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赵紫阳Zhao Ziyang

1. Early Life and Provincial Rule

Zhao Ziyang was born on October 17, 1919, in Hua County, Henan (now part of Anyang), originally named Zhao Xiuye. He joined the CCP in February 1938, aged 18, and worked in Party underground and local posts in Henan and Hebei during the war against Japan and the civil war.

After 1949 he served for long periods in the provinces: deputy secretary of Guangdong in the 1950s, a secretary of the Guangdong secretariat in the early 1960s. He was attacked during the Cultural Revolution and sent down to labor. Rehabilitated in 1971, he became Guangdong's first secretary in 1974 and was transferred in 1975 to first secretary of Sichuan and chairman of its revolutionary committee.

Ruling Sichuan (1975–1980), Zhao piloted rural reforms, supporting wider autonomy for commune-and-brigade enterprises and experiments with contracting output to households. Per official Party histories, Sichuan's rural reform led the country — the record that qualified him to run the national economy in 1980. In Guangdong (1974–75) he had already tried bringing in foreign capital for processing-and-assembly ventures, an early experiment in coastal opening; in Sichuan he tolerated and even encouraged output-contracting trials in places such as Xiangyang Commune, Guanghan County — practices still ideologically forbidden at the time. Per speeches collected in his collected works, at a 1978 provincial meeting he said publicly that "some commune members must be allowed to get rich first," fourteen years before Deng Xiaoping's southern tour remarks.

Sources: Xinhua's published 1980s biographical sketches; CCP Party History Research Office, The Party's Ninety Years.

2. Premier and Economic Reform (1980–1987)

In September 1980 Zhao became Premier of the State Council. Within Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening framework, Zhao was one of the de facto managers of economic reform.

His main policies included the dual-track price system — from 1984, planned goods carried a planned price inside the plan and a market price outside it. While stimulating production, the price gap bred large-scale "official profiteering" (officials reselling allocation permits), one source of late-1980s public discontent. Researchers link the 1988 panic buying and inflation (officially, retail prices rose 18.5 percent that year) directly to the disorder of price reform.

In October 1984 the Third Plenary Session of the Twelfth Central Committee adopted the Decision on Restructuring the Economic System, which Zhao helped draft. Enterprise contracting and coastal open cities followed. At the Thirteenth Congress in 1987, Zhao delivered the political report proposing the theory of the "primary stage of socialism."

The failed 1988 price breakthrough: from May to August 1988 Zhao pushed a one-stroke rationalization of the price system. News of it triggered nationwide panic buying and bank runs; per official statistics, prices in some cities rose over 30 percent in August 1988 alone. At the end of August Deng halted the reform, and Zhao's economic authority was badly damaged. Researchers argue the failure directly weakened his standing in the Party and foreshadowed his abandonment by the elders in 1989.

Responsibility for hardline policies of the tenure: it must be recorded that during Zhao's premiership (1980–1987), the 1983 "Strike Hard" campaign (its execution figures are disputed) and the "one-veto" family-planning regime were all implemented on his watch. As the government's chief executive he bears inescapable administrative responsibility for their enforcement. This archive affirms his 1989 choice without evading that fact.

Sources: Zhao Ziyang's collected works (Hong Kong edition); Wu Guoguang, Zhao Ziyang and Political Reform; National Bureau of Statistics 1988 price data.

3. General Secretary and Political-Reform Ideas (1987–1989)

After the Thirteenth Congress in November 1987, Zhao succeeded the forcibly resigned Hu Yaobang as CCP General Secretary. Deng Xiaoping, holding no such title, remained the de facto supreme decision-maker — a "rule from behind the curtain" arrangement that laid the fuse for 1989.

Per Zhao's own memoir, Prisoner of the State, as General Secretary he promoted research into political-system reform, including separating Party from government and expanding grassroots democracy; a political-reform study group had been set up at the Center in 1986–87. All such ideas were terminated after 1989 and none was implemented.

It should be noted that accounts of Zhao's political-reform content rest mainly on his own dictated memoir (Hong Kong, 2009) and recollections by his staff; official archives remain closed and researchers read the details differently. Wherever this archive cites his motives or designs, it attributes them as "per Zhao's own account in his memoir."

Sources: Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State (Chinese edition, New Century Press, Hong Kong, 2009); Bao Tong's recollections.

