HU YAOBANG

born November 1915, Liu-yang, Hunan, China died April 15, 1989, Peking WadeGiles romanization Hu Yao-pang general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1981 to 1987. Born into a poor peasant family, Hu received little formal education. At age 14 he left home to join the Communists, and he became a member of the Communist Party in 1933. A veteran of the Long March (193435), he worked closely with the future party leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1930s and served as political commissar under Deng in the 2nd Field Army during the war against Japan. In the late 1940s, he and Deng moved into Szechwan province when their army took over the area from Nationalist forces. In 1952 he followed Deng to Peking, where he became head of the Young Communist League (195266). After the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966, both Hu and Deng were twice purged and twice rehabilitated. After his second rehabilitation in 1977, Hu became director of the party's organization department and soon afterward was made a member of the Politburo and propaganda chief. In February 1980 he was appointed general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and was elected to the Politburo's Standing Committee, the inner circle of the ruling body. In June 1981 he was further elevated to the chairmanship of the party, replacing Mao Zedong's handpicked successor, Hua Guofeng. Hu's elevation, engineered by his mentor Deng (who himself had become the de facto leader of China), marked the Chinese leadership's broader acceptance of pragmatic programs designed to speed up economic growth. As general secretary of the Communist Party, Hu was responsible for ensuring that the party apparatus carried out the policy directives of China's new leadership. He set about downgrading the party's discredited Maoist ideology and replacing it with a more flexible and pragmatic policy of seeking truth from facts. In line with the new emphasis on collective leadership in place of the personality cult of Mao Zedong, and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of party domination that Mao had exercised as its chairman, Hu helped abolish that post at a party congress in 1982. He then oversaw the purging of unrepentant Maoists and corrupt or incompetent members from the party and their replacement with younger, better-educated cadres in the mid-1980s. Early in 1987, after several weeks of student demonstrations demanding greater Western-style freedom, Hu was forced to resign for mistakes on major issues of political policy. He nevertheless remained a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo.