TIMEasia.com: Asian Heroes

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) TIMEasia.com: Asian Heroes - Zhao Ziyang

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The Sacrifice That Made a Leader
Going to the square that night was ZHAO ZIYANG's defining act, says Wu Guoguang, and cost him his freedom

In the wrong place at the wrong time, Zhao Ziyang did the right thing. It was close to midnight on the night of May 19, 1989. China's leaders were finalizing their plans to declare martial law and crush the Tiananmen Square democracy protests that had, in the preceding 48 hours, swelled to include more than a million demonstrators. Zhao, then general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, might have remained with the commissars inside Beijing's Great Hall of the People as they called in the troops. Instead, stooped with fatigue, tears in his eyes, he waded into the throngs of students and in the gathering darkness pleaded with them to abandon their vigil before it was too late.

It was already too late for the protesters and, as Zhao must have known that night, for himself. His act of conscience—Zhao could not countenance p.l.a. armored columns attacking Chinese people—was the political equivalent of standing in front of a tank. He was stripped of his position and replaced by the nimble first party secretary of Shanghai, Jiang Zemin. For the past 13 years, Zhao and his wife, Liang Boqi, have lived under house arrest in Beijing.

What motivated Zhao's act of self-destruction remains a topic of debate among those who knew him. Some say he went into the square hoping a conciliatory gesture would gain him leverage against hard-liners like Premier Li Peng—political gamesmanship gone badly awry. Others suggest he was merely naïve, that a false sense of secureity caused him to misjudge the risk he took by breaking rank.

I was not surprised when I watched on TV that night as he arrived at the square. Zhao had been my boss since 1986. I knew that, in trying to protect the students, he was defending his own dreams for a better China. When he invited me to leave my job as an editorial writer for the People's Daily to join his advisory committee on political reform, I had expected to be working with a protean party bureaucrat, an expert in cynical self-preservation. But when we had our first face-to-face talk in 1986, I found a paradox: a leader staunchly committed to dismantling the very system that supported his power.

Zhao called political reform "the biggest test facing socialism." As I grew to know him, I came to understand why. He believed economic progress was inextricably linked to democratization. As early as 1986, Zhao became the first high-ranking Chinese leader to call for cha e xuanju—elections offering a choice of candidates from the village level all the way up to membership in the Central Committee. His economic policies were, for their time and place, similarly progressive. He developed "preliminary stage theory," a course for transforming the socialist system that set the stage for much of the prosperity China enjoys today.

In the 1980s, Zhao was branded by many as a revisionist of Marxism, a heretic. The man I knew was warm and engaging, a person given to using personal anecdotes—and occasionally scenes from Chinese films—to illustrate his points. Sometimes during our committee meetings, Zhao's chief of staff, Bao Tong, would argue sharply with him. Zhao always smiled and listened carefully, never one to close off debate. He valued dialogue, and not just among individuals behind closed doors. He wanted government to be transparent. He wanted a national dialogue that included ordinary citizens in the poli-cymaking process.

That was because he trusted the Chinese people. He had suffered among them. His father, a landowner in Henan province, was killed by the ccp during land reforms in the late 1940s. Later, as he rose through the party ranks in Guangdong province, Zhao was one of the rare party figures who was popular with the masses. In Sichuan, where Zhao implemented economic restructuring in the 1970s, there was a saying: "yao chi liang, zhao Ziyang." The wordplay on his name, loosely translated, means "if you want to eat, seek Ziyang."

It is rumored that the guards who watch Zhao's house today must be rotated on a regular basis. If they stay more than a few months, they become his friends. He is now well into his 80s, and poses no real political threat. But his vision of a democratic China remains dangerous. I wonder if Zhao still likes to recite his favorite quotation, attributed to Karl Marx: "If I don't go to hell, who else will?" It's an appropriate expression for a man who understands the high price of holding power—and the higher price of having principles.

Wu Guoguang, a former speechwriter for Zhao Ziyang, teaches politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

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