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Ousted in Tiananmen Protests, a Late Chinese Leader Is Finally Given a Grave

The ashes of Zhao Ziyang, the liberal leader ousted after seeking compromise with the protesters, were laid to rest. But the uprising remains a sensitive political scar in China.

Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, urging students to call off their hunger strike on May 19, 1989, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.Credit...Xinhua/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIJING — A century after his birth and nearly 15 years after his death, Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Chinese Communist Party leader who opposed the armed suppression of student protests in 1989, was given a quiet burial in Beijing on Friday under police guard.

The low-key, long-delayed ceremony was the latest episode showing that even in death, Mr. Zhao remains a sensitive topic in Chinese politics.

His ashes were interred in a cemetery on the northern outskirts of Beijing during a small ceremony for close family members, ending a quarrel with the party authorities over where to place his remains. He was buried alongside the ashes of his wife, Liang Boqi, who died in 2013.

“After many years of delays, the children of Zhao Ziyang have finally been able to put to rest their long-deceased father and mother,” his children said in a statement shared by Bao Pu, a Hong Kong publisher who issued Mr. Zhao’s posthumous memoirs.

For Mr. Zhao’s family, the ceremony was a small victory in honoring his memory. After Mr. Zhao died in January 2005 at 85, the party authorities wanted to keep his ashes under heavy guard in a cemetery for officials; his family wanted more control and access, Mr. Bao said in a telephone interview. Ultimately, his ashes were stored in his old home in central Beijing.

The interment in the cemetery took place a day after the centenary of Mr. Zhao’s birth on Oct. 17, 1919, in Henan Province, central China. Usually, deceased Chinese leaders’ major anniversaries inspire laudatory speeches and editorials. But Mr. Zhao was consigned to the class of toppled former leaders whose anniversaries are smothered in official silence and stepped-up security.

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Mr. Zhao’s ashes being interred at a cemetery on the northern outskirts of Beijing on Friday.Credit...Chris Buckley/The New York Times

Since Mr. Zhao’s downfall during the Tiananmen protests, his name has mostly been erased from the Chinese news media, histories and websites. His death in 2005 was announced in a terse statement, and a brief official obituary said that in 1989 he “committed serious errors.” Under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, the country has turned sharply against Mr. Zhao’s ideas for measured political liberalization.

Official hints that China could send the People’s Liberation Army in to quell pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have rekindled memories of the armed crackdown 30 years ago that ended the student-led protests in Beijing and other Chinese cities.

“Zhao is a ghost that haunts the Chinese Communist Party,” Julian B. Gewirtz, a historian of China at Harvard University who is writing a study of China in the 1980s, said by email. “He represents a different path for China’s rise — one profoundly different from Xi Jinping’s today.”

“To some he is a martyr who sought to stop the violent crackdown of 1989, and to others — in the official line — he’s an enemy who sought to bring down socialism in China,” he added.

[From our Chinese-language site: The man who chronicled Mr. Zhao’s years under house arrest.]

Mr. Zhao’s children and some former officials who supported his policies used the centenary to defend his liberal legacy, and implicitly rebuke Mr. Xi’s hard-line direction. Since Mr. Xi took office in 2012, China has detained many dissidents and human rights lawyers, while liberal former officials have often been silenced. Mr. Zhao’s children said that his time as premier and Communist Party general secretary in the 1980s was an era of bold change and intellectual ferment that drew a withering contrast with China today.

“That truly was an exciting time that caused people’s hearts to jump,” they said of Mr. Zhao’s rule in a letter published Monday by Ming Pao, a newspaper published in Hong Kong, beyond mainland Chinese censors. “The whole country was prospering, officialdom and the public, in power and out, worked in tandem.”

“These days we’re confronted with ideological regression and doctrinal shortcomings,” they wrote. “There is a spiritual malaise the likes of which hasn’t been seen for a century.”

It was not clear if Mr. Zhao’s children all supported the letter — at least four sons and one daughter are still alive, Mr. Bao said.

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The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, left, with Mr. Zhao in an undated photo.Credit...Forrest Anderson/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

Mr. Zhao rose to power in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping picked him out as a bold provincial leader with ideas on rejuvenating China’s economy, battered by the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s later years. As China’s prime minister from 1980, Mr. Zhao became a chief proponent of the market overhauls introduced in that decade, including promoting private businesses and foreign investment, as well as cutting controls on prices and supplies.

In his memoirs, Mr. Zhao said that he tried to keep a distance from ideological fights with conservatives aghast at the liberal direction that China was taking, preferring to focus on economic policy. But that became increasingly difficult after 1987, when Mr. Zhao was appointed Communist Party secretary, following the downfall of Hu Yaobang, a liberal leader who was accused of going soft on student protests.

[From our Chinese-language site: A personal history of Mr. Zhao by a colleague who helped publish his memoirs.]

Mr. Zhao increasingly came to believe that China’s market changes could succeed only if they were accompanied by political liberalization that would free up businesses and discourage corruption, he said in his memoirs. He did not advocate outright democracy, but shrinking the party’s role and allowing more tolerance for rival views.

In 1989, Mr. Zhao lost the confidence of Deng, who supported using martial law to end the protests that erupted on Tiananmen Square and spread across the country. Mr. Zhao also wanted to end the protests, but he and his allies wanted to use negotiation and compromise to persuade the students to go back to class.

Mr. Zhao was pushed from office in May 1989, before troops moved in to clear Tiananmen Square, starting on June 3 and going into the early hours of June 4. Hundreds died as the troops pressed into Beijing, according to most estimates.

The party denounced Mr. Zhao as a turncoat who had revealed splits in the leadership and defied Deng’s will. Mr. Zhao, who refused to admit to any wrongdoing, was never tried. He spent his late years largely confined to his courtyard home. But even under virtual house arrest, he remained a worry for the party, and after his death, he has continued to be a troublesome icon.

In his posthumously published memoirs and other books that chronicled his thoughts — recorded by visitors and spirited out of his home — he defended his record and embraced increasingly forthright democratic views.

“China’s failure to transform toward democracy runs against the global tide,” Mr. Zhao said according to Zong Fengming, a friend of Mr. Zhao who published their conversations. The interview with Mr. Zong, who died in 2010, was released for the centenary. Mr. Zhao said: “Sooner or later we must take that path."

Chris Buckley covers China, where he has lived for more than 20 years after growing up in Australia. Before joining The Times in 2012, he was a correspondent for Reuters. More about Chris Buckley

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Nearly 15 Years After Death, Chinese Leader Is Given a Grave. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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