July 29, 2016
A newly published collection of works by Zhao Ziyang, the party leader ousted in 1989, along with his photograph, on display at a book fair in Hong Kong this month.
Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Retired and dead Chinese Communist Party leaders who join the official pantheon are usually feted with the publication of their collected works. Generally, the fat volumes of speeches and writings are rarely read by anyone except the occasional scholar and party members ordered to study them.
But that honor has been denied to Zhao Ziyang, the party leader ousted in 1989, when Deng Xiaoping, his powerful elder, sided with conservatives who blamed Mr. Zhao for letting student protesters get out of control. Mr. Zhao died in 2005, still an official pariah under house arrest, and even now his name is rarely mentioned in the party-run news media, and his speeches and writings are hard to track down in China, where their circulation was banned after his fall.
Now, however, an unnamed group of Mr. Zhao’s former associates, in cooperation with his family, has published “Collected Works,” a four-volume set of his speeches and writings from the 1980s, when he helped steer China’s economic overhauls and increasingly clashed with conservatives who opposed his ideas for a measure of political liberalization.
Even though the compilers left out Mr. Zhao’s historic speeches during the upheavals of 1989, readers in mainland China will have a hard time getting their hands on the books. They have been published by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong, a self-governed city that remains beyond the direct reach of party censors.
“The reform and opening up launched in China in the 1980s transformed the fates of more than a billion Chinese, and you could even say that each Chinese person, each family, has some connection to Zhao Ziyang,” Gan Qi, the director of the Chinese University Press, wrote in an email. “Reliable firsthand documentation is the foundation of historical research.”
Publishers in Hong Kong have felt increasingly intimidated by pressure from Beijing, especially after five booksellers disappeared into detention in mainland China. But Ms. Gan said that she was not nervous about publishing Mr. Zhao’s works and hoped that they would shed light on an era that reshaped China. Over 90 percent of the contents have not been openly published before, according to the editors.
“As an academic publishing house that takes a neutral stance, the Chinese University Press continues its work as normal,” Ms. Gan said.
Even so, the unnamed Chinese compilers omitted major speeches that Mr. Zhao made in 1989, when he was forced from power after Deng authorized using armed force to clear student protesters occupying Tiananmen Square, Ms. Gan said. The soldiers pushed into Beijing on June 3, killing hundreds of people by many accounts, and they took the square in the early hours of June 4.
In Mr. Zhao’s famed final appearance as party leader, he arrived at the square in May 19 and mournfully but cryptically told the protesters that he had come “too late.” That speech and others do not appear in “Collected Works.”
Ms. Gan said the editors of the collection deliberately avoided speeches that Mr. Zhao gave around the time of the Tiananmen protests because the issue was “too complicated.” The main objective of publishing his works, she said, was to “sum up the experiences and lessons of the first decade of reform and opening up.”
My initial read of the works did not disclose any explosive revelations. Mr. Zhao’s secretly recorded memoirs of his time in power were already published in 2009 (although they remain banned in China).
But “Collected Works” will add nuance to understanding his time, and they vividly show an abiding problem for Chinese leaders, even today: how to square economic liberalization with the ideological underpinnings of Communist Party power.
In the 1980s, conflicts between those priorities grew increasingly acute. Mr. Zhao was promoted to premier in 1980 on the basis of his success in southwest Sichuan Province, where he loosened controls on farming and industry. He was promoted to party general secretary in 1987, succeeding Hu Yaobang, whom Deng had demoted for his failure to extinguish dissent and student protests.
Mr. Zhao’s speeches as party leader show him trying to mollify ideological conservatives, alarmed by the spread of liberal ideas and dissent, while preserving the momentum of economic adjustment. And all the time, he had to satisfy the party elders, especially Deng, watching over his shoulder.
Those tensions became increasingly sharp from early 1987, when Deng began a campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” a term for liberal and dissenting ideas. Mr. Zhao strained to carry out the campaign while keeping a firewall to ensure that it did not spill over into the economy and reverse market reforms.
“We must determinedly struggle against the wave of bourgeois, but at the same time must be extremely careful about policy boundaries,” Mr. Zhao said in a speech in January 1987 reprinted in “Collected Works.” “In fact, failing to reform would surely spur on bourgeois liberalization.”
In his memoirs, Mr. Zhao described how he only haltingly came to believe that successful economic change would also require overhauling China’s political institutions, allowing for greater public participation and official accountability. He was never a fully fledged democrat but came to believe that China’s top-down government needed to adapt to changing times.
One of the most interesting documents in the works is Mr. Zhao’s blueprint for political reorganization from October 1987. There and in an accompanying speech, Mr. Zhao argued that the party could maintain control while introducing changes that removed it from day-to-day government administration and gave citizens and businesses more autonomy and say over their affairs.
“Reform of the political system must proceed in a measured, orderly way under the leadership of the party,” the blueprint said. “Of course, no matter how much forethought is given, it will be hard to avoid a few problems.”