4. 1986–1987: Hu Yaobang's Fall and Zhao's Succession

Zhao's 1989 situation can only be understood against the student movement of late 1986 and Hu Yaobang's fall. In December 1986 student demonstrations erupted in Hefei, Shanghai and Beijing. In January 1987 Deng convened a "life meeting" at which Hu was charged with weakness against bourgeois liberalization and forced to resign as General Secretary.

Zhao's role was controversial: he was Hu's successor and was seen as having "picked up a bargain"; yet per the memoir and Bao Tong, Zhao tried to plead Hu's case and failed under pressure from Deng, Chen Yun and other elders. After Hu's fall Zhao continued the economic reforms while growing more cautious politically — a caution shattered in May 1989. Some researchers observe that Zhao, having witnessed Hu's end in 1987, chose a different road in 1989: no compromise.

Sources: Prisoner of the State; Wu Guoguang, Zhao Ziyang and Political Reform; for Hu Yaobang see this site's Hu Yaobang page.

5. 1989: Opposing Martial Law

In the spring of 1989 Beijing saw mass protests. After the April 26 People's Daily editorial labeled the movement "turmoil," Zhao's May 4 speech at the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting softened the "turmoil" label in an attempt to defuse the situation — a stance believed to have angered Deng and the elders.

Before dawn on May 19, Zhao came to Tiananmen Square and addressed the hunger-striking students. Recorded on the spot, the speech became the swan song of his political career:

"Students, we have come too late… we have come too late." He urged them to end the hunger strike — "you are young, you have a long life ahead." It was his last public appearance.

At the May 17 Politburo Standing Committee meeting, Zhao opposed imposing martial law on Beijing. Per Bao Tong (then Zhao's political secretary), most members favored martial law and Zhao was the lone opponent. On the evening of May 19, Li Peng announced the Center's decision to impose martial law in parts of the capital. Zhao refused to chair the meeting announcing it.

Per the memoir, after the May 17 meeting Deng told Zhao "we have no other choice." Zhao wrote that he knew then his political career was over, yet insisted he would "never sign the martial-law order." The pre-dawn speech of May 19 was his last public act as General Secretary; afterward he returned home and never appeared in public again. His secretary Bao Tong was arrested on May 28, 1989, for "leaking state secrets" (allegedly passing the May 17 meeting's contents abroad) and sentenced to seven years, of which he served nearly the full term.

On the night of June 3–4, martial-law troops advanced on Tiananmen Square and opened fire. Per his memoir, Zhao did not know in advance the exact timing of the order to shoot, but he clearly opposed resolving the crisis by force.

Sources: Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State; Bao Tong's collected works; Zhang Liang, ed., The Tiananmen Papers; for the June Fourth archive see this site's Tiananmen page.

6. Fifteen and a Half Years Under House Arrest (1989–2005)

From June 1989 Zhao was confined to his residence at No. 6 Fuqiang Hutong in Beijing, deprived of personal freedom until his death on January 17, 2005 — fifteen and a half years. He was never publicly tried and never received a formal judicial verdict: the CCP's typical "intra-Party disposal" of a high-level political dissenter.

Per his family and the few permitted visitors (after 2002, foreign journalists were occasionally allowed brief interviews), under house arrest Zhao kept playing golf (at designated courses near his home), studied the classics, and secretly recorded more than thirty tapes of dictated recollections — the tapes that later became the basis of Prisoner of the State.

Cut off from the outside world, he was not wholly isolated. Per his daughter Wang Yannan and other family members, in his later years he played golf daily (at a suburban Beijing course, accompanied and watched), practiced calligraphy and read the Twenty-Four Histories. The dictated recordings, made over years, were carried out by his family and became the memoir's foundation.

In 2004 Zhao's health deteriorated. At 7:01 a.m. on January 17, 2005, he died at Beijing Hospital, aged 85. Xinhua issued only a brief obituary, saying he had "long suffered from multiple respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and had been hospitalized repeatedly"; there was no state funeral or high-level memorial. The farewell ceremony on January 29 at Babaoshan drew, per the family, about 2,000 people, unreported by official media, while Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas media covered it extensively. His ashes were kept at home for years, until on October 18, 2019 they were finally interred together with his wife Liang Boqi at Tianshou Garden in Changping (see Section 9) — burial delayed fourteen years after death, a delay that is itself a window onto his official historical standing.

Sources: Xinhua obituary, January 17, 2005; Zhao family statements; Adi Ignatius's foreword to the English edition of Prisoner of the State.

