other paramount leaders, he
advocated governance transparency and a national
dialogue that included ordinary citizens in the
policymaking process, which made him popular with
the masses. Former US president Bill Clinton said
in his official visit to China in 1998 that they
should struggle to step on "the right side of
history together". When it came to Zhao, he did
this and sacrificed his political life in the
process.
More noticeably, the party even
set up a team to probe Zhao's alleged long-ago
misconduct. On the eve of the 14th Party Congress
in 1992, the party declared the fruitless
investigation completed and that Zhao retained his
party membership. Nevertheless, the verdict was
conspicuously silent about what the party called
the most grievous charge: Zhao's support of the
student-led Tiananmen "riots" and attempting to
"split" the party. "Splittism" is considered one
of the most serious charges in the communist
ideological code.
Zhao's case is
reminiscent of that of another paramount leader,
Liu Shaoqi: Liu was ousted from all party posts
and expelled from the party forever in the 2nd
session of the 8th Party Congress in 1968 for
criticizing Mao Zedong's policies. Mao and his
wife Jiang Ching ordered his persecution by the
Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and Liu
died in disgrace. He was rehabilitated in the 5th
session of the 11th Party Congress in 1980.
Compared with Liu, Zhao seems to have a better
chance to be reevaluated, perhaps fairly, and
rehabilitated, more swiftly.
Thus, a
reappraisal of Zhao sounds quite possible, as
domestic and overseas intellectuals view that as a
test of the Hu-Wen duo's political wisdom.
Appendix
The son of a
prosperous landlord, Zhao Ziyang was born in
October 1919 in China's central Henan province.
But he defied his background and joined the
Communist Party of China, working underground for
years.
After the Communist Party's victory
in 1949, Zhao emerged as a prominent party leader
in southern Guangdong province, where, following
the guidance of Mao Zedong, he oversaw the
creation of People's communes.
Soon after
the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) when Communist
Party polices were responsible for the starvation
and death of millions of peasants, Zhao advocated
a more moderate economic path by allowing peasants
to grow food in small individual plots rather than
in big communal parcels.
Mao's death in
1976 allowed for People's communes to be gradually
abolished and more pragmatic economic policies put
forward. In 1975, Zhao became party secretary of
China's most populous province, Sichuan. Under his
leadership, small rural markets prospered and the
lives of peasants were gradually rebuilt.
Zhao's measures were successful at ending
food shortages and after serving as a party
secretary of Sichuan province, he was summoned by
China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to Beijing.
In 1980 he was appointed by Deng to be premier
with a mandate to expand rural reforms.
Zhao was among the first to advocate the
creation of special economic zones in China's
coastal areas as ways of attracting foreign
investment. His economic reforms in the 1980s -
such as promoting export manufacturing centers in
China's relatively developed east and south, set
the stage for the opening up of China's economy
and was the impetus to 25 years of robust economic
growth.
As a political reformer, Zhao
spearheaded a liberal intellectual movement that
demanded a radical reassessment of Chinese culture
and the history of the Communist Party. Programmes
like the famous TV series River Elegy, aired on
Chinese television during Zhao's rule, called for
a thorough re-examination of Chinese culture. It
posed major questions: why after the patriotic
movement of the enlightening 1920s following the
collapse of imperial China, had the country
descended into the barbarity of the Cultural
Revolution?
Without openly challenging the
Communist Party's rule, Zhao's political agenda
called for party elections with more than one
candidate, free press, independent trade and
student unions, more transparency in the party's
workings and individual responsibility for
mistakes.
Zhao had also made it clear that
he sided with the students' demands for an end to
official corruption.
Despite the facade of
constitutional government and "rule of law" that
Deng had enacted after 1979, the paramount leader
decided everything himself. The students referred
to this as an "autocracy".
In 1989, when
party reformers and students challenged the
hardliners in the Communist Party, the country
hovered on the brink of civil war. The reformers
were confident they had the people's power on
their side, but the die-hard military men won
easily after arresting Zhao and calling in the
tanks. - Antoaneta Bezlova, Inter Press
Service
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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