Zhao Ziyang

October 17, 1919 – January 17, 2005

Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005) was a Chinese politician who served as premier of China from 1980 to 1987 and as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1987 to 1989. He oversaw political reforms from 1986 but lost power after supporting the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Who else was alive Wikipedia

Biography

Zhao Ziyang was born in 1919 in Hua County, Henan, and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1938. During the war against Japan and the civil war that followed he held party and political-commissar posts in the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border region and around Nanyang.

After 1949 he rose in Guangdong, becoming the province's party secretary in 1965, but was attacked by Red Guards and sent to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution. Rehabilitated from 1971, he served in Inner Mongolia and Guangdong before becoming party secretary of Sichuan in 1975. There he let farm families work land for themselves and sell their crops on the market and gave factory managers more autonomy, and output rose sharply.

Deng Xiaoping held up the Sichuan experience as a model and promoted Zhao to the Politburo and, in 1980, to premier. He extended market reforms across the country, set up special economic zones on the coast, argued for separating the party from the state, and in 1984 signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. In 1987 he replaced the ousted Hu Yaobang as general secretary.

During the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests he sympathised with the students and on 19 May went to the square to speak to them; martial law was declared the next day. In June he was stripped of all his posts, and he spent the remaining fifteen years of his life under house arrest in Beijing without being charged. He died in January 2005. Memoirs he had recorded in secret were published abroad in 2009 as Prisoner of the State.