Zhao Ziyang (17 October 1919 – 17 January 2005) was a Chinese politician. He served as the premier of China from 1980 to 1987, as vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1981 to 1982, and as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1987 to 1989. He was in charge of the political reforms in China from 1986, but lost power for his support of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Zhao joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in February 1938. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he served as the chief officer of CCP Hua County Committee, Director of the Organization Department of the CCP Yubei Prefecture Party Committee, Secretary of the CCP Hebei-Shandong-Henan Border Region Prefecture Party Committee and Political Commissar of the 4th Military Division of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region. During the Chinese Civil War of 1945–1949, Zhao served as the Deputy Political Commissar of Tongbai Military Region, Secretary of the CCP Nanyang Prefecture Party Committee and Political Commissar of Nanyang Military Division.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhao became Deputy Secretary of the South China Branch of the CCP Central Committee. He also served as Secretary of the Secretariat of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the CCP, Second Secretary and First Secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the CCP. He was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and spent time in political exile. After being rehabilitated, Zhao then was appointed Secretary of the CCP Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Committee, First Secretary of the CCP Guangdong Provincial Committee, First Secretary of the CCP Sichuan Provincial Committee and First Political Commissar of the Chengdu Military Region, Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
As a senior government official, Zhao was critical of Maoist policies and instrumental in implementing free-market reforms, first in Sichuan and subsequently nationwide. He emerged on the national scene due to support from Deng Xiaoping after the Cultural Revolution, being appointed as premier in 1980. An advocate of the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the separation of the party and the state, and reform and opening up, he sought measures to streamline China's bureaucracy and fight corruption and issues that challenged the party's legitimacy in the 1980s. Many of these views were shared by the then CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang. After Hu's downfall in 1987, Zhao succeeded him as Party general secretary.
His economic reform policies and sympathies with student demonstrators during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 placed him at odds with some members of the party leadership, including Central Advisory Commission Chairman Chen Yun, CPPCC Chairman Li Xiannian, and Premier Li Peng. Zhao also began to lose favor with Deng Xiaoping, who was the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. In the aftermath of the events, Zhao was purged politically and effectively placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. After his house arrest, he became much more radical in his political beliefs, supporting China's full transition to liberal democracy. He died from a stroke in Beijing in January 2005. Because of his political fall from grace, he was not given the funeral rites generally accorded to senior Chinese officials. His secret memoirs were smuggled out and published in English and in Chinese in 2009, but the details of his life remain censored in China.
Zhao was born in 1919 as Zhao Xiuye (Chinese: 趙修業), but changed his given name to "Ziyang" while attending middle school in Wuhan. He was the son of a wealthy landlord in Hua County, Henan, who was later murdered by CCP officials during a land reform movement in the early 1940s. Zhao joined the Communist Youth League in 1932, and became a full member of the Party in 1938.
Unlike many Party members active in the 1930s and 1940s who later became senior Chinese leaders, Zhao joined the Party too late to have participated in the Long March of 1934–1935. He served in the People's Liberation Army, which was integrated into the Republic of China's National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the subsequent civil war, but his posts were largely administrative. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Zhao served as the party chief of Hua County. It was there he met his wife, Liang Boqi, who was Zhao's subordinate; the couple married in 1944. Zhao's career was not especially notable before he emerged as a Party leader in Guangdong in the early 1950s.
Zhao rose to prominence in Guangdong from 1951, initially following a ruthless ultra-leftist, Tao Zhu, who was notable for his heavy-handed efforts to force local peasants into living and working in "People's Communes". When Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) created an artificial famine, Mao publicly blamed the nation's food shortages on the greed of rich peasants, who were supposedly hiding China's huge surplus production from the government. Zhao subsequently led a local campaign aimed at torturing peasants into revealing their food supplies, which did not exist. On the other hand, Zhao worked with regional party officials to put in place arrangements that allowed peasants to profit from the sale of their crops. These projects were masked by ambiguous names such as "a control system for field management" to hide them from Mao, who would have forbidden the projects. According to Zhao, areas where these plans were implemented had a much lower death toll from famine. Jasper Becker, however, wrote that Zhao's torture campaign during the Great Leap meant he was partially responsible for the millions of people who died from starvation and malnutrition in Guangdong between 1958 and 1961.
Zhao's experiences during the Great Leap Forward led him to support moderate political and economic policies. In the early 1960s, Zhao obtained permission from the Communist Party's Central Committee to increase foreign trade in Guangdong, which helped Guangdong to recover from the Great Leap Forward. He supported policies of Deng Xiaoping and President Liu Shaoqi. He led efforts to re-introduce limited amounts of private agriculture and commerce, and dismantled the People's Communes. Zhao's methods of returning private plots to farmers and assigning production contracts to individual households were replicated in other parts of China, helping the country's agricultural sector recover. After achieving senior positions in Guangdong, Zhao directed a harsh purge of cadres accused of corruption or having ties to the Kuomintang.
In 1965, Zhao became the Party secretary of Guangdong province. He was 46 at the time that he first became Party secretary, a notably young age to hold such a prestigious position. Because of his moderate political orientation, Zhao was attacked by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
He was dismissed from all official positions in 1967, after which he was paraded through Guangzhou in a dunce cap and publicly denounced as "a stinking remnant of the landlord class".
Zhao spent four years as a fitter in Hunan, at the Xianzhong Mechanics Factory. Zhao Wujun, the youngest of his five sons, worked with him (Zhao also had a younger daughter). While in political exile, Zhao's family lived in a small apartment near his factory, with a small suitcase in the living room that served as a dinner table.
Zhao's rehabilitation began in 1971, when he and his family were woken in the middle of the night by someone banging on the door. Without much explanation, the Party chief of the factory that Zhao was working at informed Zhao that he was to go at once to Changsha, the provincial capital. The factory's only means of transport was a three-wheeled motorcycle, which was ready to take him. Zhao was driven to Changsha's airport, where a plane had been prepared to fly him to Beijing. Still unaware of what was happening, Zhao boarded the plane. He was checked into the comfortable Beijing Hotel, but was unable to sleep: he later claimed that, after years of living in poverty, the mattress was too soft. In the morning, Zhao was taken to a meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai at the Great Hall of the People. Soon after they met, Zhao began a speech that he had prepared over the previous night: "I have been rethinking the Cultural Revolution during these years as a labourer..." Zhou cut him off, saying "You've been called to Beijing because the Central Committee has decided to name you as a deputy Party chief of Inner Mongolia."