“He was on hunger strike twice and force fed,” one source told Reuters, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. It was unclear how long the hunger strike lasted.

“He was not tortured, but fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Beijing for treatment,” the source said, declining to provide details of Bo’s condition and whereabouts which have been kept under wraps since his downfall.

[…] The recent lack of information about the case – Bo has not been seen in public since last March – harms the government’s credibility in the eyes of the people, said Bao Tong, the most senior official jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

“It’s not normal, too much time has past,” Bao told Reuters, referring to the lack of information from the government about the case.

“This is not good for the party’s image. They have not thought about this clearly. If they are able to properly deal with a big shot like Bo Xilai then they will increase people’s trust in the party,” he added.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, Bao Tong, Bo Xilai, hunger strike, justice, rumors, Tiananmen, trials, trust
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Zhao pressed forward with bold political reforms while in office, but he was never seen in public after May 19, 1989, when he made a tearful appeal in Tiananmen Square for pro-democracy demonstrators to leave. He has since become a symbol of thwarted political reform.

Du Guang , a veteran Central Party School scholar, wept and said Zhao had died while still smeared by false charges and he could never forget him. “Zhao initiated political reform but regrettably everything was terminated after June 4, 1989,” said Du, who helped found a semi-official think tank that analysed reform issues in 1988 but was forced to close after the Tiananmen crackdown.

People who visited Zhao’s home yesterday bowed in the mourning room, where a large picture of a smiling Zhao was surrounded by dozens of flowers, including ones from his former aide Bao Tong , who is under house arrest in Beijing.

Some netizens also commemorated Zhao online, though searches for his name remained blocked on Sina Weibo, and posts which mentioned him directly were reportedly removed. Many, though, had no idea who he was:

Just re-Weibo’d a photo of Zhao Ziyang, 1-17 the anniversary of his death in 2005.Typical of comments was this one: 弱弱的问一下，他是谁？

— David Moser (@david__moser) January 18, 2013

“If I may ask, who is he?”

At The New York Times, meanwhile, Andrew Jacobs reported the death of another “largely forgotten” figure of the era: General Yang Baibing, who led the suppression of the protests in 1989 but was later sidelined for conspiring to usurp Jiang Zemin’s succession.

Among democracy advocates, General Yang is best remembered for carrying out Deng’s order to clear unarmed demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the spring of 1989. In May, his older brother appeared on television with Li Peng, the prime minister at the time, to justify the imposition of martial law to quell demonstrations that had paralyzed the heart of the capital. As general secretary of the Central Military Commission and the army’s political commissar, General Yang mobilized troops whose gunfire would claim hundreds if not thousands of lives.

[…] In recent years General Yang was said to have sought a publisher for his memoirs, which included a justification for the use of force against the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Bao Pu, a publisher in Hong Kong, said party leaders had rejected the manuscript, presumably because it broached a subject that remains taboo here.

Mr. Bao, whose father was purged as Communist Party secretary general for opposing the use of force in Tiananmen Square, said many historians were eager to know whether in his memoirs General Yang had expressed regret for the killings.

“Thanks to the Yang brothers, China’s only military victory of the last 30 years involved cracking down on its own people,” Mr. Bao said. “You can’t help but wonder if he had any reflection on that.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, Central Military Commission, June 4th, Li Peng, Tiananmen Square, Zhao Ziyang
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Bao is damning in his assessment of the current administration: “There’s no ideology, there’s no socialism, there’s no communism. All that’s left is power.”

[...]

“The party is more powerful than an emperor. No emperor could mobilize and organize 80 million people. Every company and every law court has a party branch. They’re all under the party’s control, including lawyers and newspapers. What emperor could do that?” he asks.

[...]

But Bao still has hopes for the new administration that will be headed by a new president, Xi Jinping. He believes that if the administration can act fast in pushing through reforms, it may be able to claw back some legitimacy.

“They need to be pro-active,” he says. “If they admit that many mistakes were made in the past, the people would immediately forgive them.”

Read more about Bao Tong, via CDT, including an interview with Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, Bao Tong, corruption, Xi Jinping, Zhao Ziyang
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When you served in the government, in the 1980s, the older generation was really important. Veterans of the Long March tried to get Deng Xiaoping to reverse economic reforms and many of them supported the 1989 crackdown. What about now? Is there an older generation that still plays that role? Do you think people like former party secretary Jiang Zemin have influence behind the scenes?

