News: China cautious, but Zhao death not seen triggering protests

January 17, 2005

The last time Zhao Ziyang was seen in public was on May 19, 1989, when,
as the reformist General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, he
addressed student protesters on Tiananmen Square and apologised to them
for not listening to their grievances. "I have come too late," he said.

The Tiananmen protests had been partly triggered by the death of
another reformer, Hu Yaobang, who had been sacked by Deng in 1987 over
his failure to tackle earlier student demonstrations. Zhao succeeded Hu
as General Secretary, a position that made him Deng’s effective number
two and favourite to succeed him.

But although paramilitary police swarmed over Tiananmen Square this
morning, and authorities stationed extra guards outside Zhao’s central
Beijing residence, analysts did not believe that Zhao’s death would
bring further protests. Although democratic reforms have never come,
China’s focus has largely moved on.

China cautious, but Zhao death not seen triggering protests
By Philippe Naughton, Times Online

The last time Zhao Ziyang was seen in public was on May 19, 1989, when,
as the reformist General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, he
addressed student protesters on Tiananmen Square and apologised to them
for not listening to their grievances. "I have come too late," he said.

In fact, Zhao was way ahead of his time. Party elders, including
paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, declared martial law the following day
and two weeks later, the tanks rolled in on the protesters, hundreds of
whom were killed in a brutal crackdown that halted the drive for
democratic reform in China.

Zhao was stripped of all his positions and spent the next 15 years
under house arrest, until his death this morning at the age of 85.

The Tiananmen protests had been partly triggered by the death of
another reformer, Hu Yaobang, who had been sacked by Deng in 1987 over
his failure to tackle earlier student demonstrations. Zhao succeeded Hu
as General Secretary, a position that made him Deng’s effective number
two and favourite to succeed him.

But although paramilitary police swarmed over Tiananmen Square this
morning, and authorities stationed extra guards outside Zhao’s central
Beijing residence, analysts did not believe that Zhao’s death would
bring further protests. Although democratic reforms have never come,
China’s focus has largely moved on.

"The intellectuals and public of China are not in the mood for
revolution," said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at New York’s
Hamilton College. "They believe that incremental reform is in the best
interest of China."

Analysts say China in the late 1980s was a more ideologically charged
place than now, and conditions were ripe for the kind of confrontation
that ended in the Tianamnen crackdown. The pro-democracy movement of 15
years ago also had a clearly defined opponent, in the form of
conservative politicians pining for the austerity of Mao Zedong.

In modern China the hardliners have evaporated, as a general consensus
has developed that the country’s priority is carefully paced economic
liberalisation.

"Today, politics and society are basically stable, and there are no
serious ideological issues," said Joseph Cheng, a China analysts at
City University of Hong Kong. "There are some vested interests against
reform, but they are not so obvious. There are no clear targets."

And it is a measure of how much China has changed in the past decade
and a half that many of the people who were passionate about democracy
in the past have reconciled themselves to a reality where politics
changes at a snail’s pace.

"The generation who cared about Zhao are now in their 50s. The guys who
were close to him are now vice-ministers or bureau chiefs," said David
Zweig, a China expert at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"Probably some of them will sit in their government offices today and feel bad. But they’ve moved on with their lives," he said.

The most prominent representative of this group is Wen Jiabao, the
Chinese Premier, who was a close aide to Zhao until his fall from
grace. Wen will play a key role in deciding how to handle Zhao’s death,
beyond the one-line communique carried by the Xinhua news agency this
morning: "Comrade Zhao died of illness in a Beijing hospital on Monday."

"Beijing will calibrate the response to Zhao’s death carefully,
acknowledging his contributions but carefully preventing public
demonstrations," said Joseph Fewsmith, a China scholar at Boston
University."

Oliver August, the Times China Correspondent, said Zhao’s death will
come as a reminder that political reforms were frozen back in 1989. He
said there was no sign yet that his death would set off any mass
protests.

But life in China could have been very different if Zhao, who earned
his reputation as an economic reformer in Sichuan province, had not
lost the power-battle with hardliners such as Li Peng, then the
premier, and Yang Shangkun, the president.

"He is the Gorbachev of China, the failed Gorbachev of China," said
Augus. "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."

While China and the outside world learned of Zhao’s death in the terse
Xinhua dispatch, his daughter, Wang Yannan, sent a brief text message
to friends: "He left peacefully this morning, he is free at last."