78 The EconomistJuly 27th 2019
H
is diary entry for April 27th 1989 recorded the moment when
the trouble touched Li Peng directly. On his way home from his
prime ministerial office in Beijing, his car was blocked by student
protesters. His driver and bodyguards—and he was glad to have
both at that moment—had to find another way round.
After days of pro-democracy protests by students in Tianan-
men Square, nothing had been done about them. Nobody had
come to beat up and drag away the protesters, as had happened
during the only previous outbreak of large-scale unrest on that
vast plaza during Communist rule. That was in 1976, when people
were mourning the death of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. Li had
mourned too, perhaps more than many, because Zhou had cared
for him as a child after his father had been killed, a martyr in the
revolutionary struggle. Zhou’s morals and principles had deeply
influenced him then. But the public grieving in 1976 had turned
into political protest against Zhou’s hardline enemies, and that
had been sharply put down. Now, 13 years later, many Chinese were
allowing themselves to believe that the party might at last be about
to take off in a new political direction, one more open to dissent.
This Li could not allow. He would rather die, he wrote in his diary,
than let the protests get out of hand.
From the beginning of the unrest he had feared the worst: that
these troublemakers would repeat the chaos and violence that Chi-
na had suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He had sat out
those tragic years as an unthreatening apparatchik in charge of
Communist Party affairs at the capital’s electric-power bureau.
(Power-generation, especially hydroelectric engineering, was his
great love, and had been his study at the Power Engineering Insti-
tute in Moscow.) Now, in the era of Deng Xiaoping with reform the
catchword, politics seemed muddled and mixed up in a new way,
and Li was acquiring a name as a conservative. Where Deng was
open-minded, he would make his mark by being just the opposite.
In fact, Chinese politics during the Deng era was often contra-
dictory: both benign and hardline. In 1989 the paramount leaderhad two lieutenants, and Li was only one of them. The other, totally
different, was the party chief, Zhao Ziyang, a seeming liberal
through and through, a suave, charismatic man who wore Western
suits. Li had long been at loggerheads with Zhao over the pace and
direction of change, on questions ranging from price reform to
ideological controls. As a strong believer in the role of the state and
the party, he viewed any change as potentially dangerous to both.
Zhao was also, in those nervy spring days of 1989, sympathetic
to the students. He thought them patriotic. Li saw their leaders as
counter-revolutionaries, bent on overthrowing the party. They had
to be repressed. At meetings of the Politburo Standing Committee
he and Zhao sparred furiously with each other. But Li knew he had
Deng on his side, in favour of military force. On May 17th he left a
Politburo meeting at Deng’s house, alongside the “crestfallen”
Zhao, exultant that he had got his way. The crackdown had been or-
dered. On the 18th he held a tense meeting with some of the student
leaders in the Great Hall of the People overlooking Tiananmen
Square, telling them cryptically: “The situation will not develop as
you wish and expect.” On the contrary, it was about to develop as he
himself wished and expected.
The night of May 20th seared his face on China’s memory. That
was when he appeared on state television, wearing a Mao suit and
with his hair slicked back, to justify the imminent imposition of
martial law in Beijing. “The anarchic state is going from bad to
worse,” he read from a script in a voice that was tense and jerky
with anger. “The fate and future of the People’s Republic of China,
built by many revolutionary martyrs with their blood [his father
among them], are facing a serious threat.” From a packed hall, hun-
dreds of officials applauded him.
He had won his battle, and Zhao had lost. But he had not won
hearts and minds. Though the students directed their anger
against a number of people, including Deng himself, Li became
their main face of evil. As troops gathered on the edge of Beijing,
preparing to clear the square, students and other citizens staged a
massive demonstration, shouting “Down with Li Peng!”. At his
brief meeting with them on the 18th, seething with contempt, he
had told them straight: “We have to defend socialism. I don’t care
whether you are happy to listen to this or not.” On the night of June
3rd this point was repeated—with bullets. Hundreds, maybe thou-
sands, were killed. Several people, especially Deng, deserved the
tag “Butcher of Beijing” that many foreigners applied after that to
Chinese leaders. But it was most commonly given to Li.A whirling wheel
Not that he would have minded. The post-Tiananmen world was
his. Zhao-style liberalism never recovered. Economic reform
eventually took off again, faster than conservatives like him cared
for. But the party stayed firmly in charge, and that was what mat-
tered most of all. He remained prime minister for nearly a decade,
making sure his family was comfortably ensconced in the power-
generation business: his two sons and his daughter all worked in
the Ministry for Water Resources and Electrical Power, and one son
became governor of coal-rich Shanxi province. Anti-corruption
campaigners were outraged by his “power-industry family”. That
did not bother him.
The project he was proudest of, though it made him even less
popular, was the building of a massive dam on the scenic Three
Gorges of the Yangzi river. It cost tens of billions of dollars, dis-
placed 1.3m people and was denounced by environmentalists in
China and abroad, but he cherished it and hymned it in a poem:
“The huge wheel whirls/its power boundless. The achievement is
now,/the benefits for a hundred years.” He wrote a book about the
project, based on the diary he had kept then, and he continued to
keep a diary every day even in old age. He also tried to publish se-
lections from the one he had kept in April, May and June 1989, de-
fending his role in Tiananmen. He may not have cared whether
readers were happy or not. 7Li Peng, prime minister of China in 1987-98 and the public
face of the Tiananmen massacre, died on July 22nd, aged 90The butcher of Beijing
Obituary Li Peng