Monday Zhou Ziyang passed away after two days in a coma; he was 85 (NYT, 1, 2, 3; WP; Straits Times;Wiki). Zhou is probably k=unknown to most Westerners; he was Premier of China for seven years ('80-87), then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1987-89). He was succeeded as Premier by Li Peng; as GS-CCP by Jiang Zemin; this position made him the highest ranking official in China.¹ He was Premier of China when that was the supreme executive power in China (as it had been under his predessors, Zhou Enlai and Hua Guofeng).²

When Zhou became Premier in 1980, the country was still reeling from the Cultural Revolution. Few institutions, either civil or party or military, were functioning except in isolated pockets. While Deng Xiaopeng would be acknowledged as the leader of China until the 1990's, he held none of the top official posts—he preferred to act through Premier Zhou, President Li Xiannian, and General Secretary Hu Yaobang. So the main instigator of the reforms was Zhou Ziyang.

In 1986, student demonstrations became a problem for the Communist authorities once again. Deng Xiaopeng, the mentor of the cadre of reformers, was alarmed by the association of political reform and economic liberalization with disorder and disrespect for authority; he therefore responded by demanding that Hu Yaobang resign as Party chief, and gave the job to Zhou. This was relatively unpopular among many liberal-minded Chinese, but it remained difficult to openly express enthusiasm for Hu after he stepped down.

Zhou, like Zhou Enlai before him, attempted to balance two crises in the Zhongnanhai:

1. The hardliners, formerly "leftists" and supporters of the Cultural Revolution, were now technocrats with ties to the military; they were rightists and nationalists, and they did not support Deng's transformation of China into a post-revolutionary, non-regimented society; Deng had to considern their views.
   
2. Within the growing cadre of managers, functionaries, and technocrats supporting Deng, those supporting him were more inclined to see a distinct cleavage between political and economic liberalization. Moreover, the "new Deng-ists" like Li Peng, Jiang Zemin, et al. were determined to manage market reforms.

Zhou was more vulnerable as GS than he had been as Premier. He was relocated out of his former sphere of power, while thrust into the snakepit of the Central Committee. Also, he had left without resolving the inflation issue; it looked as though he was being kicked upstairs. Opponents to the political liberalization process gathered strength in the Zhongnanhai, especially after Li Xiannian was sacked as President. And then Hu Yaobang, the former GS of the Party, died.

Mourners gathered to lay memorial wreathes on the monument to Zhou Enlai, regarded as a liberal nationalist like Zhou Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. The tokens of honor accumulated rapidly into a mountain in Tian'anmen Square. In the normally repressed political mileau of China, mourning of Hu was done by proxy—via Zhou Enlai—and the mourning of Hu was, in turn, a response to the tighting grip on civil life by the state. By May, 1989, the Square was a tent city.

The Zhongnahai met, alarmed. In mid-May, functionaries like Li Peng met with students (transcript of meeting); Zhou met with the students at dawn and was contrite; he believed he had failed the students. It was his last public appearance.

We believe Zhou was shut out of further meetings for the next two weeks; his resignation as Party chief was announced after the crackdown. The Crackdown itself was launched two weeks after the mid-May love-in, even as students were beginning to leave. Units of the 27th Group Army, with direct personal ties to Pres. Yang Shangkun, converged on Tian'anmen Square on 3 June and the next day cleared the square; perhaps a thousand students died in the event, and a national crackdown followed. Zhou Ziyang was arrested and placed under house arrest, where he remained until his death Monday.

Zhou's removal from office changed the course of world history not merely by pushing the country towards regimented capitalism (rather than markets), but also sharping weakening the chance for Chinese workers to associate—perhaps, to form labor unions. Had the labor union in China developed more robustly, then China's awesome labor force would have been able to consume a large share of their own output, and meliorate the deflation that China now exports to the world.

ODDLY RELATED NEWS ITEM: "Tian'anmen suicide masterminds repent": this is related not to the 19 June '89 Crackdown in Tian'anmen Square, but to the suicides of four Falun Gang practitioners in protest at the Chinese Government's crackdown on that religion (19 Jan 2001). The protestors doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire in the enormous square; three survived the episode and suffered burns over their entire bodies.

It's understandable that the Chinese government would ban suicide conspiracies; for one thing, the act was committed in close proximity to the Zhongnangai, there's grounds for arguing the man shown in the photo induced the others to participate in a fatal conspiracy, and in any case the Chinese state media has a public responsibility to mention to readers the negative consequences of this sort of behavior. However, this is what the People's Daily had on 19 January; and the story has an ugly reminiscence of the political prisoner on television, "confessing" to plotting with an international cabal of wreckers and saboteurs.

Jiang Zemin was the first GS-CCP to become President as well, in March '93 (nearly four years after becoming GS). Hu Jintao, his successor as Party GS (Nov '02) became President five months later (March '03). For now, the question of who is the final decision maker in China has been resolved by making the GS and President the same person.