From Newsweek, via MSNBC: “When he breathed his last on Monday, fallen Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang was called, simply, ‘comrade.’ At his political apex in the late 1980s, he was a champion of democratic reforms to ease the party’s stranglehold on power. In his defining historical moment in 1989, he resisted the fatal top-level decision to send in troops to quash the Tiananmen Square democracy protests. He was last seen publicly in the square, weeping and begging the students to scatter. Skewered for trying to split the party, he spent the rest of his years confined to a loose form of house arrest. Early Monday morning, Zhao died in a heavily secured Beijing hospital, by all accounts quietly. Almost immediately, China’s current leaders signaled their resolve to keep things that way”quiet.”
China’s regime is worried that the Tiananmen hero’s death will ignite protests
Posted by Xiao Qiang | Jan 17, 2005
