Hu Yaobang

General-secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1980-1987)

• Born: November 20, 1915
• Birthplace: Hunan, China
• Died: April 15, 1989
• Place of death: Jiangxi, China

Hu advanced economic and political reform under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese paramount leader of the time, until removed from office for failing to crack down on students demonstrating for increased political reform namely democracy in 1986. His death from a heart attack in 1989 was followed by massive student protests and ended with the military crackdown known as the Tiananmen incident, an event broadcast around the globe.

Early Life

Hu Yaobang (hew yow-bhang) was born in Hunan, China. As the son of poor peasants, his background differed from Chinese Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhao Ziyang, who came from far more prosperous backgrounds. Hu’s closeness to his peasant origins seems to have affected his sympathy and empathy for peasants during his political career.

Despite its poverty, Hu’s family nonetheless found enough money to send Hu to primary school, where he became radicalized. In 1926, at age ten, he joined the Children’s Corps at the behest of one of this teachers and his older classmates, who would later flee persecution by reactionary forces. However, Hu was spared persecution because of his age.

Continuing his primary education, he scored a top grade on the test for admission to middle school. Again, his family struggled to find the money to send him to boarding school. While in middle school (he was now fourteen years old) he joined the Communist Youth League of China. By age fifteen, he left school to join the Central Soviet base camp, where he was assigned tasks of increasing importance. As soon as he turned eighteen in 1933, he joined the Communist Party and quickly rose to become the secretary-general of the Youth League central committee. The following year he joined Mao’s revolutionaries on the famed Long March from southern China to Yan’an. Wounded on the Long March, he survived to aid the party in consolidating its position, training its army, and planning the guerrilla war that ultimately forced the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek to flee the mainland for the island of Taiwan.

By age twenty, Hu was named the head of the organization department of the Communist Youth League, and was a member of its central committee by age twenty-one. He held a number of political, educational, and propaganda posts in the army during the Chinese Civil War. In 1939, Mao personally asked him to serve as the organization department director of the general political bureau of the Communist Party central committee’s military commission. This gave Hu access to the military at the highest level, allowing Hu to carry orders directly from Mao to generals and other top officers. Hu also led troops in several battles in 1947. In August, 1948, he was promoted to chief of the political department of the North China Field Army’s First Infantry Corps (renamed the Eighteenth Corps in 1949). He was also named the vice chair of the Taiyuan Military Control Commission in 1949.

Hu’s political career advanced when he was named an executive board member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, serving from 1949 to 1954. In 1950, he was also named the finance and economics commission head of the North Sichuan People’s Administrative Office and the North Sichuan military’s political commissar. He was a member of the Southwest Military and Administrative Commission from 1950 to 1952. In these positions, he established contacts with Deng, one of his superiors, who would have an important role in his later career.

Life’s Work

Hu’s national career began with his appointment as central committee head of the Communist Youth League in 1952 and as first secretary in 1953, in which capacity he also directed national programs to standardize spoken Chinese and eliminate illiteracy. Hu supported Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward, but he later expressed regret for his role in support of these disastrous policies during this period. His early national career was capped off by his being named a member of the Communist Party’s Eighth Central Committee in 1956. Hu was named the acting first secretary of the Communist Party’s Shaanxi committee in 1965.

Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. He purged Hu for being too closely aligned with Communist Party general-secretary Liu Shaoqi. In December, 1966, Hu was challenged by tens of thousands of Red Guards during a Youth League meeting, and his effectiveness in the league ended as a practical matter. Although Hu was sent to the “cowshed” to use the Chinese phrase commonplace at the time to face humiliating rituals, he was not completely destroyed. In October, 1968, he was released from the cowshed so he could participate in the Eighth Central Committee meeting. After the meeting, he was sent to a May 7 Cadre School and expected to learn through labor. Although no one would mistake this treatment as pleasant, it was not as harsh as the treatment others received.

In 1973, Zhou Enlai, who was ill with cancer, asked Mao to bring Deng back into the government to help him run the country on a day-to-day basis. This opened the door for Hu’s return to prominence. In July, 1975, Deng brought Hu back to Beijing as one of his advisers to run the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Zhou died in January, 1976, and the radicals forced Mao to remove Deng (and Hu as one of his supporters) from power. Mao died in September, and, a little over a month later, Mao’s radical supporters were arrested and removed from power. By May, 1977, Deng had been reinstated and Hu was elected to the Eleventh Central Committee in August.

