Shanghai party leader gets Zhao’s job

Press, 26 June 1989, Page 10

Shanghai party leader gets Zhao’s job

NZPA-Reuter Peking China’s Communist Party sacked its reformist general-secretary, Zhao Ziyang, on Saturday and replaced him with a relative unknown, the Shanghai party leader, Jiang Zemin.

The two-day meeting of the party’s Central Committee, which voted Mr Zhao out and strengthened the hand of hardliners in the highest levels of the party, left little doubt that supreme power still lay with the veteran leader, Deng Xiao-ping. As well as Mr Zhao, Hu Qili, long identified with the reformers, was dismissed from the policymaking standing committee.

An official statement said Mr Zhao, seen by Peking student protesters as their champion in the leadership hierarchy, was sacked for “serious mistakes” over the student unrest that was crushed by the Army in Peking’s Tiananmen Square on June 4. The statement announcing the changes pledged to continue the economic reforms and open-door policies launched by Mr

Deng himself in 1978, but the changes pointed towards greater power for hardliners like the Prime Minister, Li Peng. Mr Deng, aged 84, retired from the committee, its policy-making Politburo, and the elite Politburo standing committee at the last party congress two years ago, but he retained the key post of chairman of the party’s military commission, with Mr Zhao as his first deputy chairman. While having nothing to say about Mr Jiang, aged 62, beyond the bare fact of his promotion to party chief and member of the standing committee, the statement heaped lavish praise on Mr Deng. It paid tribute to him for taking the lead in crushing the recent “counter-revolutionary rebellion,” partyspeak for nearly two months of student-led pro-demo-

cracy protests in Peking. Troops backed by tanks moved in during the night of June 3-4 to crush the protests with heavy loss of life. The massacre was swiftly followed by a barrage of propaganda, a wave of arrests of dissidents and suspected activ-

ists, and at least 10 executions for alleged violence during the “rebellion.” First word on the session, during which Mr Li delivered a stinging denunciation of Mr Zhao, came from the New China News Agency several hours after it ended. Mr Zhao, last seen in public in Tiananmen Square on May 19 tearfully urging student demonstrators to end their hunger strike, was permitted to remain a party member and so was referred to politely throughout the proceedings as “comrade.” But that was the limit of tolerance for his offence of being too soft on the Peking demonstrations. For his “very serious mistakes” he was summarily removed from all his posts including even membership of the Central Committee as well as from the military commis-

sion. His predecessor and fel-low-reformist, Hu Yaobang, was ousted as party chief in January, 1987, but allowed to remain not only in the Central Committee but also in the Politburo. Mr Hu, like Mr Zhao a protege of Mr Deng, was removed for being too tolerant of an earlier round of student demonstrations and not doing enough to combat “bourgeois liberalisation” — catchphrase for Western political ideas. His death on April 15 of a heart attack triggered the student unrest. The Prime Minister, Mr Li, a leading light in one of at least three competing hardline factions in the Politburo, said Mr Zhao had “unshirkable responsibilities” for the development of turmoil in Peking and later in other cities.