The Man Who Almost Changed China
Hu Yaobang and the Unfinished Business of Reform and Opening
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.
Hu died suddenly of a heart attack in April 1989, and his passing would spur the fateful occupation of Tiananmen Square in Beijing by pro-democracy protesters and similar demonstrations across the country. After seven weeks, Deng had the protests quashed ruthlessly, in the process foreclosing the political democratization that Hu had hoped for. Hu’s key insight was that economic growth was not enough to power the Chinese state; without the legitimacy afforded by political reform and democratization, China would experience turbulence in its modernization and development. Chinese leaders may believe they have found a way to break that connection, but there is good reason to think that Hu will be proved right—and that ultimately, as they deal with a faltering economy and mounting discontent, they will have no choice but to confront Hu’s warning.
THE IDEALIST
Suettinger’s biography is a pathbreaking account of Hu, prodigiously and thoughtfully exploring what kind of person he was and how he emerged as a leader with reformist aspirations in a world of apparatchiks. It is the first full-dress biography of Hu in English. But Suettinger, a former national intelligence officer in the Clinton administration and a longtime scholar of China, isn’t the first American academic to have attempted such a work. The social scientist Ezra Vogel died, in 2020, before he had finished his own biography of Hu, a volume he intended as a sequel of sorts to Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, his much-acclaimed 2011 biography of Deng. The two leaders are something of a pair; their fortunes rose and fell together during the tumultuous decades of Mao’s rule before they both came to power after Mao’s death. Hu’s legacy would be defined in large part by his eventual rift with Deng, one that embodied their different visions of reform.
To draw a full picture of Hu’s life is no easy task. The most apparent and seemingly insurmountable barrier to any biographer is lack of access to archival and other primary sources, which in Hu’s case remain largely inaccessible to both Chinese and Western researchers. Suettinger spent nearly a decade finding sources and interviewing contemporaries, and in so doing managed to dig deeply into Hu’s life in ways no Western scholar has done before. The result is a remarkably nuanced work that not only depicts Hu as a courageous and thoughtful reformist leader but also illuminates an important turning point in China’s recent history.
Hu was an idealist, an honest, sincere, and candid man, as described by many who knew him and worked with him. He was born in 1915 into a poor but educated peasant family in Hunan Province. With the support of his parents, he received a good early education, albeit in tough circumstances; for several years, he had to walk 12 miles of rugged mountainous trails every day to school. At the age of 14, he joined the Communist Youth League, the youth wing of the CCP, and joined the fight. The fact that he was educated, combined with his dedication to the revolution and enthusiasm for work, helped him rise quickly through the ranks of the Red Army (which would later become the People’s Liberation Army) and the CCP. He survived the harrowing and legendary Long March—the Red Army’s retreat between 1934 and 1935 to the interior of the country—that would only further bolster his Communist credentials. By the time the CCP took over China in 1949, Hu had become the youngest army corps political commissar in the military.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. In 1932, as part of a campaign to suppress supposed “reactionaries” in their midst, Mao’s agents accused him of being an enemy agent without any evidence; he escaped the death penalty only through the last-minute intervention of two Youth League inspectors who knew him to be a loyal comrade. In the early 1940s, during a campaign launched by Mao to consolidate his dominance over the party, Hu and other CCP members had to go through the mental torture of endless self-criticism. Such ordeals, as Suettinger points out, sowed in Hu the seed of doubt about Maoism and its propensity for brutally trying to control how people think and behave.
Hu’s key insight was that economic growth was not enough to power China.
Hu nevertheless remained deeply loyal to the CCP after the Communists drove the Nationalists to Taiwan and founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He soon had the opportunity to work with Deng. From 1950 to 1952, Hu was the local CCP secretary in northern Sichuan Province, reporting directly to Deng, who was then the CCP’s head in Sichuan. Hu flushed out the remnants of the Nationalist forces in the area, restored order in the wake of the civil war, carried out land reform, and promoted agricultural and industrial production. His outstanding track record and devotion to work won him Deng’s admiration. Their accomplishments also earned them the attention of the grandees in Beijing.
By 1953, together with Deng, Hu was elevated to the national stage and transferred to Beijing to take up the position of secretary and then first secretary of the Communist Youth League. But in that post, Hu was involved in a series of disastrous Maoist endeavors, including the Anti-Rightist Movement, a political campaign that sought to purge alleged dissidents among the ranks of intellectuals; the Great Leap Forward, the economic and social drive beginning in 1958 that resulted in a devastating famine; and the Socialist Education Movement, a campaign of deepening ideological indoctrination in the early to mid-1960s.
