Hu Yaobang
Based on Wikipedia: Hu Yaobang
The Man Whose Death Sparked a Revolution
On April 15, 1989, a seventy-three-year-old man died of a heart attack in Beijing. Within hours, students began gathering in Tiananmen Square. Within a week, over one hundred thousand people marched through the capital. Within two months, the Chinese government would order tanks to crush what became one of the largest pro-democracy movements in modern history.
The man was Hu Yaobang. And to understand why his death ignited such a conflagration, you need to understand something unusual: he was a Communist Party leader who actually believed in reform.
A Revolutionary Childhood
Hu Yaobang was born on November 20, 1915, into a poor peasant family in Hunan Province. His ancestors were Hakka people—an ethnic Han Chinese subgroup known for their migrations and distinctive cultural traditions—who had moved from Jiangxi during the Ming dynasty, which ruled China from 1368 to 1644.
He never received a formal education. He taught himself to read.
At twelve years old, he participated in his first rebellion. At fourteen, he left his family entirely to join the Chinese Communist Party, becoming a full member by 1933. This wasn't unusual for the era. Revolutionary movements across China recruited heavily among the young and the poor, promising a new society built on equality rather than the feudal hierarchies that had oppressed peasant families for centuries.
What was unusual was that Hu survived.
The Long March and Narrow Escapes
In the 1930s, the Communist Party was riven by factional struggles. Hu supported Mao Zedong against a rival faction called the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks—young Chinese Communists who had been trained in Moscow and favored strict adherence to Soviet revolutionary doctrine. This choice nearly cost him his life.
When Mao was temporarily removed from power shortly before the Fourth Encirclement Campaign—one of several military operations by the Nationalist government to destroy Communist forces—Mao's supporters were persecuted. Hu Yaobang was sentenced to death.
He was literally on his way to be beheaded.
At the last minute, a powerful local communist commander named Tan Yubao intervened and saved his life. But Hu remained under suspicion. He was ordered to join the Long March—the legendary 5,600-mile retreat of Communist forces through some of China's most treacherous terrain—not as a trusted comrade but as someone to be placed under surveillance.
During the march, Hu was seriously wounded in a battle near Mount Lu, close to Zunyi, where Mao would soon consolidate his power in a pivotal conference. The Communist field medics chose not to help him. They left him on the side of the road to die.
He was saved only because a childhood friend, now a Red Army commander, happened to pass by. Hu called out his friend's nickname, was pulled from the roadside, and managed to catch up with the retreating main force.
His luck didn't hold. Later in the march, Hu joined an expeditionary force led by Zhang Guotao, whose mission was to cross the Yellow River and expand Communist territory westward, potentially linking up with Soviet forces. The expedition was a disaster. Local Nationalist warlords—specifically the Ma clique, a group of Muslim military commanders who controlled much of northwestern China—destroyed Zhang's forces. Hu Yaobang became one of thousands of prisoners of war.
Ma Bufang, the regional warlord, executed most of his captives. But he decided to keep about 1,500 as forced labor. Hu was among the survivors.
The Great Escape
What happened next sounds like fiction.
When Japan invaded China, Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, pressured Ma Bufang to send more troops against the Japanese. Ma Bufang decided that rather than risk more of his own soldiers, he would send the 1,500 Communist prisoners as conscripts. Their marching route would pass near the Communist base in Shaanxi.
Hu Yaobang and a fellow prisoner named Qin Jiwei saw their opportunity. They secretly organized an escape. When the moment came, more than 1,300 of the 1,500 prisoners successfully returned to the Communist base in Yan'an. Mao Zedong personally welcomed them back.
Hu would remain with the Communist forces for the rest of his life.
A Fateful Friendship
In Yan'an, Hu attended the Anti-Japanese Military School and met Li Zhao, another student, who became his wife. More significantly for Chinese history, he befriended Deng Xiaoping.
The two worked closely together through the 1930s and 1940s. In the final stages of the Chinese Civil War, Hu accompanied Deng to Sichuan Province, where Communist forces successfully wrested control from the Nationalists in 1949. That same year, the Communists founded the People's Republic of China.
