China’s President Praises Hu Yaobang, a Fallen Party Reformer
By CHRIS BUCKLEY and ADAM WU

China’s staunchly traditionalist Communist leader, Xi Jinping, paid tribute on Friday to a predecessor, Hu Yaobang, who was in many ways his opposite in temperament and politics.

Mr. Hu was a passionate liberalizer in the 1980s, and he dedicated his restless energies to overturning the purges and ideological shibboleths of the Maoist era, even speculating about abandoning chopsticks for knives and forks. He was ousted contentiously in early 1987, and his abrupt death two years later inspired public mourning that expanded into the Tiananmen Square protests.

But at a meeting on the 100 anniversary of Mr. Hu’s birth, Mr. Xi kept away from delicate memories while nonetheless praising this Long March veteran who was instrumental in rescuing Mr. Xi’s own father, a fellow Communist veteran, from the political wilderness where Mao had cast him.

“Comrade Hu Yaobang devoted his entire life to the party and the people,” Mr. Xi said at the meeting in the Great Hall of the People, the grandiose home of the national legislature in central Beijing, China Central Television reported. “His pioneering achievements in socialism with Chinese characteristics are immortal.”

All seven members of the party’s Politburo Standing Committee, China’s highest echelon of power, were present.

The state news media also reported the publication on Thursday of a collection of Mr. Hu’s speeches and works, ranging from 1952 to 1986. The People’s Publishing House, which released the book, said Mr. Hu’s works highlight his “noble character” and “just and clean work style,” according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

The centenary of Mr. Hu’s birth to a poor farming family in southern China has put on display liberal political currents that have survived despite Mr. Xi’s aggressive efforts to instill political conformity and to silence dissent.

For retired party cadres and older intellectuals with liberal views, Mr. Hu remains a symbol of frustrated hopes for political relaxation initiated from within the party, as Mr. Hu championed in the 1980s, and they have used the centenary to restate that hope.

“During the 1980s, all of society was vibrant and alive, a scene of thriving energy,” Hao Huaiming, a former aide to Mr. Hu, wrote recently in Yanhuang Chunqiu, which roughly translates as China Annals, a beleaguered monthly magazine in Beijing that airs the views of party moderates.

“The economy was developing, intellectual life was lively, the ideological sphere was relaxed, there was clear progress in freedom of expression and freedom of the press,” Mr. Hao wrote. “There are valid reasons why people look back nostalgically on that time.”

But Mr. Xi and other leaders appeared to have choreographed the commemoration of Mr. Hu to avoid praising his liberalizing record or conceding to hopes from Mr. Hu’s family for acknowledgment that his ousting from power in January 1987 was unjust, said Robert L. Suettinger, a senior adviser at the Stimson Center in Washington, who is writing a biography of Mr. Hu.

“My impression thus far is that the commemoration is being very carefully managed by the party to ensure that it doesn’t encourage any challenge to the regime,” Mr. Suettinger said in comments emailed before Mr. Xi spoke.

Officially admitting that Mr. Hu was unfairly driven from office, Mr. Suettinger said, would “open up a host of difficult questions about the process by which he was ousted (very irregular), and about the correctness of the student demonstrators who demanded the case be reversed after Hu died in April 1989.”

For more than a decade after 1989, Mr. Hu’s legacy stayed in the shadows, considered too controversial to honor publicly. But even party conservatives held a reservoir of affection for him, and since 2005 tributes, biographies and memoirs have multiplied, and his family supports a website in his memory.

Although Mr. Xi has shown none of Mr. Hu’s impatience with party orthodoxy, he had good reason to show affection for this widely admired leader. As head of the Communist Party’s organization department from late 1977 and then party general secretary from 1980, Mr. Hu pushed to politically rehabilitate officials and intellectuals who had been purged under Mao.

Among them was Mr. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun.

The elder Mr. Xi was a senior official ousted by Mao in 1962. He endured beatings and brutal interrogations during the Cultural Revolution, and after Mao died in 1976, he waited, like thousands of other purged officials, to be brought back from the political wilderness. Deng Xiaoping and other leaders helped those rehabilitations, but Mr. Hu was especially committed, according to historians.

In December 1977, Xi Zhongxun’s wife, Qi Xin, secured a meeting with Mr. Hu. His role as head of party organization affairs gave him a powerful role in political rehabilitations. Mr. Hu listened to her describe the elder Mr. Xi’s sufferings, according to the official biography of Xi Zhongxun.

