MCLC: In Hu's name

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In Hu’s name
Source: The Economist (11/28/15)
In Hu’s name? Old-time Pekingology makes a comeback; old-time party rule never went away
THE last time people turned out in large numbers in Beijing to commemorate Hu Yaobang, leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1981-87, it did not end well. In April 1989 he had died of a heart attack. On the eve of his funeral, 1m people took part in the biggest anti-government demonstration yet seen in the People’s Republic. Sacked two years earlier for being soft on what was known as “bourgeois liberalisation”—the embrace of Western-style freedoms—Hu was a plausible symbol for pro-democracy protesters, who then staged a weeks-long sit-in in Tiananmen Square in the heart of the capital. They brought party rule to the brink of collapse. It took the massacre of hundreds on June 3rd-4th to bring an end to their movement.
So it seems odd that the party should have made so much of the centenary on November 20th of Hu’s birth. Xi Jinping, the present party leader, and his six fellow members of the Politburo’s ruling Standing Committee attended a commemoration in the Great Hall of the People, on Tiananmen. Mr Xi’s speech extolled Hu as “a time-tested loyal communist fighter and a great proletarian revolutionist”; newspapers were filled with laudatory biographies; a new book of his utterances appeared.
The respect paid to a man who symbolises a liberal strain the party has spurned, and who will forever be associated with its near-death experience in 1989, has prompted speculation about the leadership’s intentions. Is Mr Xi, having spent three years in power cracking down on dissent, about to emerge as Hu’s political heir, a closet liberal? Might it even presage a “reversal of verdicts” over the Tiananmen protests, no longer to be seen as the work of traitors but of misguided idealists? Both of these explanations seem unlikely. The boosting of Hu may reflect a factional struggle among party leaders, played out, as at times in the past, over the corpse of a fallen comrade. Other interpretations are more mundane. They cast light on how Chinese politics has changed since 1989 and, more strikingly, on how it has not.
One point of continuity is that Hu remains popular. This is in part because of his image—as an earthy, unpompous, tolerant figure whose small stature prompted jokes that he was the only Chinese leader who literally looked up to the diminutive Deng Xiaoping. And bourgeois liberalisation, or some of its facets, remains attractive to many, especially during a period in Mr Xi’s China in which the slow, incremental broadening of personal freedom seems to be in reverse. Moreover, Hu was China’s leader, alongside Deng, when China began righting some of the wrongs done during Mao Zedong’s tyrannical rule. Many of the countless people who had been persecuted under Mao, and were then allowed to pick up the threads of their lives again, were (and remain) grateful to Hu personally. They included Xi Jinping’s late father, Xi Zhongxun. Like Hu and Deng, the elder Xi was a party leader of the old, Long March generation, whom Mao turned against. His rehabilitation is said to have owed much to Hu’s intervention. Now, as in 1989, the highest level of Chinese politics is dominated by a relatively small number of families whose mutual debts and grudges span the generations.
Also unchanged is the party’s Orwellian effort to control the past. The encomiums to Hu omit his role as an (unwitting) emblem of political reform. And eagle-eyed viewers spotted that, in a television documentary about him, editors had even tampered with a picture of a three-decade-old copy of the party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, used to illustrate Hu’s appointment as party chief. They substituted a photograph of an acceptable party bigwig for that of Zhao Ziyang, who later succeeded Hu but was cast into outer darkness for siding with the Tiananmen protesters. The party has long tinkered with the past like this, though it used to be more honest about it. After Mao died in 1976, the embarrassing prominence at his funeral of his widow and three other close associates who were later arrested and vilified was solved by simply airbrushing them out of the photographs (and replacing their names in the captions with XX, XXX, etc).
That Zhao’s image remains taboo gives little hope of a reassessment of Tiananmen. Nor has Mr Xi given many other signs that his hardline exterior cloaks an inner liberal struggling to see the daylight. More probably, he hopes to bask in Hu’s reformist glow while reinterpreting “reform” to mean his own policies, and quietly cheering that he faces no living standard-bearer for liberalism. Minxin Pei, of Claremont McKenna College in California, argues that to ignore Hu’s centenary would have been more startling than marking it. Despite losing his job, Hu remained to his death on the Standing Committee. Under Mr Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao (no relation), the party also marked Hu’s 90th birthday in 2005. It takes anniversaries seriously. Two years ago, the centenary of one late leader’s birth generated a television series and even postage stamps. That was Xi Zhongxun. For Mr Xi to ignore his father’s saviour would have looked worse than churlish.
Not to praise Hu, but to bury him
In this context, the publicity given to the event appears to demonstrate Mr Xi’s self-confidence. Under him the party is still not ready to confront its Tiananmen demons, but it does not have to worry about invoking the memory of the man in whose name protesters first took to the streets. Mr Xi can present himself as one of Hu’s ideological successors and nobody dares gainsay him.
Another analysis, however, would be that Mr Xi, for the reasons just outlined, had no choice but to lavish praise on Hu, and that the celebrations were engineered by those in the party unhappy with his centralisation of power and his illiberalism. They served as a reminder that the party’s ideology is not monolithic but, in an old-fashioned phrase, the result of a two-line struggle. That is another way in which Chinese elite politics has not changed: it is a black box, and however rational the analysis, the opposite may also be true.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 3, 2015
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