Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (3 page)

After Zhao’s death, Wang felt compelled to examine his own life, to ask himself if he had strayed too far from his principles in the years since Tiananmen. Yes, he marked the anniversary of the movement every year by visiting the square with a few old friends. Yes, he once signed an open letter urging the government to apologize for the massacre. But could he have done more? His company had challenged the state’s monopoly of the media by giving millions of Chinese a place to publish on the Web. But given his compliance with the party’s Internet censors, was that enough?

The more Wang thought, the more he knew he had to pay tribute to Zhao. At home that evening, he sat in front of his computer and composed a eulogy:

Wang signed the essay “The 1989 Generation,” and sent copies to some friends.

The next day, he read online that people were visiting Zhao’s home to pay their respects to his family, and he decided that he would also go. He skipped work a few days later. Together with a few friends, he bought some flowers and located Zhao’s house using an address he found on the Internet. No one tried to stop them as they walked down a narrow alley to the house, but inside past the large red doors, Wang noticed several men who appeared to be state security agents. Some had cameras and snapped photos, but he was no longer frightened. He signed his name in a guest book on a table near the entrance and left his phone number, too.

The house was of a traditional design, with rooms positioned around two small courtyards. The family had set up a memorial shrine in a small study located to the left, and it was full of wreaths of white and yellow chrysanthemums graced with black and white ribbons carrying messages of condolence. A portrait of Zhao wearing a light blue shirt hung on the center of the main wall. Nearby was a funeral scroll: “To be your children is the honor of our lives. To support your decision is our unchanging choice.”

What Wang found most striking about Zhao’s house was how ordinary and run-down it was. The walls were dirty, the ceilings were low, and the study was furnished only with a shabby sofa, an old desk, and a small collection of books, among them the translated memoirs of a few U.S. and Soviet leaders and a recent exposé of rural corruption,
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry.
It occurred to Wang that the house was not much bigger or better than his parents’ simple home in the countryside. So this was where a great man had been confined in old age, left to die all but forgotten by the world.

Wang expressed his sympathies to Zhao’s relatives, who were dressed in dark blue cotton coats, and he gave them copies of the eulogy he’d written. One of Zhao’s grandchildren, a teenage girl, started to cry as she read the tribute, and as he watched her, Wang found himself wiping away tears, too.

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Chinese leaders can be politically sensitive affairs. In 1976, Mao tried to restrict public mourning for his longtime deputy, Premier Zhou Enlai, the man who engineered the rapprochement with the United States and was viewed as a voice of restraint during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. But a million people lined his funeral route, and tens of thousands later staged protests in Tiananmen Square and clashed with police. The 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen were also triggered by the death of a popular leader, the reformist party chief Hu Yaobang, who had been ousted by hard-liners two years earlier. So in 2005, the leadership approached Zhao’s funeral with particular caution. It wanted a memorial service that would help the nation forget Zhao’s life, not celebrate it.

The task seemed easy enough, for it had never been very difficult to persuade people to forget Zhao. Western governments stopped asking about him almost as soon as he fell from power, and kept his name off the lists of political prisoners they inquired about. Many analysts at the time considered Zhao an authoritarian leader who sided with the students as part of a power struggle, not a genuine democrat. His critics argued that he never showed much interest in democratic reform before the Tiananmen movement, and accused him of helping the party’s hard-liners topple his liberal predecessor. Zhao backed the prodemocracy demonstrations, they said, only because he was an opportunist making a power play against the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. This was the cynic’s interpretation of Zhao’s decision to oppose the military assault in 1989, and Deng and the men he picked to replace Zhao were more than happy to let it stand. The last thing they wanted people to believe was the alternative, that Zhao was that rare exception in the history of Chinese Communist Party leaders: a man who could no longer go along with evil.

But in time, that’s what the evidence showed he was. In internal documents smuggled out of China and memoirs written by people who worked with him, a picture emerged of Zhao that challenged the party’s caricature. Not only was he a bold advocate of capitalist-style economic reforms at a time when party conservatives were fighting such policies as ideological heresy, he also was a proponent of political reform who favored a democratic transition in China, albeit a gradual one. During his three years in power, Zhao promoted discussion of changes in the party’s ossified political structure to reduce corruption, including the introduction of competitive elections and increased autonomy for local and national parliaments. He told one aide he hoped provincial-level elections could be held within a decade. Another recalled that during Zhao’s tenure, neither the Politburo nor its powerful Standing Committee ever discussed a single case involving a “political crime.” And when officials sought his instructions about a new film about the Cultural Revolution, Zhao suggested the party stop interfering in the arts. “I don’t investigate movies, I watch them,” he said. “If I have to issue instructions for every movie I see, I think I’ll stop watching movies.”

