Russell Leigh Moses
The Wall Street Journal
April 15, 2013
Hu’s back.
Not former Communist Party leader and President Hu Jintao, but rather Hu Yaobang, the deposed reformist Party Secretary whose death on April 15th in 1989 helped trigger the anti-Party protests that culminated in the tragic crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations a month and half later.
April 15th is almost as sensitive an anniversary in China as the actual suppression of the protests that began on the evening of June 3rd. For years, the day passed with little mention of its significance in official media as the Party tried desperately to suppress anything that would revive positive memories of a movement it has always cast as a “counterrevolutionary rebellion.”
It was significant, then, that Liberation Daily, Shanghai’s main Party newspaper, ran two lengthy essays on Monday, each extolling Hu Yaobang as a reformer, while another essay originally published on the website of the Party-controlled China Youth Daily revisited political errors in the coverage of his death.
To be sure, we’ve seen growing coverage of Hu and his political tenure inside China in recent years. But aside from an effusive tribute to his former mentor by then-Premier Wen Jiabao three years ago, commentaries about Hu and his legacy have tended to be narrow and matter-of-fact, without poignancy or overt political stances.
Monday’s essays mark a noteworthy departure on multiple fronts, and raise interesting questions about the current politics of reform in Beijing.
While both of the Liberation Daily essays praise Hu Yaobang, the main essay (in Chinese) is the more noteworthy of the two, as it takes the significant step of directly connecting Hu’s thinking and struggles to the current situation faced by the Party leadership. “The sort of reform urged by Hu Yaobang was quite similar” to the reform being pursued now, the piece argues, adding that “his reform also faced great resistance, and [involved] the need to emancipate the mind.” The difference between then and now, the essay goes on, is merely that in Hu’s time China was in “the early stage of development difficulties [requiring] an ideological breakthrough [while] today, we are facing larger, more numerous, and deeper-seated contradictions and conflicts of interest.”
For China’s reform, the essay notes, “cherishing the memory of Hu Yaobang has a very strong practical significance.”
The essay — which includes a few reminiscences by colleagues of Hu Yaobang’s work style — insists that, where a number of issues of reform are concerned, Hu’s “vast historical influence cannot be overstated.” Among his influential ideas, it says, is that the country’s political aim “should be the normalization of democratization,” in which “discussion would be promoted.”
Remarkably, the essay praises Hu’s support for those pressing for a faster pace of change—the reason why he was dismissed as Party chief—noting that he was someone able “to bring order out of chaos.”
Even more astonishing is another essay first published on the China Youth Daily website and later widely disseminated online: a recounting of the way in which media coverage of Hu Yaobang’s death in 1989 might have been badly handled by some in the government (in Chinese). The news of Hu’s passing was “not uniform”, the article notes, and the listening audience became “baffled because of confusion in the central radio broadcast.” That uncertainty “immediately aroused strong repercussions in the community,” with the result being “rumors and some institutions of higher learning putting up big character posters and slogans, mourn the name of Hu Yaobang and venting [their] discontent.”
The references to big character posters and venting of discontent are a clear reference to the protests in the spring of 1989 that ultimately led to the crackdown that summer. In evoking them, the essay comes surprisingly close to implying that the at least the early wave protests might have been somewhat justified, or at least the product of confusion at the top – that they were, if not excusable, then understandable.
Of course, a single essay—some of the content of which has appeared in various parts and places before—does not begin to redress a major historical event. But together the pieces mark a significant effort both to burnish Hu Yaobang’s legacy and to align the Party with it.
Notably, and somewhat strangely, the main essay in Liberation Daily extolling the prowess of Hu Yaobang makes no clear mention of his ties to recently retired Party leader Hu Jintao, whom the elder Hu mentored early on in his career (in Chinese). Hu Jintao’s clique was never shy about playing up that connection and in other coverage of this year’s anniversary of Hu Yaobang’s passing, the linkage between the two Hus is drawn both clearly and boldly (in Chinese). But not here.
There’s also the odd, brief nod to Wen Jiabao’s relationship to Hu Yaobang in the same essay, but that’s not over-the-top by any means, either.
What’s going on?
Well-timed and pointed articles such as these do not appear because space suddenly opens up — they’re pressed into the Party media because political factions are looking for opportunities to force debate.
Hu Yaobang’s program was based on not just riding reform, but pushing it forward. Dialogue—reaching out to the disaffected and disappointed in the society and the Party—was one of the core components of the policy agenda at that time.
In pushing through Monday’s essays, allies of current Communist Party head Xi Jinping seem to be pushing the idea that China’s newly-appointed leader is the rightful heir to Hu’s mantle—that Xi’s brand of reform most closely resembles the sort of political progress that might have happened had Hu not been purged. In other words, Xi’s early efforts at reform represent a second chance for the Party to get matters right.
In China, even half-hearted efforts to revisit history are often hazardous. Still, despite the political risks, Xi and his comrades have already shown real conviction and courage pushing for what they think are better ways to reform. For them, even in these early days, there’s no backing off.
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.