Upon his return to the national stage, Deng began a determined campaign to displace Hua Guofeng, Mao’s official successor. Over the next two years, Deng had Hua removed from all remaining important posts. As a part of this strategy, Deng named Hu the director of the propaganda department in 1977, instructing him to defeat Hua’s national campaign with the slogan that the Chinese had to follow Mao and his pronouncements. A year later, Hu was given a post in which he was to rehabilitate Communist Party officials who had been removed from office during the Cultural Revolution. By restoring these officials, Deng and Hu intended to build a large contingent of supporters dedicated to their policies, thinking that the officials would be supportive because Deng and Hu had brought them back from humiliating disgrace. Hu was also installed as a Politburo member, secretary-general of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. By 1980, this strategy succeeded, and Hu was named secretary-general of the secretariat, a member of the standing committee of the central committee’s Politburo, and, finally, general-secretary (chair) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Hu also was named to the Twelfth Central Committee in 1982.

As with Zhao, it is hard to know which policies were based on Deng’s ideas and which originated with either Hu or Zhao. Deng’s strategy was to have both Hu and Zhao act as lightning rods if the policies provoked dangerous political outcomes. It was Hu, however, who was sacrificed in the spring of 1987. He was removed as general-secretary for failing to crack down sufficiently on Chinese students who had demonstrated for increased democratic political reform during the closing days of 1986. Hu was a believer in open debate as a means to reform, garnering the student’s favor and support.

Although Hu was removed from the top post, he retained many of his other party positions. Zhao replaced Hu as general-secretary, allowing speculation that Hu might be able to make a comeback. Some commentators even believe that Hu was staging a comeback when he suffered a heart attack in early April, 1989. His death led to an outpouring of grief. A series of demonstrations culminated in the June 4, 1989, incident at Tiananmen Square, a demonstration of resolve and determination by students, and workers, that was broadcast on television and radio around the globe.

Significance

Hu was faithful to his peasant roots throughout his long career as a Chinese Communist revolutionary leader. After the revolution, he rose to the top ranks of the reform government of Deng before being removed as too committed to economic and political reform. He nevertheless was an integral part of China’s economic success that began to be felt in 1980.

Perhaps Hu’s most lasting legacy is his support for open political debate. China, along with the rest of the world, witnessed the flowering of an antigovernment, prodemocracy movement after his death in 1989, attesting to Hu’s significance as a reforming member of the Communist Party.

Bibliography

Hsü, Immanuel Chung-yueh. The Rise of Modern China. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This massive history of modern China has become a professional standard and contains excellent accounts of the governmental activities of both Hu and Zhao.

Lawrance, Alan. China Since 1919: Revolution and Reform A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 2004. A history of China from 1919 the year that saw major changes in political ideologies to the first years of the twenty-first century. Includes chapters on the Cultural Revolution.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. China Under Communism. New York: Routledge, 1998. A broad history of communism in China.

Pye, Lucian. The Mandarin and the Cadre: Chinese Political Cultures. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1988. Pye continues his outstanding lifelong analysis of Chinese government and political culture, arguing most significantly that Hu was in the process of attempting to stage a political comeback at precisely the point when he died in April, 1989. Correctly predicts that Zhao was in a no-win situation as the chair of the CCP.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Spence’s masterful history of modern China has fairly extensive coverage of both Hu and Zhao and their activities as the top leaders in China in the 1980’s.

Yang Zhong Mei. Hu Yaobang: A Chinese Biography. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1988. This biography contains a wealth of factual material about Hu, but it is written in a style typical of a twentieth century Chinese writer who avoids analysis or speculation while instead focusing in almost excruciating detail on minute facts.

Zhang Liang, comp. The Tiananmen Papers. Edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. Collection of hundreds of Communist Party and government documents that recount the positions of the leaders who crushed the demonstration. Features biographical sketches for one hundred of the individuals involved in the events. Includes index.