Zhao Ziyang, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), died last weekend at the age of 85. Zhao headed the CCP in the spring of 1989, when demonstrators filled Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He was dismissed days before tanks rolled in to crush the protests, and spent the remaining years of his life under house arrest. Unrepentant to the end, Zhao stood for a radically different China than that which exists today. Even his memory poses a formidable challenge to China's leadership and serves as a rallying point for reformers.
Zhao was an unlikely reformer, having joined the CCP in 1938 -- more than a decade before it took power in China. He steadfastly kept faith in the party even after his father, a landowner, was killed by party officials in the late 1940s. He served in the military during the war against the Japanese and during the Chinese revolution, primarily in an administrative capacity.
It is tempting to call Zhao a pragmatist. He rose to the upper ranks of the party in southern China's Guangdong province by focusing on land-use reform. Chairman Mao Zedong's economic theories notwithstanding, Zhao disbanded the local communes and introduced a production system that essentially allowed farmers to work their own private plots. The results were excellent, a stark contrast to the dismal output elsewhere in the country.