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Nick-la
Wonder Wit
Joined: July 19, 2003
Posts: 3675
Location: Wasted on this site
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 Posted:
Jan 17, 2005 - 07:38 PM |
 
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| Post subject: What a way to die |
Trapped for 15 years, unlawfully and withouth trial or given reason.
What a great country.
China on alert after Tiananmen party reformist dies
Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Monday January 17, 2005
The Guardian
Zhao Ziyang, the former Chinese Communist party leader who has been under house arrest since the Tiananmen Square prοtests of 1989 has died aged 85.
His son, Liang Fang, told Reuters: "He died at 7.10am. National leaders came to pay respects, but it is not convenient to say who they are."
His daughter, Wang Yannan, added that he was "free at last".
Reflecting government fears that the death of the democracy figurehead could spark a wave of demonstrations, security had already been tightened in Beijing's Tiananmen Square this week.
Dissidents were under surveillance and most of the domestic media had been for bidden from mentioning Mr Zhao's condition.
However, two hours after Mr Zhao's death, the official Xinhua news agency reported: "Comrade Zhao had long suffered from diseases of his respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and was hospitalised for medical treatment several times. His condition worsened recently, and he passed away after failing to respond to emergency treatment."
Frank Lu, a prominent human rights activist, said Mr Zhao had died peacefully surrounded by his family.
Mr Zhao was a popular pro-reform premier and party general secretary when he was last seen in public on May 19 1989. He went further than any other Chinese leader in sympathising with the student hunger strikers, tearfully begging them to leave the square.
"I have come too late," he apologised. A day later, the government declared martial law, the first step in a bloody crackdown that led, two weeks later, to the massacre of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of prοtesters in Beijing.
He had been confined to his courtyard home, reportedly guarded and kept shut away from the outside with the help of a bicycle lock, ever since. One associate described him as being in the Chinese equivalent of the Tower of London.
According to his family and friends, Mr Zhao's health had deteriorated alarmingly in recent years, prompting fre quent hospital visits and the use of respirators. The government refused to comment on his condition until last week, when a foreign ministry spokesman, Kong Quan, denied speculation in the Hong Kong media that Mr Zhao was already dead.
"Zhao Ziyang is an old man," Mr Kong said on Tuesday. "He fell ill a couple of days ago, but now his condition is stable."
The next day, however, police escorts appeared at the daily flag-raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square, a move seemingly designed to forestall dawn prοtests.
Analysts are split as to whether the death of Mr Zhao will cause an outpouring of sympathy and renewed calls for reform. Historical precedent is likely to give the government cause for concern. In 1976 the death of popular premier Zhou Enlai led to prοtests at Tiananmen Square.
The spark for the 1989 demonstrations was the death in April that year of Hu Yaobang, the reformist party chief purged two years earlier.
But in today's China most urban students appear more concerned with making money than pushing for political reform. Those who do speak out, such as the dissident Hu Jia and mothers of the Tiananmen Square victims, are kept under constant surveillance.
Unrest has grown in the countryside, where many peasants feel they are being sacrificed to enrich corrupt party officials, but whether China's disgruntled farmers would ever get to hear about Mr Zhao's death is far from clear. Even if they did, few could afford the time and effort to travel to Beijing.
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People here won't do anything. the gov's biggest and only success is making sure they are selfish as they are materialistic. |
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I'm surrounded by idiots. |
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izanami
PopStar
Joined: Jan 27, 2004
Posts: 1037
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Jan 17, 2005 - 09:52 PM |
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I remember that he was already quite sick last June 2004, and the top officials were quite worried that he would pass away on June 4 (TAM anniversary) and spark off an emotional outbreak.
Zhao Ziyang was also the pioneer architect for many of the economic reforms that define China today. Except that Deng Xiaoping got all the credit for it. Some more exerpts from other publications:
From the Financial Times:
Mr Zhao had joined a Communist youth organisation in his native Henan province as a teenager. War with Japan made the area a centre of Communist guerrilla activity and he joined the party in 1938, rising quickly through its ranks.
After the Communists won China’s civil war in 1949, Mr Zhao was sent to the southern province of Guangdong, where he specialised in agricultural issues while winning key roles in the party apparatus. As an official, he appears to have pushed results-based policies at odds with the ideological line favoured by Mao Zedong, party chairman.
While Mr Mao stressed the need for rural communes to create a “new society”, Mr Zhao focused more on technical work to improve agricultural yields. He was adept at softening directives with which he disagreed and - when political winds blew too hot - at keeping a low profile or mouthing the right slogans. By 1965, he was at 46 the youngest provincial party chief in China.
