China’s senior leadership on Friday honored the reformist Communist Party chief whose death sparked the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, breaking more than a decade of official silence on his legacy. But notably absent from the politically sensitive ceremony was the man who approved it, President Hu Jintao.
The memorial for the late Communist leader Hu Yaobang, whom hard-liners ousted in 1987 because he had tolerated a wave of student protests in support of democratic reform, took place behind closed doors and amid heightened security in Beijing. State television reported the event Friday night, and within hours thousands flooded the country’s most popular Web sites with notes of remembrance and support.
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