7. The Memoir, Prisoner of the State

In May 2009 Zhao's dictated memoir was published in Hong Kong (English edition: Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, Simon & Schuster), edited from the thirty-plus tapes he had secretly recorded under house arrest by Bao Pu and Adi Ignatius, among others.

The book discloses the inside story of 1989 decision-making: the voting at the May 17 Standing Committee meeting, Deng Xiaoping's stance before and after June Fourth, and Zhao's own views of reform and the crackdown. In it Zhao states that China should adopt a parliamentary democracy, and that "if we do not carry out political-system reform, the fruits of economic reform will be gained and then lost" — read as the clear statement of his late political position.

The book is banned in mainland China. The authorities have never formally responded to its contents.

Sources: Zhao Ziyang, Reform's Course (Chinese memoir, New Century Press, Hong Kong, 2009); Prisoner of the State (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

8. Assessments and Controversies

This archive's position: Zhao Ziyang was a rare case within the CCP system — a supreme leader who, at the decisive moment, chose not to obey a crackdown order. His May 19, 1989 speech in Tiananmen Square is one of the very few recorded apologies by a ruler to protesters in twentieth-century Chinese political history. At the same time, as Premier through the 1980s he bears administrative responsibility for the chaos of the dual-track price system and "official profiteering" corruption, and researchers assess the real depth of his political-reform designs differently. This archive pronounces neither "flawless man" nor "sinner"; it records only verifiable words and deeds.

Sources: the sources of the sections above, in synthesis; writings of Wu Guoguang, Cheng Xiaonong and other researchers.

9. Family, the Fourteen-Year Wait for Burial, and Anniversary Control

Zhao and his wife Liang Boqi had four sons and a daughter. Under house arrest, No. 6 Fuqiang Hutong was both home and prison: visitors were registered by the guards, telephone and correspondence were monitored, and guards and staff surrounded his daily life. Liang Boqi was his chief link to the outside world through the house-arrest years; she died at Beijing Hospital on December 25, 2013, aged 95 — eight years after her husband, her own old age spent in that same courtyard. The day after Zhao's death on January 17, 2005, the family set up a mourning hall at the Fuqiang Hutong home for relatives and friends; per published reports, state security officers barred his old aide Bao Tong and his wife from leaving their home to attend, and Bao's wife was injured in a fall during the argument and hospitalized. The January 29 farewell at Babaoshan was under heavy guard; police drove away spontaneous mourners outside the cemetery, and a group of about thirty citizens wearing white mourning bands who shouted "Zhao Ziyang's spirit lives forever" were taken away by public security; official coverage was kept to a strict minimum, the obituary praising his economic-reform contributions while repeating that he had "committed serious mistakes" in 1989.

Burial was delayed fourteen years. The family applied for years to inter the ashes in a civilian cemetery; the authorities first suggested burial back in his native Henan, then proposed a smaller cemetery the family would not accept, and no agreement was reached. In 2019, the year of Zhao's centenary, Radio Free Asia reported on October 17 that the authorities had finally approved the family's purchase, at its own expense, of a plot at Tianshou Garden in Changping, Beijing (a twenty-year lease) — on conditions that reportedly included demolition of the No. 6 Fuqiang Hutong residence, which journalist Gao Yu, relaying the family, called the "price" demanded. On October 18, 2019, Zhao's ashes were interred together with Liang Boqi's at Tianshou Garden in a private family ceremony; the tombstone bears only names and birth-and-death dates, no biography. Bao Tong visited the grave on October 22.

Burial did not mean relaxation. On January 17, 2020, the fifteenth anniversary of Zhao's death, the family arrived at Tianshou Garden to find: an ID-card gate installed at the cemetery entrance, high-definition facial-recognition cameras across the grounds, tall trees newly planted in front of the grave blocking the view and leaving only a narrow gap to squeeze through, photography forbidden, and no flowers or offerings permitted; foreign journalists were stopped outside by police and security guards with radios patrolled the grave area. His son Zhao Erjun told RFA the family had not been able to leave even a single bouquet. Every year around January 17 (the death anniversary) and June 4, the Fuqiang Hutong home and Tianshou Garden are stability-maintenance priorities: doorstep "visits," checkpoint duty at intersections, visitors turned away, year after year. Per the family's and friends' accounts to foreign media over the years, the number of people coming to the former residence to pay respects has fallen year by year — not from forgetting, but because attending itself costs registration and summonses. In Hong Kong before the 2020 National Security Law, Zhao's anniversary mourning was linked to the June Fourth candlelight vigil; since then, public mourning has essentially vanished from Chinese soil. As of October 2026, the official verdict on Zhao Ziyang has not loosened at all: no rehabilitation, no commemoration, no reporting — and even a bouquet at his grave is policed.

