From The New York Times:
Deng Xiaoping, China’s late paramount leader, famously declared after he consolidated power in the early 1980’s that his predecessor, Mao Zedong, was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad. With that numerical coda, the Communist Party closed a historical debate that had threatened to tear it apart.
Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Communist Party and China’s top leader, assigned no precise ratio to assess his late predecessor, Zhao Ziyang. But Mr. Hu clearly struggled to find the right balance in managing the politically explosive death of Mr. Zhao, who was officially memorialized and cremated on Saturday.
The test of whether Mr. Hu succeeded may be less the event itself, conducted with martial discipline, than whether society and the Communist Party ultimately accept the verdict on Mr. Zhao, political analysts said.