Hu tried very hard to engage himself in these movements by following and implementing all orders from Beijing as faithfully as he could. But he was alarmed by the way many of his comrades and subordinates were groundlessly labeled “rightists” and by the suffering of everyday people during the Great Leap Forward. Those experiences cultivated in him a deeper suspicion of Mao’s utopian program of “continuous revolution.” At a CCP Central Committee plenum in Lushan in 1959, he was reluctant to follow the general push to criticize Peng Dehuai, the former defense minister whom Mao had identified as the head of an “anti-party clique” for making critical comments about the Great Leap Forward. Not surprisingly, when the Cultural Revolution began, in 1966, Mao singled out Hu and other leaders of the Communist Youth League for severe attack. Hu himself was repeatedly brought to denunciation rallies, where Red Guards would inveigh against him and seek to humiliate him in public. Deng also suffered during the Cultural Revolution, twice purged by Mao and his allies.
In 1969, Mao’s agents at the Youth League Center banished Hu to a farm in Henan Province for “reeducation.” He was forced to perform heavy manual labor almost every day and he suffered greatly in this period. After the death in 1971 of Lin Biao, one of Mao’s key lieutenants, Hu was allowed to return to Beijing but was not fully rehabilitated into the ranks of the party elite. In this period, he read voraciously—including classic Marxist works, Chinese history, books of philosophy and ethics, and even the translated plays of Shakespeare. He became increasingly critical of Maoism in both its theory and practice. When Mao died, in September 1976, and the old order seemed in jeopardy, Hu was ready to advance the radical cause of reform in China.
OPENING THE DOOR
Mao’s death led to a period of uncertainty in which various factions vied for power. Hu aligned himself with Deng, who was emerging from his second period of exile during the Cultural Revolution. Whereas Deng’s principal adversaries, including Mao’s chosen successor and the party chairman Hua Guofeng, claimed to adhere to “the two whatevers”—the slogan that “we will absolutely uphold whatever decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave”—Hu sought a different path. In May 1978, the Guangming Daily, a party ideological organ, published an essay, written by a group of teachers at the Central Party School (Hu was then its executive vice president and reviewed the essay before publication), titled “Practice Is the Sole Criteria to Judge Truth.” They argued that the truth must be tested and proved by practice—an implicit rebuke of the implacability of Maoist dogma and its claims to truth. The essay sent shock waves through the system; it effectively eroded the legitimacy of Hua (as his position as China’s top leader entirely relied on Mao’s designation) and rejected the restrictions that Mao and his ideology had imposed on China. This ideological salvo greatly enhanced Deng’s position in the intraparty struggle with Hua’s faction and helped lead to Deng’s eventually becoming China’s paramount leader in 1978.
As Deng rose, so did Hu, who became the head of the CCP’s Central Organizational Department in December 1977. In this role, Hu sought to correct the injustices of the Cultural Revolution and other Maoist political campaigns. Under Hu’s direction, tens of thousands of CCP cadres, including hundreds of high-ranking ones, were rehabilitated and assigned to official positions. Hu also helped end the ostracization of tens of millions of ordinary citizens who had suffered during Mao’s destructive initiatives and let them live normal lives. These efforts to redress the excesses of the Mao era won Hu much support from within the party and among the wider public. In 1981, Hu replaced Hua as chairman of the CCP Central Committee (the next year, the title of the position would change to general secretary), allowing him to effectively function as Deng’s right-hand man in the launch and promotion of reforms.
Between 1978 and 1982, Deng and Hu advanced a series of policies intended to open China’s economy. These included abandoning the rigid centrally planned economic system borrowed from the Soviet Union, decollectivizing agriculture, embracing some market mechanisms, allowing foreign investment into the country, seeking greater trade with Western countries, and sending Chinese students to study abroad. As a result of these changes, the overall economy ballooned—with annual growth rates of around ten percent throughout the decade—as did productivity. Before the reforms, China’s share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity hovered around two percent; today, it’s around 20 percent.
Curiously, Suettinger focuses on Hu’s domestic contributions in this period, altogether missing how he helped transform China’s orientation to the outside world. During the Mao years, China styled itself as a revolutionary country, bent on challenging the existing international system and its institutions dominated by the United States and other Western capitalist countries. Hu was among the first Chinese leaders to see the need for a less instinctively confrontational, more cooperative, and forward-looking foreign policy. In the early 1980s, he played a central role in a CCP grand strategy review that led to the party’s jettisoning the Maoist notion that another world war was inevitable and reaching the consensus that it was in China’s long-term and fundamental interest to strive for a peaceful external environment. Good relations with the outside world would allow the country to concentrate on economic development and the pursuit of socialist modernity. Hu shaped the trajectory of the change, understanding that opening to the world could speed reforms at home. He was a firm supporter of the normalization of ties with the United States in 1979, championing a friendly relationship between the two countries; he endorsed and even got personally involved in China’s improving cooperative relations with its erstwhile foe Japan (in 1983, for instance, he invited 3,000 Japanese students to visit China); he strove to improve Beijing’s relations with London by visiting the United Kingdom and receiving Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit to Beijing in 1986, which helped make more credible Deng’s promise that China would not alter the special status of Hong Kong until 2047.