Sources: RFA reports of October 17, 2019 and January 17, 2020 (via GlobalSecurity); VOA's January 29, 2005 farewell report; the Jamestown Foundation's account of the mourning hall and Bao Tong's obstruction; Liang Boqi's dates per her Chinese Wikipedia entry.

10. April–May 1989: Completing the Chain from Hu Yaobang's Death to the Martial-Law Order

To cross-corroborate this archive's Hu Yaobang page, the chain of spring 1989 is completed here. On April 15 Hu Yaobang died, and mourning rose from Beijing campuses; on April 17 tens of thousands of students entered Tiananmen Square to lay wreaths, and that night into the early hours of April 18 students demanding to be received were jostled at Xinhua Gate. On April 22, the day of Hu's memorial service, three students knelt for hours outside the east gate of the Great Hall of the People begging to be received, and were not. The April 26 People's Daily editorial labeled the movement "turmoil manufactured by a tiny minority." Zhao was then visiting North Korea and returned to Beijing on April 30; on May 4, in his Asian Development Bank speech, he described the student movement's mainstream as patriotic, said the demands to punish corruption and advance reform were reasonable, and called for resolving problems on the track of democracy and law — a clear departure from the April 26 label which, per his memoir and Bao Tong's account, Deng read as "two voices coming out of the Center." On May 16, meeting Gorbachev, Zhao disclosed that Deng still "held the helm" on major questions — read abroad as publicly pointing decision responsibility at Deng; relations between the Deng household and Zhao were beyond repair from that point. On the afternoon and evening of May 17 the leadership met at Deng's residence to decide on martial law and Zhao's opposition failed (the voting details differ among accounts; Section 5 follows Bao Tong and the memoir, and no new version is introduced here); that night Zhao tendered his resignation to the Secretariat and it was not accepted. After the pre-dawn Square speech of May 19 (Section 5), he took sick leave and was in fact already sidelined; on the evening of May 19 Li Peng announced at a Party-government-army cadres' meeting the Center's decision to impose martial law in parts of the capital, and Zhao did not attend. On May 28 Bao Tong was arrested. On June 23–24 the Fourth Plenary Session of the Thirteenth Central Committee stripped Zhao of all his Party posts and Jiang Zemin succeeded him as General Secretary; the plenum document charged Zhao with "the grave errors of supporting turmoil and splitting the Party at the critical moment of the Party's and the nation's life and death." From April 15 to June 24 — seventy days — a General Secretary was first bypassed, then suspended, then condemned: procedurally every step had a meeting; in substance every step was decided before the meeting, outside it.

Sources: Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State; Bao Tong's recollections; Zhang Liang, ed., The Tiananmen Papers; for the full June Fourth archive see this site's Tiananmen page, and for Hu Yaobang's fall and death this site's Hu Yaobang page.

本站点评Our Take

赵紫阳案最刺眼的地方，不在软禁本身，而在软禁没有法律：没有起诉，没有判决，没有期限，一个国家的总理与党的总书记，靠一份党内文件就在一座胡同院子里关了十五年半，直到死。死后管控继续：讣告要删改，告别要戒备，骨灰在家放了十四年才准入土，入土之后墓前不许放花，园里装上人脸识别。这套处置的逻辑始终一致——问题从来不是赵紫阳做了什么，而是怕人们想起他。1989年5月17日，他在常委中反对戒严，没有改变结局，只改变了自己的结局。一个体制连它自己选出的最高领导人拒绝在镇压令上签字都不能容忍，那么它能容忍的，从来就只有服从。The most glaring feature of the Zhao Ziyang case is not the house arrest itself but its lawlessness: no indictment, no verdict, no term — a country's premier and the Party's General Secretary confined in a hutong courtyard for fifteen and a half years, until death, on the strength of an internal Party document. The control outlived him: an edited obituary, a funeral under guard, ashes kept at home for fourteen years before burial was permitted, and after burial no flowers allowed at the grave and facial-recognition cameras in the cemetery. The logic never varied — the issue was never what Zhao Ziyang had done, but the fear that people might remember him. On May 17, 1989 he opposed martial law among his Standing Committee colleagues; it changed nothing about the outcome, only about his own. A system that cannot tolerate even its own chosen top leader refusing to sign a crackdown order can, in the end, tolerate only obedience.

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