So, at last former Chinese premier and Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang (
"I am very sorry," he said to startled onlookers. "I have come too late." After that, he existed more as a historical chimera than as a real person.
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
When his bizarre and unscheduled appearance in the square was broadcast on Central Chinese Television the next morning -- during one of the last days of uncensored media coverage -- people across China were stunned by this fleeting moment of all-too-human, official anguish. After all, party leaders rarely evince their personal feelings in public, much less transgress the party line as brazenly as Zhao did. Such individualism fit neither Leninist nor traditional Chinese prescriptions for behavior by a high official.
Memory Hole
As the crackdown following those heady weeks of free expression and assembly came to its apocalyptic end on the night of June 3-4, Zhao vanished, sucked down the Party's memory hole into which so many other leaders have vanished since China's "socialist liberation." To the discredit of the democratic world, hardly any head of state remonstrated on Zhao's behalf, minimally demanding that some accounting be made for his illegal and immoral incarceration. Instead, Zhao was allowed to remain in suspended animation, under house arrest, conveniently forgotten like some cryogenically frozen celebrity with no hope of resurrection.
Zhao was not killed, but allowed to live in an old Beijing courtyard house with his family. He was let out from time to time, but under guard like a zoo animal, to go to some spa or to play solitary holes of golf, one of the many manifestations of "bourgeois liberalization" that his reform efforts allowed to leak through China's once hermetic seal.
Chinese have long used the deaths of defrocked leaders as occasions to let out sentiments that can find no expression through the normal political process. During the winter of 1976, when premier Zhou Enlai (
Historical Echoes
It was, of course, the death of former party chief Hu Yaobang(
At the same time, China seems so drugged by business nowadays that it is hard to imagine many people marching for a cause that would do nothing for their bottom line. It's almost as if the Communist Party had turned Marx on his head, replacing religion with profit as the new "opium of the masses." Few outside of the lumpen classes of unemployed workers and dispossessed peasants seem to have any gusto for political protest.
By contrast, Zhao embodied a chapter in Chinese history when to be a reformer meant to take on not only the economy, but every aspect of life. Before becoming premier and party chief, he experimented with everything from the de-collectivization of agriculture and separation of the Party from business to laws guaranteeing the rights of journalists and greater openness toward the outside world for ordinary people. He was even the first Chinese leader to wear a suit and tie rather than a Mao habit when traveling abroad, as well as the first to hold an open press conference.
Reformer
Although Zhao was no visionary, no Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa, and not even anti-communist, his agenda in the mid-1980s embraced the economy, politics, culture, media and society, and it led to one of the most open and intellectually rich periods of Chinese history.
It was a tragic paradox that the political movement that so peacefully swept China in 1989 ended up arresting the process of broad-based, evolutionary reform to which Zhao consecrated his life. So chastened by the trauma of June 4 was the party leadership that, for several years afterwards, it was unclear if any reform would survive.
Then, in 1992, then leader Deng Xiaoping (
Zhao's death reminds us not only of how unjustly he was treated, but of how lopsided China's reforms have been. For China's "miracle" to truly become miraculous, party leaders could do worse than study the record of a man whose legacy they now seem eager to push into oblivion.
Orville Schell, the author of many acclaimed books on China, is a dean at the University of California at Berkeley.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
The muting of the line “I’m from Taiwan” (我台灣來欸), sung in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), during a performance at the closing ceremony of the World Masters Games in New Taipei City on May 31 has sparked a public outcry. The lyric from the well-known song All Eyes on Me (世界都看見) — originally written and performed by Taiwanese hip-hop group Nine One One (玖壹壹) — was muted twice, while the subtitles on the screen showed an alternate line, “we come here together” (阮作伙來欸), which was not sung. The song, performed at the ceremony by a cheerleading group, was the theme
Secretary of State Marco Rubio raised eyebrows recently when he declared the era of American unipolarity over. He described America’s unrivaled dominance of the international system as an anomaly that was created by the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Now, he observed, the United States was returning to a more multipolar world where there are great powers in different parts of the planet. He pointed to China and Russia, as well as “rogue states like Iran and North Korea” as examples of countries the United States must contend with. This all begs the question:
Liberals have wasted no time in pointing to Karol Nawrocki’s lack of qualifications for his new job as president of Poland. He has never previously held political office. He won by the narrowest of margins, with 50.9 percent of the vote. However, Nawrocki possesses the one qualification that many national populists value above all other: a taste for physical strength laced with violence. Nawrocki is a former boxer who still likes to go a few rounds. He is also such an enthusiastic soccer supporter that he reportedly got the logos of his two favorite teams — Chelsea and Lechia Gdansk —
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS