BEIJING, 29 January 2005 — The government and relatives of ousted Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang have agreed to hold his scaled-down funeral today at a cemetery reserved for senior party officials, people invited to the service said Thursday.
But it remains to be seen whether senior leaders will attend the event and whether there will be a formal eulogy assessing the man who rose to near the top of the Communist hierarchy before falling from grace for sympathizing with students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.
That it took more than a week after his death to negotiate the proper arrangements is an indication of how potent a symbol Zhao remains 15 years after Beijing put him under house arrest and virtually expunged him from public consciousness.
The 85-year-old former premier was said to have been in poor health for some time, so officials had many years to prepare for his death, which occurred Jan. 17. But figuring out how to treat Zhao’s legacy has never been easy. Despite the government’s claim that he undermined party unity by supporting pro-democracy students, Zhao made great contributions by helping launch market-oriented reforms from which the country still benefits.
“The party is caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Rick Baum, a China expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “How could they say he made contributions without saying he was a great communist and tacitly reverse the verdict on his life?”
If Beijing rehabilitates Zhao, it would be forced to re-evaluate the Tiananmen massacre and perhaps even acknowledge the need for more political freedom. Observers say that is unlikely to happen any time soon. “It’s clear they want to maintain control over the definition of June 4,” said David Zweig, a China hand at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, referring to the 1989 crackdown in which hundreds and possibly thousands of people were killed. “Zhao’s death brings that issue again to the foreground.”
Although there won’t be an elaborate state funeral with the lowering of flags and official tributes on prime-time television, any memorial for the deposed leader signals a small softening on the part of Beijing. They can’t afford to let the appearance of total disrespect for someone of Zhao’s political stature trigger public unrest in a country with a history of mass protests in the name of dead public figures.
The main sticking point between the family and the government has been the content of the official obituary. The government is believed to want it to state that Zhao made a mistake by siding with student demonstrators and causing a division in the party. Zhao never agreed with that characterization and neither have his relatives.
Whatever is said today about the man most remember for his tearful urging of students to leave Tiananmen Square, it probably won’t be the last word on his legacy.
The funeral’s end “does not mean the issue of Zhao and Tiananmen would not be revisited,” said Jiang Wenran, a China scholar at the University of Alberta in Canada. “The possibility of re-evaluation won’t be buried with him.”
In China, the general public is unlikely to find about the funeral until afterward, if at all. State media continued its silence on Zhao’s passing except for a terse dispatch last week that referred to him only as “comrade,” without any mention of his former titles or reference to his role in the 1989 student movement.