There aren’t elders anymore like that. Jiang isn’t a real elder. In the revolution he was a nothing. He doesn’t have that kind of influence. The big difference is that in the past it was one person who decided: Mao and then Deng. Now a few people decide.

Is this good? Some people say the lack of a single strong leader explains why there have been no major economic reforms in the past decade.

Overall it’s a good thing. It’s terrible when just one person decides. You can talk about Deng’s reforms, but what about Mao? He could decide anything but he chose the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. And Deng, well there was June 4 [the night of the 1989 Beijing massacre].

Now the leaders are more deadlocked. If they can’t decide, nothing happens. In America, if you’re corrupt you have to resign. Look at Nixon. He had Watergate and had to resign. In China does that happen? No. Why? Because everyone is in one boat. If that boat turns over, everyone ends up in the water. When I say “everyone” of course I mean the people in power. So in China everyone helps each other out. If you are in trouble, I’ll help you out and if I’m in trouble you help me out. So only in an extreme case like [recently deposed Politburo member] Bo Xilai can someone be pushed out.

Right now it’s nine guys helping each other out [the nine members of the Politburo’s Standing Committee]. That’s the political system. No one wants to rock the boat.

I think that group of men at the other table are watching us.

Forget them. They follow me wherever I go.

Read more about Bao Tong and about the 1989 protest movement via CDT.

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Post tags: 1989 protests, Bao Tong, ccp leadership, corruption, Deng Xiaoping, high-level corruption, Jiang Zemin, Politburo Standing Committee, Zhao Ziyang
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Taiwan, which marks its own National Day nine days after a lavish display of communist military power by rival Beijing, should provide the model for reunification with China, a former top Communist Party aide has said.

Bao Tong, former aide to late ousted Party chief Zhao Ziyang, lauded the current form of democracy on the self-governing island, which still celebrates the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) with the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen.

“In Taiwan, where there is no socialism, it is possible to ferret out corruption openly,” Bao wrote in an essay marking the “Double Tenth” celebrations.

“On the mainland, where we enjoy the benefits of the dictatorship of the proletariat, masses of people who turn out to protest at corruption are suppressed as troublemakers,” Bao added, referring to the 1989 military crackdown on student-led protests on Tiananmen Square.

© cdtstaff for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 protests, Bao Tong, Chinese democracy, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, Zhao Ziyang
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“People don’t really talk about June 4 any more,” a confident public security official told The Age. “We’re far more worried about September, when this year’s university students graduate and find there aren’t any jobs.”

The party’s obsession with controlling its past makes the achievements of a few contrarian cadres all the more unlikely.

[...] In the 1980s, when China was being liberalised, Du edited the People’s Daily and then headed the General Administration of Press and Publications. But on May 31, 1989, as the tanks rumbled towards Beijing, Du decided he would not be meekly swept along in yet another episode of tragic Communist Party history. He says he agonised and shed “many tears” before phoning a senior leader and vowing to tear up the party membership card he had carried for 54 years if the soldiers opened fire.

The soldiers sprayed their bullets, the party arrested Zhao, but Du did not hand in his membership card. Instead he has spent 20 years chipping away at the party’s collective guilt from the inside, trying to clear the names of the reform-minded cadres it had destroyed.

And the Financial Times interviews Bao Tong, a senior aide to Zhao Ziyang who was the highest official to be jailed in connection to the 1989 protests:

He greets me at the door with a wry smile, jet-black hair and a lithe frame wrapped in a Princeton University sweatshirt. It is hard to believe that he spent six years of his life doing hard labour during the Cultural Revolution and then, from 1989, another seven years in solitary confinement in the notorious Qincheng political prison. When I mention the sinister-looking men at the entrance to his apartment block who asked me to explain why I’ve come to see him, his face cracks into a sly grin.

“I’m contributing to the country by stimulating domestic demand, increasing employment and helping solve the financial crisis,” he says. He speaks Mandarin with the soft consonants of a southerner and the confidence characteristic of a senior party cadre. “You only saw three people down there but if I want to go out I’m followed by three groups – one on foot, one in cars and one on motorbikes. Just think – it takes more than 30 people to keep an eye on me so if the government decided to monitor all 1.3bn people in China we could solve the unemployment problem for the whole world!”

While this kind of gallows humour and the satirical use of communist propaganda slogans is common on the anonymous internet, I have never heard a senior Chinese official, even a retired one, talk like this in public.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 20 years, Bao Tong, Du Daozheng, June 4th, Zhao Ziyang
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When the memoir became public last week, Mr. Bao, the most senior Communist Party official imprisoned after the crackdown, quickly claimed responsibility. In a string of interviews with the foreign press that security officials did not initially seek to prevent, he said he had collaborated with other liberal party elders to slip the cassette recordings out of the country for publication.

