Chen Jian
One of the most consequential events of the twentieth century was China’s historic turn, in the years after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, toward a sweeping program of reform. By relaxing the state’s grip on the economy and its control over society in this period, Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader from 1978 to 1989, helped put in motion the forces that would in mere decades pull hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty, transform China into the workshop of the world, and set it up as a great power in the twenty-first century—the only plausible rival to the United States. Although Deng led this process, he was aided at the time by the advice and work of a less heralded leader, Hu Yaobang.
Hu does not enjoy the broad name recognition of Mao, Deng, and the leading Mao-era statesman Zhou Enlai. Even in China, many people who came of age after 1989 know little about him. But as the international relations scholar Robert Suettinger shows in The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer, Hu was an essential figure in the grand process of “reform and opening.” Leading up to and during his tenure as chairman (and then general secretary) of the Chinese Communist Party from 1981 to 1987, he worked to shatter the ideological hold that Maoism had over Chinese politics, restoring the rights of millions of people purged during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, and striving to ensure that the imperatives of reform prevailed in Chinese policymaking. Hu’s commitment to political reform, however, led to his downfall, after a rift with Deng forced him out as CCP general secretary in January 1987. But he was still regarded by ordinary Chinese—as well as intellectuals and young students—as the champion of China’s political democratization.
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