But Mr Zhao’s political skills could not protect him from the Cultural Revolution launched against party moderates in 1966. He was toppled by Red Guards, paraded in a dunce cap, subjected to mass criticism in front of 80,000 people, and charged with political offences ranging from being anti-Mao to watching pornographic films at the provincial party HQ.
However, Mr Zhao bounced back quickly and by the early 1970s he was back at work. As the Cultural Revolution drew to a close, he was sent to run Sichuan, one of China’s most important grain-producing provinces.
There, Mr Zhao took advantage of Mr Mao’s death in 1976 and the rise of pragmatic party veteran Deng Xiaoping to launch a series of bold agricultural reforms. Farmers were allowed to till individual plots and to sell produce in local markets, with dramatic results.
Between 1976 and 1979, grain output in Sichuan rose around 25 per cent, making the province a net exporter of food again. “If you want to eat, seek Ziyang,” or so the folk saying went that played on the shared sound of Mr Zhao’s surname and the verb ‘to look for’.
Mr Deng made Mr Zhao China’s premier, a position he used to push other “reform and opening” measures such as the creation of semi-capitalist special economic zones. Such policies set China on course for extraordinary growth, but also brought corruption, wealth disparities and foreign ways.
These strained the social fabric and angered conservative Communists, whose distrust of Mr Zhao could only be fuelled by his lack of interest in ideological orthodoxy and his habit of wearing Savile Row suits for meetings with foreign dignitaries.
After a wave of student demonstrations for democracy in 1986, Mr Zhao was forced to line up with the hardliners to oust party chief Hu Yaobang, an ally and fellow Deng protege. But Mr Zhao replaced Mr Hu and was soon pushing political reforms intended to separate party and state.
China’s economy was deteriorating, however, and the conservatives were in the ascendant when Mr Hu’s death in early 1989 sparked a wave of new student prοtests in Tiananmen Square.
Mr Zhao’s initial reaction was low key, even though he himself was a target of some demonstrators over alleged corruption among his family. He opposed efforts by the hardliners to suppress the prοtests. Some analysts said he hoped to use the popular calls for reform to strengthen his own position.
Mr Deng - semi-retired but still China’s most powerful leader - decided the prοtesters must be silenced. On June 4, the People’s Liberation Army seized Beijing back from the people, killing hundreds.
Admirers say Zhao felt he owed it to history and to the party to oppose the assault on peaceful prοtesters. He was stripped of his posts and condemned to effective house arrest that lasted until his death.
It was a kinder fate than that of some other senior Chinese communists: former president Liu Shaoqi died of untreated ailments in prison in 1969, for example. Mr Zhao was even permitted quiet rounds of golf on Beijing courses and to accept visits from friends.
Mr Zhao risked such perks by issuing occasional calls for the government to reconsider its verdict on the 1989 prοtests. The appeals were ignored, but many in China are convinced that the government will someday rehabilitate Mr Zhao’s principles and disavow the use of force that bloody June.
From the New york times:
....
Mr. Zhao's role at Tiananmen came to overshadow his other
legacy as a principal architect of the sweeping economic
changes that began in the 1980's under Deng Xiaoping, then
China's paramount leader. Mr. Zhao pushed to develop
coastal provinces with special economic zones that could
lure foreign investment and create export hubs - the
blueprint for what is the backbone of the current Chinese
economy.
"Deng Xiaoping's entire economic package, a good part of
it, was really Zhao Ziyang's brainchild," said David
Shambaugh, who wrote a 1984 biography of Mr. Zhao. "In
coastal development, agriculture, price reform and
industrial reform, those were Zhao's ideas. Deng got the
credit, but they were Zhao's ideas."
Unlike Mr. Deng and Mao Zedong, Mr. Zhao had not been a
military hero during the Communist revolution. Nor had he
taken part in the Long March of 1934-35, the unifying rite
of passage for the generation of Communist leaders who
founded the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Instead, Mr. Zhao's political apprenticeship came as a
provincial bureaucrat. Born in 1919 in central China's
Henan Province, he joined the Communist Youth League in
1932, then joined the Chinese Communist Party six years
later. He served in the military during the war against the
Japanese, then during the Chinese revolution, but his posts
were largely administrative.
Mr. Zhao had no formal training as an economist but
exhibited a pragmatic style and had record of success that
eventually attracted Mr. Deng's attention. Dispatched to
southern China after the Communist victory in 1949, Mr.
Zhao focused on land reform issues as he steadily rose
through the political ranks in Guangdong Province.
Few issues were more politically charged in newly Communist
China. Efforts to fulfill Mao's vision of a socialist
utopia led to the abandonment of private land plots in
favor of agricultural communes. But the misguided
collectivization schemes of the Great Leap Forward of
1958-60 became a historic catastrophe. An estimated 30
million people died during three horrific years of famine
caused by a collapse in food production.
