Mark Avery/Associated Press
Protesters struggle with soldiers as people in Beijing try to block troops on their way towards Tiananmen Square in 1989. Gen. Yang Baibing directed the suppression of student-led protests in the square.
Published: January 17, 2013
BEIJING — Gen. Yang Baibing, a military strongman who carried out the violent suppression of student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and was later purged because of fears that he was accruing too much power, died here on Tuesday. He was 93.
Gen. Yang Baibing at a party meeting in Beijing in 1997.
His death was reported by the official Xinhua news agency. A statement issued by the party’s Central Committee provided the sort of terse homage typically reserved for a disgraced political figure, saying, “He was a seasoned loyal Communist fighter and a proletarian revolutionist.”
The younger half brother of Yang Shangkun, a former president of China and a Red Army luminary, General Yang had largely been forgotten in the two decades since the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, stripped the brothers of their posts out of concern that they were seeking to upend his succession plan with what some analysts described as a “minicoup.” Their downfall was probably abetted by Deng’s handpicked successor, Jiang Zemin, as he moved to isolate potential rivals in his drive to consolidate power.
But during the politically turbulent years after the Tiananmen crackdown, General Yang was a prominent defender of the economic reforms being championed by Deng, who was facing resistance from conservatives. In a statement published by a party newspaper, General Yang declared the military to be the “protector and escort” of reform, which included efforts to open China to the outside world.
In the end, Deng’s economic liberalization drive prevailed, paving the way for China’s extraordinary economic growth.
The alliance with Deng, however, proved short-lived. Rumors surfaced that General Yang had privately raised the prospect of a succession plan without the likes of Mr. Jiang, who at the time was displaying lukewarm support for market-oriented reforms. In late 1992, after Deng caught wind of the talk — some called it a plot — the Yang brothers lost their posts, as did scores of their loyalists in the military.
Among democracy advocates, General Yang is best remembered for carrying out Deng’s order to clear unarmed demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the spring of 1989. In May, his older brother appeared on television with Li Peng, the prime minister at the time, to justify the imposition of martial law to quell demonstrations that had paralyzed the heart of the capital. As general secretary of the Central Military Commission and the army’s political commissar, General Yang mobilized troops whose gunfire would claim hundreds if not thousands of lives.
In the months that followed, the Yang brothers — sometimes referred to disparagingly as the “Yang family clique” — purged officers who had failed to carry out their orders properly. But in his ensuing drive to pack the army’s upper ranks with allies, General Yang incurred the resentment of military elders, who accused the brothers of trying to subvert Deng’s succession plans.
Deng, in failing health, moved against the brothers, with some reluctance, only after learning that General Yang had held an unauthorized meeting with military officers at a Beijing hotel in which they discussed an alternative leadership arrangement that would go into effect upon Deng’s death, according to Ming Pao, a newspaper in Hong Kong. At a party congress several weeks later, General Yang was ousted from his military post, although he was given a nominal spot on the 20-seat Politburo until Mr. Jiang reportedly nudged him off in 1997.
Deng died that year at 92.
As is the case with many top Chinese leaders, not much is known about General Yang’s private life. Raised in southwest Sichuan Province, he was the 11th child of an “open-minded and patriotic landowner,” according to China Daily, and joined the Communist Party in 1938. He was imprisoned for much of the decade-long Cultural Revolution and later rehabilitated, becoming a full general in 1988.
Yang Shangkun, his brother and the former president, died in 1998.
It is unclear what General Yang did after his forced retirement, although two years ago he made a rare public appearance in Chongqing, his eyes shaded by sunglasses, during the unveiling of a memorial to another brother, Yang An’gong, who was killed by warlords during a Communist-led uprising in 1927.
In recent years General Yang was said to have sought a publisher for his memoirs, which included a justification for the use of force against the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Bao Pu, a publisher in Hong Kong, said party leaders had rejected the manuscript, presumably because it broached a subject that remains taboo here.
Mr. Bao, whose father was purged as Communist Party secretary general for opposing the use of force in Tiananmen Square, said many historians were eager to know whether in his memoirs General Yang had expressed regret for the killings.
“Thanks to the Yang brothers, China’s only military victory of the last 30 years involved cracking down on its own people,” Mr. Bao said. “You can’t help but wonder if he had any reflection on that.”
Patrick Zuo contributed research.
