THE last time people turned out in large numbers in Beijing to commemorate Hu Yaobang, leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1981-87, it did not end well. In April 1989 he had died of a heart attack. On the eve of his funeral, 1m people took part in the biggest anti-government demonstration yet seen in the People’s Republic. Sacked two years earlier for being soft on what was known as “bourgeois liberalisation”—the embrace of Western-style freedoms—Hu was a plausible symbol for pro-democracy protesters, who then staged a weeks-long sit-in in Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital. They brought party rule to the brink of collapse. It took the massacre of hundreds on June 3rd-4th to bring an end to their movement.
So it seems odd that the party should have made so much of the centenary on November 20th of Hu’s birth. Xi Jinping, the present party leader, and his six fellow members of the Politburo’s ruling Standing Committee attended a commemoration in the Great Hall of the People, on Tiananmen. Mr Xi’s speech extolled Hu as “a time-tested loyal communist fighter and a great proletarian revolutionist”; newspapers were filled...Continue reading
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