Zhao Ziyang Missed His Historic Opportunity

      The death of former Chinese Communist Party
Secretary-General Zhao Ziyang does
not mark the end of an era, but is rather a reminder of unfinished business.
That business is the democratic reforms and the end to official corruption we
students protested for in Tiananmen Square in
the summer of 1989. Nearly 16 years on, and from my exile in Taiwan, I
cannot but see Zhao’s lonely death as
further evidence that that the protests I helped lead won China neither
democratic reform nor an end to official corruption.

      The
obituaries for Zhao, whom I recall
as a humble, grey-haired scholarly man who spoke Mandarin with a folksy Henan burr, have made
much of his last public appearance. He had already been stripped of his
position by Deng Xiaoping when he came to us in Tiananmen
Square on May 19 with the words “I’m late, too late. Sorry.” Zhao’s arrival was unannounced and discrete, and like
most of the students in the square that day--less than three weeks before the
tanks and troops would clear us out--I wasn’t even aware that the man was
amongst us uttering those historic words. But, if I missed the opportunity to
be present when he spoke, I have often thought those words in the years since.

      Above all,
today it strikes me that the words, “I was too late,” might well serve as the
epitaph of a man who ended his life a tragic figure, who was offered a historic
opportunity to embrace reform but who did not come to the square and offer any
support until he had been stripped of his rank. Until the last of his days he
was a living symbol of much that is wrong in China today.

      In death
that symbol becomes all the more potent, which is why China this week
is in such a heightened state of alert, and why there will be no state funeral
service. It is also why former Zhao
aide, Bao Tong, who recently accused the state of trying to erase Zhao from history, was not allowed to pay his
respects, and Public Security Bureau thugs injured Mr. Bao’s 73-year-old wife while
pushing her into an elevator. That act of violence alone is a reminder that
while much has changed in China,
much also has not. Wracked by social unrest born of the world’s widest wealth
divide, China
is still a place where the response to dissent is sharp and brutal. It can be
no other way, because all dissent in China is a reminder that, despite
the economic changes that have swept the nation since Tiananmen, reform on all
other fronts is on hold.

      This, of
course, is the tragedy of modern China. The Chinese way is to
systematically banish all agents of reform. My generation of student leaders
lives in exile or in imprisonment, and Zhao
Ziyang passed his remaining days after being stripped of his job under police
supervision. I’ve often wondered where his thoughts led him when they turned to
the events of 1989. Many of us who survived the Tiananmen protests are haunted
by a sense of failure for not having accomplished what we set out to do, and by
feelings of guilt for the lives of those who perished in the effort. To my
mind, it’s hard not to imagine that Zhao
must have had similar feelings and have spent much of his “retirement”
wondering whether he could have done it differently.

      In my
thinking--and this has haunted me for close on 16 years--he could have. It’s
impossible for me to forget that spring and summer of 1989, when I was a
student barely into my twenties and I took the streets of Beijing. To be sure, I was idealistic, and
perhaps in some ways naïve, but like so many others in those heady days I only
took to the streets because I thought there was a real opportunity for change.
We would never have taken the chances we did if we hadn’t thought that what we
were demanding was possible. And we saw the possibility in reformist elements
in the government, chief among whom is the man China is quietly mourning this
week.

I say to history that at any time before he was
stripped of his position, particularly in the days after we started our hunger
strike on May 13, Zhao, as the
nation’s most powerful title holder, could have come to the square, or gone on
national TV, to at least acknowledge that we students had just cause for
complaint. It would have put him and other reformists in control of the
situation. Instead, he attended a meeting of the standing members of the
Politburo in Deng Xiaoping’s private residence in which he was stripped of his
rank. He did come to the square too late.

      To this
day, I cannot help but see Zhao as defined by that moment He missed his
historic opportunity, and in the end his most notable achievement was that he
did nothing. On this week of his death, my thoughts go out to his family and
all who loved him, and I say may he rest in peace. But at the same time I
cannot but wonder, as I have all these years, what if.

——Published  2005.01.20.  Asia Wall Street Journal