“In the past, the minute these things appear, the party would say, ‘This is turmoil; we must crack down,’ ” he said in one telephone conversation early this week. “But if the party can maintain this current calm, then maybe it can eventually be saved.”

By Friday, though, the government’s restraint appeared to be wearing thin.

Highlights of Mr. Zhao’s memoir and audio clips of his original dictation, which were accessible for days within the mainland on the Web sites of American newspapers, including The New York Times, now appear to be blocked.

And Mr. Bao’s run of unfettered press availability ended. Mr. Bao said by telephone late Friday that he had just been informed he could no longer accept interviews “starting right now.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, June 4th, Zhao Ziyang
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Du Daozheng, reformist chief of the General Administration of Press and Publications in the late 1980s, said he was one of four retired officials who helped Zhao secretively record his memoirs before his death under house arrest in 2005.

Zhao’s recollections, published abroad and sure to be banned in mainland China, challenge the ruling Communist Party’s verdict that the student-led protests centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing were a counter-revolutionary plot, and he calls the armed crackdown that ended them on June 4 two decades ago a tragedy.

In a statement explaining his role in making the memoirs, Du said it was time to rehabilitate Zhao, ousted in 1989 by Party conservatives who accused him of siding with the protesters.

“At the major historic juncture of June 4, Zhao Ziyang acted responsibly to the Chinese nation, to history and to ordinary people,” Du said in the statement, which will appear in the Chinese-language version of Zhao’s memoirs to be published in separately administered Hong Kong this month.

Read more about Du Daozheng via CDT.

See also an interview with Bao Tong, Zhao Ziyang’s top aide who was the only senior official to be jailed in connection to the protests of 1989, in the Globe and Mail.

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Post tags: Bao Tong, Du Daozheng, reformers, Zhao Ziyang
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On Fuxing Road in western Beijing is a vast Soviet-style building that proudly houses old jets, tanks and ships — all memorials to the various military conflicts faced by the People’s Republic of China. But just around the corner, in a typical middle-class housing complex, is an unwelcome reminder of how the country manages its political conflicts.

On the sixth floor of an apartment building there lives a veteran of the opaque, unforgiving world of Chinese statecraft. Bao Tong, 76, was a top aide and speechwriter for the secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s. Now he lives under virtual house arrest, his every move observed, every visitor screened by a handful of guards, every conversation presumably monitored. The Communist Party would clearly like him to fade into oblivion, to live out the rest of his days caring for his goldfish and taking walks in the park. But Bao Tong has no intention of going out quietly.

Over the past month Bao has repeatedly questioned the authoritarian nature of China’s central government — in very public ways. He helped draft Charter 08, a lengthy pro-democracy online manifesto initially published in early December by 303 mainland writers, scholars and artists, a number that has since grown to several thousand. Soon after, he released a series of essays through Radio Free Asia that questioned the very motivations and accomplishments of the Party.

Bao Tong says his decision to sign the landmark Charter comes from a long-held regret over joining the Communist Party as a young man. “Sixty years ago I wanted violence. In order to promote Leninism and communism, I joined this Party…I signed Charter 08 to correct my mistake of 60 years ago,” Bao said one recent afternoon in the Beijing apartment he shares with his wife. Bao’s face is visibly weary, but he sits with an erect posture, and his eyes flash as he discusses history and politics. “This is not about using violent means to change society,” he says. “It’s about using peaceful, rational means. Everything I do can be boiled down to one word: patriotism.”

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, Charter 08, dissidents
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The essays contain devastating language. They will agitate China’s leaders because of Bao’s status as a veteran comrade speaking out while thousands of workers lose their jobs as a result of the world recession. The essays appeared as the party was celebrating 30 years of the “reform and opening-up” policy instituted by Deng, who died in 1997.

[...] Bao has published criticism in the past but the timing and vigour of his essays are particularly damaging to President Hu Jintao, who has promised a “harmonious society” to be guaranteed by political control.

There appears to be uncertainty, and perhaps division, at the top about how to respond to peaceful critics drawn from all classes. Security agents have detained some signatories of Charter 08.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 30 years of reform, Bao Tong, political reform
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In October 1984, a group of university students spontaneously unfurled a banner that read “Hello Xiaoping” and marched in an ebullient mood towards Tiananmen Square. This was an expression of the public mood. Five years later, countless students coralled in their dormitory buildings smashed “little bottles” (xiaoping) in an expression of their indescribable anger and grief. This, too, was an expression of the public mood. Both expressions gave voice to the two-faced nature of Deng Xiaoping.