In 1962, Mr. Zhao, then the top provincial official in
Guangdong, introduced a plan to disband the commune system
and return private land plots to farmers while assigning
production contracts to individual households. The system
worked and would become a model that helped the rest of
China rebuild agricultural output.
Politically, though, Mr. Zhao would not be rewarded. In
1967, he was persecuted during the purges of the Cultural
Revolution for "revisionist" thinking and spent four years
in forced labor at a factory. He re-emerged in 1971 as an
official in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, seemingly
as a born-again Maoist. He gave a speech renouncing private
enterprise and material incentives.
But his conversion was apparently not very genuine. He
returned to Guangdong in 1972 and then moved to Sichuan
Province in 1975. There, he introduced land reforms similar
to those he had used earlier in Guangdong and loosened
controls on industry. He allowed farmers and factories to
set prices for their products, a decision that saw three
years of production increases.
His performance also gained the attention of Mr. Deng. A
Sichuan native, Mr. Deng had survived two purge attempts to
eventually emerge as China's paramount leader after Mao's
death in 1976. Mr. Deng wanted to solve China's economic
problems with pragmatic solutions, not ideological
experiments, and in 1980 he brought Mr. Zhao to Beijing as
deputy prime minister.
Later that year, Mr. Zhao was elevated to prime minister, a
job that made him the titular head of the government and
placed him in charge of the Chinese economy. At Mr. Deng's
behest, he acted boldly, embracing economic reform by
expanding self-management for peasant farmers and some
industries. In 1987, after the ouster of Hu Yaobang, who
was deemed too lenient toward student prοtests, Mr. Zhao
became general secretary of the Communist Party, a job that
made him Mr. Deng's presumptive heir.
He apparently had his doubts.
"I'm not that fit to be the
general secretary," Mr. Zhao said in an American television
interview about a month before being appointed to the job.
"I'm more fit to look after economic affairs."
Nonetheless, Mr. Zhao was not meek. He made a famous speech
at the opening of a Communist Party congress in 1987 in
which he declared that China was in "a primary stage of
socialism" that could last 100 years. As a result, he
argued, China needed to experiment with a variety of
economic approaches to stimulate production.
It was a deft refinement that managed to place
experimenting with market economics within an evolutionary
framework for socialism.
But Mr. Zhao's policies earned him many enemies among
Marxist ideologues and hard-liners in Beijing who blamed
him when the economy overheated in 1988. Inflation soared,
as did reports of corruption. His influence in the
government he putatively led began to wane. Mr. Zhao's
enemies also pounced on his embrace of political
liberalization. "He thought the goal of Chinese political
reform was to build up democracy and rule of law," said Wu
Guoguang, who was among a group of advisers who consulted
with Mr. Zhao on various issues and now teaches politics at
Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Mr. Shambaugh, the biographer, said Mr. Zhao was
increasingly desperate by 1989 as his power was quickly
eroding. On May 4, he made a conciliatory speech toward
Tiananmen prοtesters without Mr. Deng's clearance. In the
weeks before the crackdown, Mr. Zhao and Mikhail S.
Gorbachev, then the Soviet leader, met in Beijing as the
prοtests continued. The image projected to the world was of
two like-minded Communist reformers.
But Mr. Zhao sealed his demise by telling Mr. Gorbachev
that all major decisions by China's Central Committee had
to be approved by Mr. Deng, who was technically in
retirement. This was hardly revelatory but speaking about
Mr. Deng's role in public violated a major taboo. It also
was regarded as a signal by Mr. Zhao that Mr. Deng was
responsible for the government's intransigence on calls by
prοtesters.
Mr. Deng quickly stripped Mr. Zhao of his powers, and
later, of his job. In the months after Mr. Zhao was placed
under house arrest, he was pilloried in the Chinese press.
But, ultimately, no charges were brought against him.
"He has been steadfast that his views are correct, and
their views were wrong," Mr. Shambaugh said before Mr.
Zhao's death. "He has given not an inch in the past 15
years."
Even in isolation, Mr. Zhao made news, if only outside
China. When former President Bill Clinton visited China in
1998, Mr. Zhao managed to issue a letter calling for China
to reassess the Tiananmen crackdown and acknowledge that it
had made a grave error. Coverage of the letter was banned
in China.
Mr. Zhao's confinement was loosened enough during the
1990's, but he still needed permission from the highest
levels when he requested to go on vacation in southern
China to pursue his passion for playing golf.
He is survived by his second wife, Liang Boqi, four sons
and a daughter. |
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Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.-- Brillat-Savarin |
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