During the land reform movement that followed—when the Party redistributed land from wealthy landlords to peasant farmers—Hu took part in efforts to restrain violence. Land reform across China was often brutal, with peasants encouraged to publicly "struggle" against landlords, sometimes beating or killing them. Hu instructed Party work teams never to "use beheadings to solve problems." When slogans called to "annihilate" landlords, he explained this meant taking their property, not their lives.
He wasn't opposed to all executions. "Evil tyrants"—the most exploitative or criminal landlords—and counterrevolutionary landlords could be put to death. As Hu coldly put it: "It is entirely they who force us to kill them." This was still a revolutionary, after all. But his relative moderation would become a recurring theme.
Rising Through the Ranks
In 1952, Hu accompanied Deng to Beijing and became leader of the Communist Youth League, a position he held until 1966. He rose rapidly through the Party hierarchy. But in 1964, Mao sent him to work as First Party Secretary of Shaanxi Province, far from the center of power. Mao's explanation was revealing: "He needs some practical training."
The real reason, many believe, was that Hu wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic about Maoism. Unlike many colleagues who would lose everything in the coming storm, Hu managed to keep his membership in the Party Central Committee until April 1969, several years into the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution: Humiliation and Survival
The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, was Mao's campaign to reassert his authority by unleashing young Red Guards against anyone deemed insufficiently revolutionary. It destroyed millions of lives. Intellectuals, artists, teachers, and moderate Party officials were "struggled against," sent to labor camps, imprisoned, or killed.
Hu was purged twice and rehabilitated twice—a pattern that exactly mirrored the political fate of his mentor, Deng Xiaoping.
In 1969, Hu was recalled to Beijing to be persecuted. He became "number one" among the "Three Hus"—three officials from the Communist Youth League whose names were publicly vilified. They were paraded through Beijing wearing heavy wooden collars around their necks. The other two Hus were Hu Keshi, the second-ranking member of the Youth League, and Hu Qili, who was third in rank and had also become a close associate of Deng.
After the public humiliation, Hu was sent to an isolated work camp for "reformation through labour." He spent his days hauling large boulders by hand.
When Deng was temporarily recalled to Beijing from 1973 to 1976, Hu was recalled too. When Deng was purged again in 1976, Hu was purged again. After his second purge, Hu was sent to herd cattle.
Everything changed when Mao died in September 1976.
The Rehabilitator
In 1977, Hu was recalled and rehabilitated for the final time. He was promoted to direct the Party's organizational department, and later ran Party propaganda through a Politburo department. Most importantly, he became one of the main leaders responsible for reassessing the fates of people who had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.
According to the Chinese government, Hu was personally responsible for exonerating over three million people.
Three million people whose careers had been destroyed, whose families had been torn apart, whose lives had been suspended for a decade or more—and Hu Yaobang gave them back their status, their jobs, their dignity.
He tacitly supported the 1978 Democracy Wall protesters—activists who posted political writings on a wall in Beijing demanding greater freedom—and even invited two of them to his home. He opposed the "Two Whatevers" policy of Mao's immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, which held that whatever Mao decided was correct and whatever Mao instructed should be followed. Instead, Hu supported Deng Xiaoping's rise to power.
At the Summit
Deng engineered Hu's rise. After Deng displaced Hua Guofeng as China's "paramount leader"—a term used because Deng never held the top formal positions but wielded supreme power—Hu ascended to the highest levels of the Party.
In 1980, he became General Secretary of the Central Committee's Secretariat and was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee, the innermost circle of power. In 1981, he became Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Then, in 1982, he helped abolish the position of Party chairman entirely.
This was a deliberate effort to distance China from Maoist politics. Most of the chairman's functions were transferred to the post of General Secretary, which Hu now held. By 1982, Hu Yaobang was the second most powerful person in China, after Deng himself.
Deng referred to Hu and another reformer, Zhao Ziyang, as his "left and right hands."
The Reformer's Agenda
Throughout the 1980s, Hu pursued an ambitious reform agenda. His economic reforms followed Deng's pragmatic turn away from strict Maoist central planning. But Hu also pushed for political reforms that went further than many Party elders were comfortable with.
