Hu Yaobang

Biography

Hu Yaobang was born in 1915 into a poor peasant family in Liuyang, Hunan, and taught himself to read. He left home as a boy to join the communists and became a full member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1933. A supporter of Mao Zedong, he narrowly escaped execution in a party purge, took part in the Long March and was captured with Zhang Guotao's western expedition before escaping back to Yan'an, where he studied at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University.

In the civil war he served as a political commissar under Deng Xiaoping, beginning a lasting alliance. From 1952 he led the Communist Youth League, and in 1964 Mao sent him to Shaanxi as provincial party secretary. During the Cultural Revolution he was purged and paraded through Beijing, sent to labour camps, recalled with Deng in 1973 and purged again in 1976.

Rehabilitated in 1977, he headed the party's Organization Department and then its Publicity Department and oversaw the rehabilitation of more than three million people persecuted in earlier campaigns, a central part of the Boluan Fanzheng reforms. He joined the Politburo Standing Committee in 1980, became party chairman in 1981 and general secretary when the chairmanship was abolished in 1982, and pushed economic and political reform and a more conciliatory policy in Tibet.

His tolerance of liberal intellectuals angered party elders, and after student demonstrations in December 1986 he was forced to resign as general secretary in January 1987, keeping his seat on the Politburo. His death after a heart attack in April 1989 set off public mourning that grew into the Tiananmen Square protests.