Deng’s two-sidedness was like a pendulum. One minute he wanted reforms, the next he was resolutely upholding the four basic principles of socialism. One minute he wanted to escape from a political dead end, the next he had returned to it.

Deng was like that. You could criticize him for logical inconsistency, but you couldn’t say he said one thing and did another. Both his words and his deeds were in earnest. He was a genuine supporter of reforms, and yet also a staunch protecter of the very things we were supposed to be reforming.

Read an earlier essay in the series here. On the Time China blog, Austin Ramzy recalls meeting Bao and comments on his latest essay.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 30 years of reform, Bao Tong, Deng Xiaoping
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Reforms, along with the Third Plenum of the 11th Chinese Communist Party Congress Central Committee [in December 1978], seem to be a hot topic at the moment. I too have some thoughts and memories to write down, some comparisons and criticisms. I would welcome the opportunity to debate them with anyone wishing to do so.

Where should I start? From the source of it all: namely, the reasons why there was no way forward but reform at this time.

Someone famous once said, “Not introducing reforms will take us down a blind alley.” This famous person has long since died.

Of course, it wasn’t said by Chen Yun, who favored a planned economy, nor was it said by Zhao Ziyang or Hu Yaobang, both of whom favored a market economy and political reform. No, it was said by the biggest name of that era: Deng Xiaoping.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 30 years of reform, Bao Tong, reforms
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It is very naive to take the number of gold medals won as an indicator of the rise of China. That sort of patriotism…has nothing to do with the Olympic spirit…There are subtle differences between China and other countries when it comes to the training and selection of athletes. Other countries use athletics as a way of training the body. China uses athletics to snatch prizes.

China has sponsored a top-down professionalized system, a totally segregated approach to athletic training. Non-Chinese may not understand the term “away from production.” It has its roots in the Chinese Communist Party’s experience of the 1927-37 Chinese civil war, when peasants who relied on the land for their existence took up arms as their revolutionary duty to fight for a share of it. In the process, they were torn away from their families, from the rest of society, and from normal economic activities. They were said to be taken “away from production” to fulfill this task.

China’s athletes are chosen as young children…and taken away from their families, from their schools, and totally cut off from normal social activities. The door is closed, and they give up their entire youth and part of their childhoods for the sole aim of entering and winning competitions, an aim for which they are totally re-molded by the system.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, Olympics politics
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The Beijing Olympics are a great opportunity for China to show off its splendour to the world. Since the Olympic Games take place every four years, a new venue must be found every four years. It is not that hard for world leaders to deal with the matter if one’s psychology is “normal”, not so for China’s leaders. For them, I fear it is quite impossible.

Why impossible in China? Because China was awarded the Games after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In support of the Chinese people, the international community continued to condemn and denounce a few “Chinese butchers,” but to show its friendship to more than a billion Chinese, they picked Beijing to host the Olympics.

This is what comes when peoples are on friendly terms but for those who succeeded the people responsible for the 1989 massacre, the first attitude (condemnation) is symptomatic of a desire to demonise China, embodying the “not yet extinguished desire of hostile forces to exterminate us”; conversely, the second (awarding the Games) is seen as a lucky break that fell from the sky showcasing all of our transformations. Thus, China like Cinderella can say that it has turned into the most beautiful princess of the story.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, Beijing 2008 Olympics, Weng'an riot
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Take harmony seriously; talk to the Dalai Lama

The Lhasa incident has caused massive grief for all the Tibetan people and all of China. Anyone who has ever been through a great historical tragedy will understand its significance. The Chinese government spokesman said the whole thing was orchestrated by the Dalai Lama — a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — from behind the scenes. However, as a reader from Europe put it: “Nobody here believes what the Chinese government says.”

That one phrase is more eloquent that 10,000 words. It renders the spokesman’s words meaningless. Because it shows how ordinary readers are quite capable of making their own considered and independent decision not to believe what the Chinese government says, but instead use their own experience as a basis for deciding what to think.

Bao’s statement follows a similar call for dialogue issued by 29 dissents, including prominent figures Liu Xiaobo and Wang Lixiong, last weekend.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bao Tong, Dalai Lama, Lhasa riots, Tibet protests
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