The Post

Senior party official whose sympathies for Tiananmen Sq protesters resulted in jail

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As the police car drew up in front of a set of nondescrip­t gates set in high walls a few miles outside Beijing, Bao Tong, who has died aged 90, almost breathed a sigh of relief. He could guess his destinatio­n and turned to the stonyfaced police officers who had ushered him into the car an hour earlier at the headquarte­rs of China’s Communist Party. ‘‘Is this Qincheng prison?’’ he asked. It was.

That morning – May 28, 1989 – had got off to a bizarre start. Bao had been called to a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the elite group of five men who ruled China. Nothing strange there, he was its political secretary and closest aide to the party chief, making him among the highest-ranking men in the country. However, the call was unexpected and the car that came to collect him was not his usual limousine. All around him in Beijing, nothing was normal. Tens of thousands of students had been camped out for several weeks in Tiananmen Square to demand reform and defying orders to leave as well as the imposition of martial law.

When the car drew up inside the redwalled, closely-guarded Zhongnanha­i compound he was greeted by the head of the party’s Organisati­on Department – effectivel­y the head of personnel. ‘‘Are you safe?’’ Song Ping asked. Bao reassured him. But Song insisted that the chaos in central Beijing was a risk and that the students were after him. ‘‘I have a safer place for you,’’ he replied, escorting Bao out to a waiting police car.

Entering the prison, he was told that he would no longer be called by his name but addressed simply as prisoner 8901. He was then taken to a cell measuring 6 sq m furnished with a board for a bed and without a door. Instead of a door there was a desk, manned round the clock by guards who recorded his every move, minute by minute.

His crime was loyalty to his boss of nine years, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Zhao Ziyang, who sympathise­d with the student demonstrat­ors in Tiananmen Square. He opposed the decision to send in the People’s Liberation Army to crush the protests on June 4.

When Bao was put on trial, three years after entering prison, he was charged with leaking a state secret and with counterrev­olutionary crimes – code for crossing the CCP. He was sentenced to seven years and spent his entire term in solitary confinemen­t.

Born in southeaste­rn Zhejiang province, he grew up in Shanghai. Influenced by an uncle, a leading left-wing intellectu­al and political commentato­r, he attended Shanghai Nanyang High School, where he met his wife, Jiang Zongcao, who was already active in the communist undergroun­d and persuaded him at 16 to join the party – then still proscribed.

His admission to the party had been quite cloak and dagger. Just weeks before Shanghai fell to the communists in 1949, he was told to go to a Shanghai park carrying a copy of a local newspaper and to meet a contact carrying the same newspaper who would ask him the time. He was to reply that he didn’t have a watch but that he thought it was about 7am. And that was just what happened. By the end of the day he was in charge of an undergroun­d cell at his school.

He worked in the Organisati­on Department for two decades. At the start of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 he was purged and sent to do hard labour on a farm for 10 years. Rehabilita­ted in 1977, he returned to Beijing and worked with China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, drafting speeches and policy. In 1980 he became political secretary to Zhao Ziyang, who was then premier. He remained at Zhao’s side when he became general secretary of the party in 1987.

So when the students took to the streets in 1989 demanding a crackdown on corruption and greater freedoms, Bao and his mentor sympathise­d, though he knew at once that the movement would likely end in tragedy.

Bao was allowed to return home in 1997, but spent the rest of his life under constant surveillan­ce. Guards manned a desk in the lobby of his building, registerin­g all visitors, and followed him wherever he went – often to his nearest McDonald’s to meet foreign journalist­s over cups of coffee. He never saw Zhao, who spent the rest of his life under house arrest, again. When he died in 2005, Bao and his wife tried to pay their respects but were turned away by police who knocked down his elderly wife, fracturing a vertebra. His wife died in August this year. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Bao never ceased his open criticism of increasing­ly repressive Communist Party rule. The country would never move forward, he said, until it repudiated the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. ‘‘I believe there will be real democracy in China sooner or later, as long as there are people who want to be treated equally and have their rights respected . . . No totalitari­an system can last for long.’’

‘‘I believe there will be real democracy in China sooner or later .... no totalitari­an system can last for long’’

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