The most unpopular man in China made his last speech yesterday before he finally steps off the stage nearly 14 years after he ordered the army to suppress the students in Tiananmen Square.
Li Peng, former prime minister and currently chairman of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, stressed the need for complete obedience to the Communist party when he addressed the congress yesterday delivering his final report on its work over the past five years.
The congress should ”conscientiously accept the [party’s] leadership and implement to the letter and in spirit the party’s policies and guidelines”, he told around 3 000 delegates in Beijing. This was the only way to ensure that the people were ”the true masters of the country”, he explained.
Li, who became known around the world as the Butcher of Beijing, delivered his last message with his usual quiet delivery and a little smile. His official biography describes him as unassuming, easy to approach, and good at making friends.
In the run-up to the Beijing massacre of June 1989, Li made countless enemies by siding with the party elders in the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement.
Then prime minister of China, he worked behind the scenes to undermine Zhao Ziyang, the moderate party secretary general who argued against the use of force.
In the demonstration which preceded the crackdown, thousands of students as well as ordinary Beijing citizens made Tiananmen Square ring with the slogan ”Li Peng must step down”. On street corners where barricades had been erected to stop the army moving in, the usual phrase was more direct: ”Li Peng is a bastard”.
The leaked ”Tiananmen Papers” have revealed Li’s role in a meeting on June 2, the day before the massacre, where he formally moved that the square should be cleared.
”It is becoming increasingly clear,” he told Deng Xiaoping and other aged leaders who still ruled behind the scenes, ”that the turmoil has been generated by a coalition of foreign and domestic reactionary forces, and that their goals are to overthrow the Communist party and to subvert the socialist system.”
After the army moved in and the Beijing citizens tried to prevent it reaching the square, Li called for ”decisive measures to put down this counter-revolutionary riot”.
Many analysts believed that after a decent interval, the post-massacre leadership under Jiang Zemin, who took over from Zhao, would defuse popular anger by ditching Li. Over the years it became clear that Li had considerable survival skills, and that if he went down, this would shift the questions still being asked about the massacre in the direction of other leaders.
Li’s father died in the revolution and he was then ”adopted” like others in a similar situation by the then prime minister Zhou Enlai, giving him a political head-start.
Li was trained as an engineer in the Soviet Union and worked for many years in the power industry, becoming minister of power in the early 1980s. His other claim to fame is as chief political backer of the massive Three Gorges Dam on the river Yangtze which is now nearing completion.
In 1989 critics of the dam had succeeded in forcing a postponement, but Li took advantage of the political repression which followed to secure reluctant approval for starting construction.
Chairman of the standing committee of the NPC since 1998, Li will formally hand over to the vice-premier, Wu Bangguo, at the end of this week when the congress endorses a decision which, like all those involving changes of leadership, has already been taken by the Communist party.
Li has attracted demonstrations whenever he has travelled abroad. Relatives of some of the victims of 1989 have persistently called for an inquiry to establish responsibility, and have sought to take legal action against him abroad.
Recently some criticism of his family and of his political allies has been voiced, suggesting that he may have difficulty in continuing to wield power once in retirement. – Guardian Unlimited Â