EARLY RETIREMENT
With Deng as paramount leader and Hu as general secretary, it seemed that China was on the path to ever-widening reform through much of the 1980s. But it was not to be. By around 1984, Deng, Hu, and several other CCP elders began to have critical disagreements on the way forward. The main point of contention was whether to create more checks and balances in the CCP system, which is what Hu wanted. At first, it seemed that Deng also favored this approach. As he consolidated his own power, however, Deng became increasingly worried that such reforms would result in the embrace of Western-style democracy, threatening the CCP’s one-party domination of the country. Although he was willing to promote economic reforms and open up the economy, he repeatedly called on the party and the country to fight “bourgeois liberalization” and maintain the “four cardinal principles,” adhering to the “socialist road,” proletarian dictatorship, the leadership of the CCP, and Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideological beliefs.
Hu, by contrast, wanted to go further in the direction of political democratization. A fissure opened between the two men. When Deng persistently emphasized the need to resist “bourgeois liberalization,” Hu spoke openly about the need for more democracy, more freedom of speech, and more public participation in politics. Deng grew disappointed with Hu’s forthrightness and began to lose trust in his longtime ally.
Events came to a head with Hu’s public call in 1985 for the “youthification” of the aging CCP leadership. He began with himself, stating, “I’m almost 70 years old, and I’m about to retire . . . . Those veteran comrades over the age of 80 even more should step down.” Deng never rejected this suggestion, and even indicated that he might be willing to retire. But that was merely rhetoric. When Hu naively suggested that Deng would set a good example by “taking the lead in retiring,” it was a step too far for the paramount leader. In January 1987, at a “democratic life meeting” attended by top party leaders and presided over by Deng and other elders, Hu was compelled to resign as general secretary. Hu calmly accepted almost all the charges against him as he saw, in Suettinger’s telling, “the need to preserve stability and unity within the leadership.”
But this defenestration was not the end of Hu’s story. Although he was pulled from China’s political stage, he continued to haunt it. Many people in the country referred to him as “the conscience of the party”—the metaphor was not just praise but also implied that the CCP had lost its way without him. In the years following Hu’s resignation, the gap between rapid economic and social change, on the one hand, and political stagnation, on the other, continually produced tensions between the state and the citizenry, as well as within Chinese society. Discontent and anxiety about the sclerotic pace of political reform spread far and wide.
When Hu died, in April 1989, students in Beijing—and then citizens from all walks of life—quickly turned the mourning of him into a powerful public demonstration of their frustration and anger at the lack of political reform and widespread corruption. Protesters flooded Tiananmen Square in Beijing. What followed became a defining moment in China’s history. On June 4, Deng and other CCP elders ordered troops to crack down on students and other demonstrators, resulting in the bloody tragedy that shocked the world.
HU’S WARNING
More than four decades after the launch of the reform and opening-up project, China is now at another inflection point. Its economic growth during the reform era was extraordinary, and by 2010 it had become the second-largest economy in the world. That success has many causes, but one of the most important factors is that China in the era of reform and opening enjoyed a long peace; guided by the likes of Hu, it strove to craft amicable relations with the outside world and avoid confrontation, particularly with the United States.
But the other vision of political reform—Hu’s vision—is decidedly unfulfilled. The CCP remains entrenched in Beijing. The prospect of a political system with greater checks and balances seems distant. From Deng’s rule onward, the CCP leadership has taken full advantage of China’s continuous and rapid economic growth to boost its legitimacy and has taken credit for all of China’s economic successes. Legitimacy so defined, however, depends on continued strong performance; China’s rapid economic growth must last forever if the government is to enjoy the legitimacy that accompanies that economic record. The current slowing of the Chinese economy is much more than an economic issue. It represents a serious challenge to the Chinese state. In his time, Hu understood this problem, which is why he wanted China to embrace greater political reform and put mechanisms in place that would satisfy the demands and social, moral, and cultural aspirations of the Chinese people.
Those needs remain unaddressed, a deficit that has periodically inflamed tensions between the Chinese state and society, as well as between China and other countries. Hu saw this coming. Even as he sought to remake China in the world, he understood that the biggest challenges facing China come not from without but from within.