(p. A19) Bao Tong, who was the highest-ranking Chinese official imprisoned over the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square that ended in mass carnage in 1989, and who later became an acerbic outsider-critic of the Communist Party, died on Nov. 9 [2022] in Beijing. He was 90.
The cause was acute leukemia, said his son, Bao Pu.
For a decade, Mr. Bao was a top aide to Zhao Ziyang, the liberalizing party leader who was ousted shortly before the Tiananmen crackdown. After his release from prison, Mr. Bao — who spent the rest of his life under surveillance — used essays, interviews and Twitter to denounce China’s autocratic turn.
In the mid-1980s, he was central to devising Mr. Zhao’s political reform proposals to rein in the party’s power and expand public oversight of officials. In his later years, he saw little near-term hope that the party would reopen the way for democratic changes, yet he stayed optimistic that China would eventually take that path. And that shift, Mr. Bao said, would demand confronting the traumas of June 1989, when troops shot protesters in Beijing and other Chinese cities, with estimates of the death toll ranging from the hundreds to the thousands.
“The ‘June 4’ student democracy movement of 1989 was the great event, the one most worthy of the Chinese people’s pride, that I experienced in my life,” Mr. Bao wrote this year in an article for Radio Free Asia. But the bloodshed, he added, had “brazenly opened up a new era where state power has no constraints and civic rights have lost their safeguards.”
. . .
In 1987, Deng abruptly demoted Hu Yaobang, the party’s liberal-minded general secretary. After Mr. Zhao replaced Mr. Hu as party leader, he and Mr. Bao scored a major victory when Deng approved — and a party congress endorsed — their proposals for measured political change. Mr. Bao’s role in helping to draft the main report for that congress, a high-water mark for liberalizing hopes in China, was one of his proudest moments, his son said.
. . .
“In the past I believed in Communism; now I don’t think it’s worth believing in,” he told a foreign reporter in 2012 as security officers looked on. “Now I just think that Marx had some nice ideas. He said the poor are worth helping.”
. . .
Mr. Bao was never allowed to meet with Mr. Zhao after 1989. But in 2019, the authorities let him visit the grave of Mr. Zhao and Mr. Zhao’s wife.
“They’re finally free and at peace,” Mr. Bao wrote at the time. “I wish that all Chinese people can have freedom and peace in this world.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 21, 2022, and has the title “Bao Tong, 90, Dies; Top Chinese Official Imprisoned After Tiananmen.”)