He attempted to reform China's political system by requiring candidates for the Politburo to be directly elected, holding more elections with multiple candidates, increasing government transparency, consulting the public before determining Party policy, and making government officials more directly accountable for their mistakes.
These goals were sometimes vaguely defined. But the direction was clear: toward something more open, more accountable, more—though Hu would never have used the word—democratic.
He promoted the role of intellectuals as fundamental to achieving the Four Modernizations—the program of modernizing agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology that Deng had made the centerpiece of Chinese policy. He encouraged intellectuals to raise controversial subjects in the media, including democracy, human rights, and the possibility of imposing legal limits on the Communist Party's influence.
Many Party elders mistrusted him from the start.
Tibet and the Minorities
One of Hu's most controversial initiatives was his policy toward Tibet and other minority regions.
In May 1980, Hu visited the Tibet Autonomous Region and was appalled by what he saw. Previous policies had been disasters. He made a point of explicitly apologizing to Tibetans for China's misrule of the region—an extraordinary gesture for a Chinese leader.
He ordered the withdrawal of thousands of Han Chinese cadres from Tibet, believing that Tibetans and Uyghurs should be empowered to administer their own affairs. He reduced the number of Han Party officials and relaxed social controls. Han Chinese who remained in Tibet were required to learn the Tibetan language. He set out six requirements to improve conditions, including increased state funds, improvements in education, and efforts to revive Tibetan and Uyghur culture.
He declared that "anything that is not suited to Tibet's conditions should be rejected or modified."
He also tried to cancel the Bingtuan—the Production and Construction Corps, essentially soldier-farmers who served as a paramilitary force in Xinjiang—but was blocked by Wang Zhen, a powerful Party elder.
His ethnic policies were later criticized by some high-level officials and Han nationalists who believed Hu had given too many privileges to ethnic minorities. But to Tibetans and many observers, this period represented the most liberal and respectful approach to Tibet in the history of the People's Republic.
The Restless Traveler
Hu traveled constantly. He visited 1,500 individual districts and villages throughout his time as general secretary, inspecting the work of local officials and keeping in touch with ordinary people. In 1971, he even retraced the route of the Long March, visiting remote military bases in Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia.
He was notable for his liberalism and his frank expression of opinions that sometimes agitated other senior leaders.
On a trip to Inner Mongolia in 1984, he publicly suggested that Chinese people might start eating Western-style—with forks and knives on individual plates—to prevent communicable diseases. He was one of the first Chinese officials to abandon the Mao suit in favor of Western business suits. When asked which of Mao Zedong's theories were desirable for modern China, he reportedly replied: "I think, none."
He wasn't prepared to abandon Marxism completely. But he frankly expressed the opinion that Communism could not solve "all of mankind's problems."
Japan and the Military
Hu made sincere efforts to repair Sino-Japanese relations—but was criticized for going too far.
In 1984, when Beijing recognized the twelfth anniversary of Japan's diplomatic recognition of the People's Republic, Hu invited three thousand Japanese youth to visit Beijing and arranged tours of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Xi'an. Many senior officials considered this extravagant, since Japan had only invited five hundred Chinese youths to Japan the previous year.
Hu was criticized internally for the lavish gifts he gave visiting Japanese officials, and for allowing his daughter to privately accompany Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone's son when they visited Beijing. He defended himself by citing the importance of strong Sino-Japanese relations and arguing that Japan's wartime atrocities in China were the actions of military warlords, not ordinary citizens.
He also alienated the People's Liberation Army. For two consecutive years, he suggested that the Chinese defense budget should be reduced. Military officials accused him of making poor choices when purchasing military hardware from Australia in 1985. When Hu visited Britain, they criticized him for drinking soup too loudly during a banquet hosted by Queen Elizabeth II.
The criticism about soup may seem absurd. But it reflected something real: the military establishment was looking for reasons to bring him down.