Mr. Hu “declared that all unjust and erroneous verdicts must be handled truthfully so that the verdicts are thoroughly reversed,” the biography said. “The case of Comrade Xi Zhongxun, of course, is no exception,” it quoted Mr. Hu as saying.

Later, Xi Zhongxun, returned to senior office, repaid Mr. Hu’s support. In late 1986, after Deng Xiaoping accused Mr. Hu of failing to act forcefully against ideological laxity and student protests, Mr. Hu came under bitter attack by Deng’s loyalists and ideological conservatives. But the elder Mr. Xi stood by Mr. Hu at a meeting to criticize him.

“This is abnormal,” he said at that meeting, according to one account republished on the website dedicated to Mr. Hu. “You’ve set in motion something that will only lay the seeds of disaster for the stability and unity of the party and the country.”

Mr. Hu endured persecution and near-death experiences in his tortuous political career, which started as a teenage “little Red devil,” joining the Communist revolutionary forces in the 1930s. He was almost executed as a suspected traitor in one of the purges that paralyzed the encircled Communist forces.

After Mao’s death in 1976 and a coup that swept aside radical supporters of the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Hu was among the cohort of party veterans who reclaimed power and began shedding the ideological and economic fetters in favor of economic and political liberalization.

Mr. Hu’s off-the-cuff pronouncements on policy exasperated even fellow reformers in the party elite. In 1984, Mr. Hu suggested that, for good hygiene, Chinese people should set aside chopsticks and shared dishes in favor of Western manners.

”We should prepare more knives and forks, buy more plates and sit around the table to eat Chinese food in the Western style, that is, each from his own plate,” he said. The idea never took off.

陸塑造改革形象 高調紀念胡耀邦

今天是中共前總書記胡耀邦一百歲冥誕，中共將舉行高規格紀念活動，預計高層領導人將出席。中共還出版「胡耀邦文選」，藉紀念胡，凸顯習近平堅持改革、一脈相承的政治形象，以爭取民意和向心力。

央視、新華社等國有媒體昨報導，為紀念胡耀邦誕辰一百周年，中共中央文獻編輯委員會編輯的「胡耀邦文選」已由人民出版社出版，即日起在大陸發行。

早在今年五月，中共就放出消息，擬「鄭重安排」紀念活動，中共中央黨校也稱，將把胡耀邦任職黨校時的講話和批語成書出版。

香港學者丁學良在英國金融時報中文網撰文稱，胡耀邦自文革結束到被迫辭職的十多年裡，思考的、嘗試做的均基於一個路子，就是如何讓中國的黨政系統從「以權為本」轉型至「以民為本」。

丁學良說，最能與胡耀邦風雨同舟的人，是習仲勳、萬里、胡啟立。胡耀邦的主要助手之一後來感歎：「好在有個習仲勳 （習近平之父）同志，要不然，我們的日子就過不下去了。就靠他，我們才撐過了難關。」

香港時政評論員李平則在香港蘋果日報撰文稱，習近平主政後，官方媒體多番宣傳習近平之父習仲勳與胡耀邦「在歷史轉折關頭」患難相助的友誼，包括胡耀邦為習仲勳平反、攜手推動改革開放，不也是要強調紅色血脈的傳承？

報導指，胡耀邦這張牌好用，因作風開明、廉潔的領導人形象深入民心，這種形象正是習近平急需樹立的。早在2013年，即習近平主政後第一個胡耀邦逝世周年紀念日，胡耀邦長子胡德平出書「改革放言錄」，暢談對中國政治、法治、經濟等的思考，既是向習近平進言，也是胡、習兩家友誼的延續，連帶習近平就任總書記前曾會晤胡德平，也被挖掘出來，當作習近平將走改革路線的證據。

而習近平主政後掀起反貪風暴，但被質疑是權鬥手段，此時再打胡耀邦牌順理成章。前年習近平在紀念毛澤東冥誕一百廿周年大會上講話，重點是表述效仿毛氏治黨治國的理念。去年，習近平在紀念鄧小平冥誕一百一十周年時，擺出以鄧小平為師的姿態，號召學習鄧小平的品格、勇氣和胸襟。

李平表示，不難想像，這次紀念胡耀邦冥誕一百周年，習近平將做廉潔文章，既無關為胡平反反自由化不力的惡名，更無關平反六四。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/world/asia/china-hu-yaobang-birthday-xi-jinping.html

紐約時報中文網報導：
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20151122/c22huyaobang/zh-hant/

2015-11-20．聯合報．A12．兩岸．記者賴錦宏