ZHAO ZIYANG

born Oct. 17, 1919, Hua county, Honan province, China Wade-Giles Chao Tzu-yang, original name Zhao Xiusheng, Wade-Giles Chao Hsiu-sheng premier of China from 1980 to 1987 and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1987 until he was dismissed in 1989. Born into a landlord family in Honan province, Zhao joined the Young Communist League in 1932 and became a member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1938. During World War II he served in local party organizations in northern China. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, he was moved to Kwangtung province, where he became provincial first party secretary in 1965. Purged in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, he was later rehabilitated and sent as first party secretary in 1975 to Szechwan, China's most populous province, where he greatly increased industrial and agricultural production. These results were achieved through such innovative policies as rewarding workers on the basis of work performance rather than need and relying on material incentives that encouraged individual initiative rather than on quotas set by central authorities. In addition, factory managers were given much greater autonomy, and peasants were allowed to expand their private plots of land. Such achievements caught the attention of Deng Xiaoping, the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party, and Zhao was quickly made a Politburo alternate in 1977 and a full member in 1979, becoming a member of that body's powerful Standing Committee in February 1980. Early in 1980 he was appointed vice premier and then, in September, premier, replacing Hua Guofeng. An economic experimenter, Zhao advocated any structure, system, policy, or measure that might stimulate the forces of production. As premier he was able to extend his Szechwan policies to the whole of China. Thousands of industrial enterprises were given limited self-management, and peasants achieved increased control over and responsibility for their production and profits. Throughout the 1980s Zhao's pragmatic measures led to rapid increases in both agricultural and light-industrial production, and his policies became the guiding principles for China's future economic development. Zhao was appointed acting general secretary of the Communist Party upon Hu Yaobang's forced resignation from that office in January 1987. In November he officially became general secretary, with Li Peng taking over the premiership. As general secretary, Zhao continued to favour the loosening of government controls over industry and to advocate the creation of special free-enterprise zones in China's coastal regions as a means of hastening economic development. Premier Li, on the other hand, favoured a cautious approach that relied more on government planning and guidance. In April 1989 massive student demonstrations calling for more democratic government broke out in Peking. As the protests continued and grew in size, a serious split developed in the Chinese Communist leadership between those who, like Zhao, were somewhat sympathetic to the protesters' demands and those who, like Li, favoured using force to suppress the demonstrations. As the protest movement spread to other cities and threatened to immobilize the central government, Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, threw his support to Li, who thereupon imposed martial law and used the armed forces to crush the protests. On June 24, 1989, Zhao was formally dismissed from his top party and government posts and was replaced as general secretary by Jiang Zemin.