Zhao Ziyang

Zhao Ziyang was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party until he refused to endorse martial law in 1989, and spent the last fifteen years of his life under house arrest. He had made his name as a provincial reformer: in Sichuan in the late 1970s he dismantled communes and let peasants sell surplus produce, with results dramatic enough to produce a rhyme about wanting to eat, look for Ziyang. Deng brought him to Beijing, where as premier from 1980 and then party leader he drove the price reforms and enterprise autonomy that built the modern Chinese economy, and argued for separating party from government. On 19 May 1989 he went to Tiananmen Square at dawn with a loudhailer, spoke to the hunger strikers, and told them he had come too late. It was his last public appearance. Martial law was declared the next day, Li Peng read it out, and Zhao was stripped of all posts for splitting the party. He was never tried and never expelled, which left him in a legal nowhere: guarded in his courtyard house in Beijing, permitted golf occasionally, unmentionable in the press. He recorded a memoir secretly onto cassette tapes over children's music and opera, which was smuggled out and published in 2009. His death in 2005 was announced in one sentence. His grave was refused for years and his ashes remained in his home until 2019. The interpreter standing beside him in the square that morning was Wen Jiabao, who went on to serve as premier for a decade without ever publicly mentioning it.

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