胡耀邦 (1915-1989)

choi

Matthew Pottinger, China's True Believer. Hu rose from obscurity to become one of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. His belief in reform often landed him in peril. Wall Street Journal, Feb 1, 2024, at page C7
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... e-believer-712cea59
(book review on Robert L Suettinger, The Conscience of the Party; Hu Yaobang, China's communist reformer. Harvard University Press, Oct 15, 2024)

Note:
(a) "You can judge the nature of a society by tracking the plight of its prisoners, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky reputedly observed."
(i) What was attributed to him was: "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals." But it is wrong. See Help Me Find a Citation Source!  Reddit, 2020
https://www.reddit.com/r/dostoev ... _a_citation_source/
(citing Ilya Vinitsky, Dostoyevsky Misprisioned: 'The House of the Dead' and American Prison Literature. Los Angeles Review of Books (magazine), Dec 23, 2019, which actually discussed another quote also attributed to Dostoyevsky: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons")
(ii) English dictionary:
misprision (n; Did You Know?): "MISUNDERSTANDING, MISINTERPRETATION"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misprision
("Prison, too, is from prehendere by way of Anglo-French. And misprision comes to us by way of Anglo-French mesprisun ('error, wrongdoing'/ where Anglo-French mes- is what Modern English mis- is: consult etymology of this Web page), from [verb] mesprendre ('to take by mistake'), itself from [Latin verb] prehendere")
(iii) Middle English is the English spoken in England After Norman Conquest in 1066, the English spoken in England is Middle English AND the French (brought in by the conquerors) spoken in England is Anglo-French (which gradually diversified from the contemporaneous French spoken in France).
() Terms and Definitions. https://frenchofengland.ace.ford ... ms-and-definitions/
(A"The term 'Anglo-French' was used in scholarship to refer to the form of French spoken in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this period, it was not usually the first language of those who spoke it, but was a frequently-taught second language and an important language of record")
(B) Anglo-French
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-French
(may refer to "Anglo-Norman language or its descendants, varieties of French used in medieval England")

(b) "Hu’s deposers (party 'immortals' [中共八大元老] Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun) put down the protests with tanks and gun fire, a massacre forever known as liu si—June 4—to those who witnessed it."
(c) "And once Ye [Jianying (1897 – 1986)] died, Hu had no one to protect him. In 1987 he was demoted to a position of impotence, still on the Politburo Standing Committee, but only as an observer. It was after a Politburo meeting that he died, setting off the chain of events in 1989 that nearly democratized China."
-----------------WSJ
You can judge the nature of a society by tracking the plight of its prisoners, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky reputedly observed. You can judge the nature of a totalitarian regime, perhaps, by documenting the fate of its most honest leaders. Consider the life of Hu Yaobang (1915-1989), the whip-smart and idealistic young revolutionary who would rise almost to the pinnacle of the Chinese Communist Party before being deposed for his reformist ideas in 1987.

Robert Suettinger’s insightful book about Hu, “The Conscience of the Party,” is as much a biography of the party as it is of the man. Hu was born first, but it was the party (founded in 1921) that would inspire, recruit, promote, debase, purge, torture and resuscitate him—before bending to his reformist agenda for a time and then discarding him. His death by heart attack in April 1989 unleashed an outpouring of grief and frustration across China. The public gatherings of students and workers grieved by his death swelled into weeks of pro-democracy protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hu’s deposers (party “immortals” Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun) put down the protests with tanks and gun fire, a massacre forever known as liu si—June 4—to those who witnessed it.

The party and its monopoly on power persists today in part thanks to Hu’s market-oriented reforms that made China’s communist leadership less economically inept, less inhumane and, until recently, less prone to vest absolute power in the hands of a single member.

Mr. Suettinger, a former CIA analyst and White House policymaker, spent a decade delving into unclassified but increasingly hard-to-get Chinese-language sources to piece together Hu’s journey from rural obscurity, through war and political upheaval, to his arrival as chairman and general secretary of the party (though he was still outranked by key elders).

Mr. Suettinger, a former CIA analyst and White House policymaker, spent a decade delving into unclassified but increasingly hard-to-get Chinese-language sources to piece together Hu’s journey from rural obscurity, through war and political upheaval, to his arrival as chairman and general secretary of the party (though he was still outranked by key elders).

