Only close family were allowed to attend the low-key burial in Tianshou Garden cemetery in Chaoping in Beijing's northern outskirts. Well-wishers and supporters were kept away. She also apologised for not publicly announcing the burial before it went ahead, saying the family were unsure if they would get the green light from authorities until the last minute.
Zhao Ziyang was promoted by China's former supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, who was looking for someone to reform the economy and open up the country to the outside world. His position seemed assured when he was made general secretary of the ruling Communist Party in But the protests by students and residents in Beijing - and elsewhere across China - two years later revealed deep divisions within the party leadership.
Hundreds of thousands called for democratic reforms in a peaceful demonstration largely focused on a gathering in Tiananmen Square. Mr Zhao, who had a more liberal attitude than other leaders, favoured a conciliatory approach towards the protesters.
That view eventually lost to those who wanted to bring in the army, and Mr Deng approved the detention of his former favourite.
The burial of Zhao Ziyang - once China's top official - has been a contentious issue. Usually, Chinese state leaders' burials are extravagant affairs, complete with media fanfare. But when Mr Zhao died in , it was announced that his cremation would be held in a conventional cemetery, designated for state leaders, high ranking-officials and celebrities tolerated by the authorities.
Then, officials refused permission for his ashes to be buried, and the family took his ashes home. He also went without the usual speeches and editorials which celebrate deceased Chinese leaders' major anniversaries.
The authorities had categorised him as a "toppled former leader" whose anniversaries are smothered in deliberate silence and tightened security. He championed a number of political and economic reforms but was ousted for his role in creating conditions which led to the student pro-democracy movement.
Born into a family of landlords in Huaxian County, Henan Province, in China, in , Zhao Ziyang attended elementary school in his hometown and middle schools first in Kaifeng and later in Wuhan. He was married to Liang Bogi and had four sons and one daughter.
In he was elected a member of the People's Council of Guangdong Province and appointed deputy party secretary of Guangdong Province. In April he became the first party secretary of Guangdong Province.
Under his leadership, Guangdong was among the first provinces to return to guaranteed private plots, free rural markets, and contracting output to households after the disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign of Mao Tse-Tung. During the Cultural Revolution spearheaded by the Red Guards, Zhao was persecuted and exiled to a factory as a laborer because of his support for "revisionist" policies.
In he reappeared in China's political arena and became the party secretary of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. In April Zhao returned to Guangdong where he was appointed vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Committee. In he was promoted to the first party secretary and chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Guangdong Province. Zhao wanted the Party to maintain a political leading role, rather than administrative and management leadership. But how long could such a political arrangement have lasted?
As soon as democratic elections would have been organized, other political forces would have emerged. Said differently, separating the Party and the state while keeping the Party in the leading role would sooner or later have led to a showdown within the Party leadership. In such a case, a rupture similar to the end of the USSR would not have been unlikely.
However, Zhao and the reformers were in too weak a position to have been able to impose such choices against the will of the majority of the Party leadership; under the pressure of elder leaders and others, Deng would have eventually abandoned them. I did fieldwork in and again in in various provinces, including Shandong, Hunan, and Guangxi.
What Zhao and his advisers had in mind at that time was light-years away from what the city and county cadres I met understood from the 13th Party Congress. Even a redefined, narrower, and more political leading role was for them very hard to understand since leadership and management were then and are still today difficult to differentiate.
In such circumstances, how could Zhao and the reformers have hoped to see their reform plan implemented? In any event, my conclusion is that Zhao and the reformers were either doomed or would have had to accept a much more timid political reform package in order to survive. My friend worked for a government agency handling the media covering the Congress. Of course I had planned to attend. Already, the conclave in Beijing had produced some startling changes. For us, the Chinese and foreign media who were covering the Congress, the typically choreographed and boring event had turned out to be somewhat different, in both optics and substance.
For the first time, we were invited to observe the opening and closing ceremonies from the gallery of the Great Hall of the People. We were invited to a series of press conferences featuring senior ministers. Remarkably, our notebooks and tapes were more full of information than usual. In the afternoon of November 1, I was ushered into one of the humongous halls inside the Great Hall of the People. My friend was there, too, grinning widely.
We all stood behind a long U-shaped table, sipping cocktail drinks and chatting. Then there was a commotion and Zhao Ziyang was introduced as the newly elected General Secretary of the Communist Party. Zhao, then 68, entered the hall like a victorious politician, smiling and clasping his hands before him.
They were all wearing Western suits. Dapper in double-breasted suit and burgundy tie, Zhao joked and answered questions for an hour as he worked his way though a long line of reporters. Until this time, I had never seen a top Chinese official interact with the press up close and unrehearsed. This press event is a punctuation mark in my year career as a foreign correspondent in China.
Zhao displayed confidence and wit, giving off-the-cuff answers to our unfiltered questions. Perhaps naively, he denied the existence of conservative and reformist factions in the Chinese Communist Party.
His optimism was understandable. Deng Xiaoping had forced the retirement of fellow Long March veterans who were unsympathetic to market reforms. The just-concluded congress had elected a fresh batch of younger and better-educated technocrats into the policy-making central committee.
The reformists seemed to be going in strength, the old-school conservatives in disarray. Alas, two years later, Zhao was toppled, the biggest scapegoat of the political maelstrom that followed the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests. If Zhao had remained in power and the Tiananmen crackdown did not happen, I could imagine the Zhao style of political reform would have continued and the Party would have loosened its grip of control—but only to a limited extent.
After all, during his brief reign, Zhao had advocated toumingdu —transparency and press freedom. He called for political reform, including checks and balance: separation of the Party and government affairs, separation of the affairs of the government and the enterprises.
Had Zhao remained, China probably would be more democratic, or at least less authoritarian than it is now, even though some of his advisers then encouraged him to embrace xin quanweizhuyi new authoritarianism. Zhao would have pursued reformist policies to improve governance and keep the Party in power, not to undermine its rule. Had he remained, the Chinese media would probably be even more robust and relatively free-wheeling, enjoying more leeway to deliver the news and offer editorial opinion.
His reform ideas departed so radically from the status quo that they made him appear like a bomb-thrower—and a sitting-duck target for the Old Guards. His seemingly gentle personality, lack of ambition, political savvy, and tenacity and his narrow political base contributed to his ultimate failure. Zhao was not a Gorbachev. His views may have changed in the years after his downfall, but he was a loyal communist, at least when he was in power. China would have been considerably freer and less authoritarian now had he survived the debacle.
Still, China ruled by Zhao would have remained a bird in cage, but in a much bigger cage.
0コメント