24 January 2005
Saint Ziyang
Zhao wasn't much of a democrat, believing that the country was in a 100-year transition period to perfect socialism, which meant that elections certainly weren't on the agenda. But neither was he in any sense a good man. He had risen to the top of an organisation collectively responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
The students at Tian'an Men knew this well. The preferential treatment he and his children received was part of the reason why the demonstrations began in the first place. He liked to play golf at a time when a round (on a Japanese-built course) would probably have cost a couple of months' salary for an ordinary worker, already struggling under the steep inflation Zhao's policies had caused.
The scale of the killings at Tian'an Men is so tiny in comparison to the Communist Party's mass murders of land-owners and rich peasants, of political opponents, and of tens of millions of hapless innocents in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as to be almost an irrelevance. The blood shed there was mere drops in an ocean of it. Zhao was part of the mechanism that caused it, so how can a few tears in public when his star was already in decline possibly wash him clean?
What does it say about the Chinese today that a man with so much blood on his hands, and who was one of the specific targets of the Tian'an Men protests, should now be thought of as a hero?
What does it say about the effect of 55 years of isolation from the outside media and 55 years of a solid diet of lies in the domestic media that the people of China can think of him this way? What has it done for moral standards that someone so corrupt can be viewed positively, simply because he was willing to undertake a certain amount of carefully controlled economic reforms, and because his enemies within the Party were a bunch of moral and intellectual pygmies of the likes of Li Peng?
Worse, what does it say about all the Chinese who've emigrated and who have access to independent thought and accurate historical material, and the freedom to speak their minds, that so many can be recording their approval of him on web sites and in letters to the editor?
What does it say about the Chinese leadership that someone party to so much repression and death, and so corrupt, should be seen as a saint merely for a few words of apology?
And what does it say about us that we should allow those few televised words, and those relatively few televised deaths to grow to obsure the deaths of tens of millions of others not fortunate enough to be on camera?
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