Hu Yaobang

Hu Yaobang was the reforming party general secretary whose death brought students into Tiananmen Square in April 1989. He joined the communists as a boy, survived the Long March at nineteen, and ran the Communist Youth League for two decades. Purged in the Cultural Revolution and rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping, he was given the job of reversing it: as head of the Organisation Department he oversaw the rehabilitation of some three million people condemned in the campaigns of the previous twenty years, including the dead, which is the largest act of that kind any communist party has performed on itself. As general secretary from 1982 he pushed economic liberalisation, argued for a lighter hand in Tibet and apologised there for past policy, and was tolerant of intellectual argument in a way that alarmed the party elders. Student demonstrations in late 1986 were held against him, and he was forced to resign in January 1987 after a self-criticism, keeping his Politburo seat and no power. He died of a heart attack during a Politburo meeting on 15 April 1989. The mourning that followed - wreaths, then crowds, then a sit-in - became the demonstrations that ended on 4 June. Official commemoration of him remained delicate for decades and was cautiously revived in 2015. He was buried in Jiangxi rather than at Babaoshan, at his family's request. The party's verdict on him has never been reversed or fully restored, and the ambiguity is deliberate: rehabilitating him properly would mean reopening the question of what the demonstrations after his funeral were about. Wen Jiabao, who had been his aide, wrote about him publicly in 2010.

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