Tiananmen hero Zhao Ziyang dies, 85

[JohnLocke]

Purged Party Chief of China, Zhao Ziyang, Dies
By Benjamin Kang Lim -- Reuters
Sunday, January 16, 2005
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BEIJING--Zhao Ziyang, toppled as China's Communist Party chief in 1989 for opposing an army crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, died in hospital on Monday, his family and the government said. He was 85.
Zhao, who resisted then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's decision to crush the Tiananmen protests, has remained a politically sensitive figure for 15 years amid government fears his death could spark a groundswell of protest.
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Zhao's daughter, Wang Yannan, who changed her surname after her father was purged for opposing the military crackdown on the student-led 1989 protests, said he died peacefully.
"He is free at last," Wang said in a statement to Reuters.
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The government had stepped up security in Tiananmen once Zhao's health began to deteriorate, fearing his death could serve as a rallying point for reformers, for workers bitter at high unemployment and for poor farmers envious of wealthier urban residents.
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While Zhao is forever associated with opposition to the crackdown, his legacy remains unclear because the secretive Chinese leadership has never fully explained his role, Hou Dejian, a Taiwan composer who staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen days before the crackdown, told Reuters in Taipei.
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Kenneth Lieberthal, University of Michigan professor of political science, noted the new generation of college students and others in their 20s had no direct experience of Zhao and he was remembered among older generations as a political reformer.
"The leadership will take precautions anyway, with stepped up security and surveillance — they always do. But will this be a spark for another protest movement? I have no idea. But I would doubt that it would," he told Reuters.
Zhao was placed under house arrest, confined behind the red doors of his Beijing courtyard home, shortly before the army, backed by tanks, crushed the demonstrations on June 3-4, 1989.
Hundreds of people were killed.
Zhao was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, when he appeared in the square and made a tearful appeal to the protesters to leave, saying he had come too late. The government declared martial law the next day.
He was accused of trying to split the party and sacked as general secretary. Jiang Zemin took his place, ruling for more than a decade before handing over to Hu Jintao in late 2002.
But in certain circles his death will be deeply mourned.
"At present there is no person like him on the Chinese political stage. No one can replace him," said Jiang Peikun, husband of professor Ding Zilin, whose teenage son was killed in the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
"This is the end of an era."
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Read the rest here.
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The Prisoner of Conscience: Zhao Ziyang, 1919-2005
He carried China's democratic hopes but sacrificed his freedom at Tiananmen
By Matthew Forney and Susan Jakes -- Time
Sunday, January 16, 2005
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The last time the world saw Zhao Ziyang, he had a bullhorn in his hands and tears in his eyes. It was May 19, 1989, and for weeks students from around China had camped in Tiananmen Square calling for China's aging leaders to give them democracy. Many saw Zhao, the reform-minded General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as their greatest hope. When he arrived shortly before dawn, hunger-striking students literally reached their arms out to him, thinking the government had backed down and that they had won. But Zhao brought a very different message. He had just left a meeting of China's top leaders and military commanders, and he was powerless to stop the imminent violence. "I have come too late," he told them.
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Zhao was once China's greatest hope for political reform. He joined the CCP in 1938—11 years before Chairman Mao's peasant army swept into Beijing—and remained a committed cadre even after his father, a landowner, was killed by Party officials in the late 1940s. By the 1960s, Zhao had risen to Party secretary of Guangdong province, near Hong Kong, before being purged during the Cultural Revolution for his association with Mao's enemies. As that decade of chaos ended, Zhao was posted to remote Sichuan province as CCP secretary, where Deng Xiaoping tasked him with introducing economic reforms. Zhao became one China's most popular leaders. Unlike Mao, the "Great Helmsman," or Deng Xiaoping, the "Chief Architect of Reform," Zhao didn't receive a nickname from propagandists. Instead, his honorific came from the people he governed. Peasants in Sichuan used to say, "yao chi liang, Zhao Ziyang"—a rhyming pun meaning "If you want to eat, Zhao is your man." Deng promoted him to Premier in 1980, and made him Party chief in 1987.
The legacy of economic reforms that Zhao promoted are everywhere on display in China, but Zhao's agenda for change was more ambitious still. In a seminal speech in 1987 to the Central Committee, he proposed limiting the CCP's control over government. Many remember the two years that followed as one of the most open periods in modern Chinese history. "Publications introduced new and surprising ideas, intellectuals freely held seminars and there was a sense that ordinary people could influence the direction of the country," says Wu Guoguang, a former aide to Zhao who now teaches at the University of Victoria in Canada. "If those ideas had stayed current, the Communist Party would look very different today." Instead, the reformist aspirations that Zhao husbanded were purged with him.
Zhao sealed his fate with an act of courage unseen among China's totalitarian leaders before or since—he broke ranks. He alone sacrificed his career, and his freedom, when he sided with the students and tried to prevent the bloodshed that came on June 4, 1989. In the words of leadership at the time, "Comrade Zhao Ziyang committed the serious mistake of supporting the turmoil and splitting the Party." Despite the changes that have swept China in the past 15 years, that remains the official verdict on Zhao. It is also the Party's most vulnerable point. Any reformist contender for power could at any time propose clearing Zhao's name. Doing so would likely divide the CCP between closet reformers who agree with Zhao's ideas and the rest who fear that democracy will mean the Party's collapse. For China's current, conservative leaders, Zhao may be more dangerous in death than he was in life.
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Read the rest here.
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Tiananmen hero Zhao Ziyang dies, 85
By Oliver August -- The Times of London
Monday, January 17, 2005
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Police are expected to implement additional security measures in Tiananmen Square to prevent an outpouring of public support for the deposed former leader. It was the death of Mr Zhao’s predecessor, Hu Yaobang, in 1989 that triggered the Tiananmen demonstrations. Students grateful to Mr Hu, a former Communist Party chief, for supporting demonstrations two years earlier came out to honour him that spring.
Before long, their numbers swelled and an impromptu memorial turned into a nationwide pro-democracy protest that ended in a crackdown.
Mr Zhao was purged from the party leadership after accusations that he sympathised with the students on Tiananmen Square who for seven weeks demanded democratic reforms and the resignation of Li Peng, the Premier at the time.
He was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, when he visited the square to talk to the student hunger strikers, one day before martial law was declared. "I have come too late," he apologised, in tears.
After the slaughter of hundreds if not thousands of unarmed students and citizens in Beijing on the night of June 3, a central government report squarely placed the blame on Mr Zhao.
"Comrade Zhao Ziyang committed the serious mistake of supporting the turmoil and splitting the Party," the report said. "He had the unshirkable responsibility for the shaping up and development of the turmoil."
Since then, Mr Zhao has lived under house arrest in a tightly guarded compound in central Beijing. Although his political reform plans have been shelved since his removal from power, his economic reforms in the 1980s set the stage for 25 years of robust economic growth.
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Read the rest here.
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"I have come too late..."

[JohnLocke]

1. Kick (nt).

[Selatius]

2. You know who I admire most out of that event?

The unknown man who stood in front of the tanks. He's a hero in my book.

[JohnLocke]

3. "Tank Man"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_man

[ClarkUSA]

4. Every damn one of them who stood up for democracy is a hero

[Moderator]

5. Duplicate

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1157330