When the students filled Tiananmen Square, Zhao encouraged dialogue and calm, cautioned his colleagues against heavy-handed measures, and appeared to sympathize with the protesters’ demands. “Democracy is a worldwide trend,” he told the Politburo on May 1, two weeks after the demonstrations began and months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. “If the party does not hold up the banner of democracy in our country, someone else will, and we will lose out. I think we should grab the lead on this and not be pushed along grudgingly.” A few weeks later, Zhao discussed the subject with the Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to Beijing at the height of the student protests for a previously scheduled summit meeting. “Can a one-party system ensure the development of democracy?” Zhao asked his Soviet counterpart. “Can it implement effective control over negative phenomena and fight the corruption in party and government institutions?” Gorbachev recalled the conversation in his memoirs:

The drama reached its climax the day after Zhao’s meeting with Gorbachev. In an expanded session of the Politburo Standing Committee, Deng proposed the imposition of martial law to clear the square and end the protests. Zhao objected, and when he was overruled, he tendered his resignation.

After the bloodshed, Zhao submitted to life under house arrest. From his home at No. 6 Fuqiang Hutong, he watched in frustration as the party blamed him for the student “turmoil” and then set out to make sure the country forgot him. He tried to resist. In the late 1990s, two letters he wrote demanding a reassessment of the Tiananmen protests were leaked to the public. And later, in interviews secretly conducted by various friends in the years before his death, he managed to present his views for the historical record. He explained his plans for gradual democratic reform, answering critics who accused him of moving too slowly as well as those who said he had moved too fast, and he faulted Deng for failing to grasp the need to adapt the political system to the new economy he was building. He denied trying to push out his predecessor, and criticized his successors—China’s current leaders—for lacking vision and forbidding even talk of political reform. He worried about rampant corruption and rising discontent with the party’s rule, and wondered whether those who benefited most from China’s one-party market economy—party hacks and their cronies—were already too powerful and entrenched for any leader to introduce democracy. But most of all, he denounced the Tiananmen Square massacre. “There was an argument that the suppression was the last resort, as there was no alternative. This argument is wrong,” he said. “We had many chances that would have made a solution without bloodshed possible.”

Zhao lived under constant surveillance, and security remained tight even as he lay on his deathbed in the hospital. Some party officials resorted to putting on white lab coats and pretending to be doctors so they could keep a closer eye on him. When Li Rui, the eighty-eight-year-old former government minister who once served as an aide to Mao, attempted to visit Zhao in late December, security agents blocked his way for nearly an hour before a supervisor intervened. Days before Zhao’s death, the seventy-five-year-old former Politburo member Tian Jiyun was permitted to see his former colleague for the first time in more than fifteen years, but security agents insisted on staying in the room to monitor their brief conversation. After Zhao died of lung failure, Tian returned to the hospital. “Now that he has gone,” he told Zhao’s children, “we don’t have to be afraid any more of people saying we are plotting some so-called hidden scheme!” Zhao’s only daughter, Wang Yannan, announced her father’s death in a text message to friends with her cell phone: “He left quietly this morning. He is free at last!”

But even after Zhao’s death, the security apparatus didn’t back off. His children began having trouble making and receiving calls with their cell phones, and the calls that did go through were often cut off. Police set up checkpoints around his house, blocking friends trying to visit to express their sympathies. They also detained a large group of petitioners, ordinary citizens from around the country who had traveled to Beijing with grievances against the abuse of power by local officials, and who unfurled a banner “in memory of our good leader.” When Bao Tong, the seventy-two-year-old former aide to Zhao who was the highest-ranking official arrested in the Tiananmen crackdown, attempted to leave his apartment building to pay his respects, a team of plainclothes security agents shoved him back inside and into an elevator. His seventy-three-year-old wife was knocked to the ground in the scuffle and hospitalized for weeks with a fractured vertebra. Bao sprained his wrist and a finger, but the agents wouldn’t let him see a doctor unless he removed a white flower pinned to his shirt and a black armband he was wearing, traditional symbols of mourning. He refused and endured the pain instead.

Meanwhile, Zhao’s children began negotiating their father’s memorial arrangements with senior party officials assigned to handle the funeral. The family wanted to host the service and open it to the public, but the party insisted that it be allowed to take control and restrict attendance. Another point of dispute was the content of an official obituary evaluating Zhao’s life. Such obituaries are standard protocol for senior officials, but Zhao’s family objected because the party’s draft accused him of making a “serious mistake” in 1989 and played down his role in promoting the market reforms that transformed the economy. They argued that if any “mistake” was mentioned, the party should be specific about what their father had done wrong, and note that he spent the last years of his life under house arrest for it. There was also disagreement over what would happen to Zhao’s ashes. The party agreed to place them in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the nation’s main resting place for revolutionary heroes and high government officials, but selected a small memorial hall that the family complained held only the ashes of lower-level officials. Later, the family inquired about purchasing a plot in the section of the cemetery open to the public. Party officials lied and told them it was sold out, apparently because they worried the tomb might become a gathering place for the party’s opponents in the future.