Only four of his 11 siblings survived to adulthood, and Hu looked almost as if he had been stunted by his meager upbringing in Hunan Province, topping out at slightly under 5 feet in stature and barely more than 100 pounds. “Oh! It’s a little guy,” Mao Zedong blurted out when Hu stood up and spoke for the first time after one of Mao’s talks. Hu had joined the revolution at age 14. He became one of the stalwart survivors of the Long March (1934-35), during which Mao, a fellow Hunanese, co-led a ramshackle guerrilla army on its retreat to a northern redoubt at Yan’an, from which the Communists would gain strength and ultimately prevail in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

Hu’s intellect, enthusiasm and collegiality made him a standout as an organizer, propagandist and instructor of the strange European ideology known as Marxism-Leninism. Mao took a liking to Hu and assigned his young disciple a host of important jobs, including work in the Red Army central headquarters, where he got to know Ye Jianying—the general who would come to Hu’s political rescue at dire moments in the decades that followed.

Hu’s hands would end up stained in blood, however—not from combat in the civil war, but from Mao’s savage imposition of communist rule following the war’s end. Hu was sent to help impose order on relatively lawless regions of Sichuan Province in China’s southwest, working for the first time under another diminutive future leader of China: Deng Xiaoping.

The carnage that ensued in the spring and summer of 1950 leaves little wonder why this part of Hu’s life has been airbrushed by many of his admirers. Mr. Suettinger presents the record unblinkingly. The pitiless rampage Mao unleashed, with Deng and Hu as his instruments, leaves the reader shaken.

From afar, Mao issued arbitrary killing quotas, adjusting them up or down based seemingly on whether he felt satisfied his underlings had shown sufficient ruthlessness. The Bandit Annihilation Campaign and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries produced waves of summary executions. Deng, foreshadowing his cold-bloodedness at Tiananmen Square four decades later, excoriated subordinates for being “afraid to kill,” telling them that an insufficient death toll would isolate the party from the masses.

Military units and peasant militia killed some 49,000 “bandits” in Hu’s area of responsibility during a three-month stretch in mid-1950. Eventually even Deng would send word up that things were getting out of hand, warning that a “mood of killing quickly” had taken hold. A higher party committee eventually responded with instructions, drafted by Mao himself, to lower the killing quota to between 0.5 and 1.0 people per 1,000.

Deng would summarize the campaigns by dryly reporting that 850,000 bandits and counterrevolutionaries had been “annihilated” in the Southwest region. Mao cabled back his appreciation in January 1951. Members of Hu’s family have tried to defend his record by saying he killed below his quotas, and that the party criticized him for it.

As Mao steered China into a succession of catastrophes during the final two decades of his rule, Hu grew disillusioned with the dictator’s policies, and then with the megalomania that motivated them.

His integrity was a point of pride for him and for the multitudes whose trust he earned, and Hu felt conscience-sick that he’d been cowed into endorsing policies that created a famine. Tens of millions of peasants starved to death from 1958-61. Years later, Hu would personally visit and apologize to junior officials in Anhui Province who had reported truthfully about the devastation afflicted by the Great Leap Forward.

During the Cultural Revolution, the decade of political convulsions Mao orchestrated to cling to power, Hu was purged and beaten, sometimes to unconsciousness. In 1968 he was pulled from extrajudicial detention in a “cowshed” in order to participate in the denunciation of Mao’s rival Liu Shaoqi at a party plenum, before being sent to do labor in Henan Province.

Hu’s political resurrection came through his guardian angel, Gen. Ye Jianying, who brought him back to work alongside Deng Xiaoping in 1975. Mr. Suettinger provides a detailed account of the rural and economic reforms that Hu would help spearhead in the years that followed. Even Deng kept his distance until some of the bolder gambits—such as Hu’s dismantling of the rural commune system—worked out. The totality of pro-market reforms by Hu and Deng and others would become widely known as “Reform and Opening.”

But Hu’s experimentation with political reforms was a bridge too far for the party. He had tried to institute earlier retirement for senior leaders. Deng would have none of it. And once Ye died, Hu had no one to protect him. In 1987 he was demoted to a position of impotence, still on the Politburo Standing Committee, but only as an observer. It was after a Politburo meeting that he died, setting off the chain of events in 1989 that nearly democratized China.

These days, China’a supreme leader Xi Jinping, who has steered the party back to its Maoist roots, suppresses information about Hu. Hu-associated publications and websites that had been around for years have vanished. More surprising, perhaps, is that Mr. Xi is steadily trimming back the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, too.

Mr. Xi has repurposed Deng’s landmark phrase “Reform and Opening” to mean something close to its opposite. In a major address celebrating the party’s centennial in 2021, Mr. Xi mentioned Deng only once by name: in a section commending the “resolute will” and “decisive measures” taken to suppress “serious political disturbances in the spring and summer of 1989” (my translation).

The tragic reality is that today’s Chinese Communist Party is closer to the one that summarily executed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Southwestern China in 1950 than to the one Hu tried to reshape through reform. Hu Yaobang may have been the party’s conscience, but Xi Jinping is its essence.

Mr. Pottinger was deputy national security advisor from 2019-2021. He chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.