The Anti-Corruption Campaign
Together with Zhao Ziyang, Hu launched a large-scale anti-corruption campaign. They permitted investigations into the children of senior Party officials—the so-called "princelings" who leveraged their parents' positions for personal enrichment.
This made powerful enemies.
Conservative Party elders opposed Hu's free-market reforms and his tolerance of political liberalization. They saw him as a threat to their power and to the Party's monopoly on political authority. The group known as the Eight Elders—eight revolutionary veterans who retained enormous influence despite lacking formal positions—grew increasingly hostile.
The Fall
In December 1986 and January 1987, widespread student protests erupted across China. The demonstrations called for faster political reform, greater freedom of speech, and more democracy. They were peaceful. They were not organized by Hu. But his political opponents blamed him anyway.
They convinced Deng Xiaoping that Hu's tolerance of "bourgeois liberalization" had instigated the protests. In a January 1987 meeting, the Party elders confronted Hu with a list of his supposed failures and demanded his resignation.
Hu was forced to resign as General Secretary. He was allowed to retain his membership in the Politburo—a face-saving gesture that kept him nominally within the leadership—but his political career was effectively over.
His position as General Secretary was taken by his ally Zhao Ziyang, who continued many of Hu's economic and political reforms. But Hu himself was now sidelined, a living symbol of reformist hopes that had been crushed.
Death and Conflagration
On April 15, 1989, Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack. He was seventy-three.
The next day, students began gathering in Beijing to commemorate him. They didn't just mourn—they demanded that the Chinese government reassess and recognize Hu's legacy. They saw in his downfall everything that was wrong with the system: the way reformers were punished, the way the old guard clung to power, the way hope was extinguished.
A week later, the day before Hu's official funeral, some one hundred thousand students marched on Tiananmen Square.
The protests grew. They spread to other cities. Workers joined students. By May, over a million people were gathering daily in the square. They erected a statue called the Goddess of Democracy facing the portrait of Mao.
On the night of June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese government sent the military to clear the square. Tanks rolled through the streets. Soldiers fired on civilians. The exact death toll remains unknown—estimates range from hundreds to thousands. The Chinese government has never released official figures and continues to censor any discussion of what happened.
The man who had exonerated three million victims of the Cultural Revolution became, in death, the catalyst for China's most brutal crackdown since that dark era.
Erasure and Rehabilitation
After the massacre, the Chinese government censored details of Hu's life. His name became sensitive. Discussion of his legacy was suppressed.
But in 2005, on the occasion of his ninetieth birth anniversary, the government finally commemorated him and lifted its censorship. It was a partial rehabilitation—an acknowledgment that Hu had been a loyal Party member and a capable leader, even if his political views had been problematic.
Hu was buried in Gongqingcheng, a city in Jiangxi Province whose name literally means "Communist Youth City"—a fitting resting place for the man who led the Communist Youth League and who, throughout his life, believed that the Party could be reformed from within.
The Significance of Hu Yaobang
Hu Yaobang's story illuminates a path not taken.
In the 1980s, China genuinely seemed to be moving toward political reform alongside economic reform. Hu and Zhao Ziyang represented a faction within the Party that believed China could modernize politically as well as economically—that accountability, transparency, and some forms of democratic participation were compatible with Communist rule.
That faction lost. When the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, they crushed not just the student movement but the entire reformist wing of the Party. Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed the military crackdown, was purged and spent the last fifteen years of his life under house arrest. The message was clear: economic reform was acceptable, political reform was not.
This bargain—rapid economic growth in exchange for political submission—has defined China ever since. It has produced spectacular material progress and an increasingly authoritarian political system. Whether it is sustainable remains one of the great questions of the twenty-first century.
Hu Yaobang believed it didn't have to be this way. He believed the Party could change, could become more open, could tolerate dissent and debate. He was wrong about what the Party was willing to accept. But he may not have been wrong about what China needed.
Every April 15, despite the censorship, despite the risks, some Chinese citizens still find ways to commemorate his death. They remember the man who survived the Long March, who exonerated millions, who dared to apologize to Tibet, who believed that Communism could not solve all of mankind's problems.
They remember the man whose death lit a fire that the government could only extinguish with tanks.