Former Chinese leader derided for Tiananmen role
Li Peng, the former Chinese premier derided as the stone- faced “butcher of Beijing” for his role in the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989, died July 22 in the Chinese capital. He was 90.
Mr. Li’s death was announced by Xinhua, the staterun news agency, which gave no specific cause.
Born to Communist revolutionaries in the early years of the Chinese civil war and educated as a hydroelectric engineer in the Soviet Union, Mr. Li rose to the top ranks of the Communist Party, serving as a bridge between the old guard and the more technocratic leaders who succeeded them.
He served 10 years as prime minister and then five years, until his retirement in 2003, as chief of the National People’s Congress, the country’s partydominated, rubber- stamp Parliament.
Mr. Li, a wooden presence on television, was never widely loved by the Chinese public, but he wielded great power late in his career as a top- ranking member of the secretive Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s leading center of power. That he survived at such a rarefied level suggested that he was more politically adroit than his stodgy public image indicated.
Mr. Li is most widely remembered as the forbidding official in a Mao suit who appeared on television in May 1989 to announce the imposition of martial law in urban Beijing and to denounce leaders of the giant pro- democracy protests that had occupied Tiananmen Square in the heart of the city. They were enemies of the Communist Party, he declared, who imperiled “the fate and future of the People’s Republic of China, built by many revolutionary martyrs with their blood.”
Historians have debated how much personal responsibility Mr. Li bore for the army’s assault on students and workers beginning late on June 3, 1989, when tanks and troops with automatic rifles opened fire, killing hundreds if not more as they plowed toward Tiananmen Square. The troops took the square early on June 4.
Scholars have also debated Mr. Li’s role in the removal and permanent house arrest that spring of his more liberal rival, Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who was nominally of a higher rank. Mr. Zhao had advocated negotiating with the students and opposed using the army against them. Mr. Zhao died in 2005.
Since 1989, critics had called for Mr. Li to face trial or a public reckoning for his role in the bloodshed. But 30 years after the Tiananmen crackdown, the Communist Party shows no sign of disavowing the decision to use armed force.
Mr. Li would later protest — accurately, in the view of most experts — that the momentous decision to send in troops in 1989 could have been made only by Deng Xiaoping, the elderly behind- the- scenes leader and military chairman who had set China on its postMao path of increasing economic freedom while keeping a tight grip on political power.
Mr. Li presented his own version of events leading up the crackdown in a diarylike account that was circulated among the party’s elite and acquired by a Hong Kong publisher in 2010. In it, Mr. Li defended his conduct, describing himself as a responsible and sober- minded servant of the party and presenting Deng as the dominating force who had made a knowing decision to use armed force against the protesters.
Mr. Li recalled how he and other officials had monitored troops as they advanced toward Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3 and the early hours of June 4.
“At about half past 5 in the morning, the remaining 2,000 students and core elements behind the turmoil left through the southeast corner of the square,” he wrote. “Nobody died during the evacuation of Tiananmen Square. Thus, the cancer of the illegal occupation of Tiananmen Square was fully removed. I notified the Xinhua News Agency to report this to the country and the whole world.”
Mr. Li was known among the top leaders of the 1980s and ’ 90s as a conservative on economic issues, urging caution in the dismantling of state industries and the introduction of free markets.
Like most Chinese Communist leaders of his era, he revealed little of himself, usually reading from turgid official scripts in public. If there is a single colorful quotation to his name, it has not been found.
Leftist ideology mattered less to Mr. Li than ensuring stability at almost any price and safeguarding Communist Party rule. Building his early career in the state- run power industry, he was one of the first of the so- called technocrats to rise in politics — a generation of college- educated officials, many trained in engineering, who began to take office in the 1980s and ’ 90s. He was known to be concerned in particular with hydroelectric power and dams.
One of Mr. Li’s signal legacies will be the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which he promoted as premier. The project caused wide concern in China and abroad about potential environmental consequences — such as earthquakes and landslides — and the human cost of relocating more than 1.3 million people displaced by the rising waters behind the dam that inundated dozens of towns and cities.
“Without Li Peng’s advocacy, the Three Gorges Dam might never have been built,” said Li Cheng, a China scholar at the Brookings Institution.