Washingtonpost.com: China Special Report
By Steven Mufson and John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 3, 1998; Page A16 BEIJING, June 2Four days after police told him his political rights had been restored, the most senior Chinese Communist Party official jailed for political reasons in two decades launched a broadside tonight against the party for failing to undertake significant political reform.
In an interview, Bao Tong, who was arrested May 28, 1989 -- just days before soldiers and tanks crushed student-led protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- challenged Communist Party officials to prove their commitment to the rule of law by letting him speak his mind after spending seven years in prison and two more under restrictions.
"My goal is to be a very good Chinese citizen, a Chinese citizen with the right to speak his mind," said Bao, 65, who was chief of staff, speech writer and senior political adviser for ousted Premier and Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang. "I am ready to take my ideas and speak out about them. Free speech is a very important contribution to building China, and I believe my freedom of speech will be protected by law and by the government."
Bao, who was made a scapegoat for the upheaval that threatened the control of the Communist Party, said, "I want to test their promises. So if I meet any problems, it shows their promises are fake." But in a note of realism about government security surveillance and the cautious pace of political change in China, Bao said, "I hope that my telephone works for a while. I hope that my family has no problems. I hope that I don't have an accident."
Though less well known internationally than recently released dissidents like student leader Wang Dan, who led protests for democracy in 1989, or veteran dissident Wei Jingsheng, Bao has much more influence in China, especially within the top ranks of the ruling Communist Party. He was a member of the party's powerful organization department in the 1950s and 1960s, jailed and sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, and then returned to the core of people around senior leader Deng Xiaoping in 1977 when China's economic reform period began. He later became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was the point man for political and economic reforms under Zhao that deemphasized ideology and were aimed at transforming China's centrally planned economy into one more responsive to market forces.
"I am still proud that I was a party member," Bao said, "but the Chinese Communist Party has done a lot of stupid things."
His comments come amid signs that influential party members are debating political reform more openly than at any time since the 1989 crackdown. Some voices outside the party also are calling for a reevaluation of the party's verdict on the suppression of the 1989 demonstrations, which ended in the deaths of hundreds of civilians.
Bao was riding on a train back to Beijing from the countryside in 1977 when he heard a radio broadcast that Deng had been rehabilitated. "I had a great deal of hope in Deng," Bao recalled tonight. "I thought in the beginning he could become a great man in Chinese history. Unfortunately, during June 4 [1989], he blackened his own face. No one did this to him. He was too powerful. He did it to himself. That, I think, is a tragedy for him."
Bao blamed the Communist Party for thinking it could undertake economic reforms without significant political reforms. He said that the party should have embraced political change at the time of the Democracy Wall movement in 1979. Instead Deng used the movement to crush his leftist rivals, then turned on the movement and jailed its most prominent advocate, Wei Jingsheng.
"This was the biggest lesson" of 1989, Bao said. "I was very active in pushing political reforms. But I should have pushed for them earlier. From as soon as we smashed the Gang of Four, just when the Democracy Wall was up, we should have started." The Gang of Four, which included the widow of Mao Zedong, and which orchestrated the Cultural Revolution, lost out to a more "moderate" faction in the power struggle following Mao's death.
Bao said the failure to act sooner on reforms has created a country with a weak legal system that risks repeating mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, when millions of people were killed or exiled to the remote countryside in a decade of intraparty strife, and of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. He linked the party's bouts of what he called "madness" with a concern that as China grows more powerful, it could prove a destabilizing force in Asia and world affairs.
China "has already gone mad twice in the last 40 years," Bao said. "You have to ask yourself a question: What will it do on the international scene? Is it a source of stability or a potential source of instability? When it doesn't have enough power, its attitude will be restrained. But once it develops and becomes strong, what kind of role is it going to play without a complete structural change?"
Bao said China should adopt a system of multiparty democracy and said that the Chinese Communist Party should model itself on American political parties and be more responsive to its citizens.
"If we can't do a multiparty system now, we can still start to work within the party to have a free discussion of opinions," Bao said. Though Bao was expelled from the party when he was officially sentenced in 1992, he noted that the ousted premier Zhao is still a party member. "If he could publicize his views about June 4, that would be an improvement."
Zhao, who was the second of Deng's proteges to be ousted and who preceded current party chief Jiang Zemin, lost his post after he appeared in Tiananmen Square in May 1989 to express sympathy with the students and to plead with them to leave the site. He lives in Beijing under a loose form of house arrest. During the party congress last October, he sent a letter to party leaders in an unsuccessful attempt to get them to reassess the events of 1989.
Though many officials and scholars blame the students for provoking the government crackdown through their recalcitrance, Bao said the prime responsibility was the government's. "As a party member and official, my mistakes were bigger than theirs," Bao said. "Even if the students made 100 mistakes, it still wasn't equal to what the government did to them in sending the military to shoot at the people. There's no way you could compare it."
Bao, who joined the party underground during the 1940s when he was a high school student, had worked with Zhao on economic and political reforms for 10 years at the time of his arrest. He was held incommunicado for nearly three years in Beijing's Qincheng Prison, before he was officially sentenced for allegedly leaking state secrets to the student movement.
Bao said that his treatment showed the absence of true rule of law in China. A State Council report written by then-Beijing party chief Chen Xitong (now in jail on corruption charges) accused Bao of leaking word to the students that martial law would be imposed and advising them about how to confront it. But at his trial in 1992, no mention was made of those charges, Bao said.
Bao's imprisonment violated one of the unspoken rules Deng made after the Cultural Revolution. That rule was: If you're a senior party official and lose a power struggle, you lose your job but you don't go to jail the way people did in the Cultural Revolution. Bao is the only exception to that in the past 20 years.
Bao had no severe complaints about his treatment in jail. But he said he was denied medical treatment after his release in 1996 when he was confined to a workers' dormitory in a western suburb of Beijing for 11 months.
About a year ago, Bao was allowed to leave the dormitory on condition that he not return to his home in central Beijing. He now lives in a six-room apartment in western Beijing, near the famous Babaoshan cemetery. He lives on his stipend from the Communist Party and his wife's pension, a combined income of about $170 a month. He says he passes his time doting on his wife and playing with his 9-year-old granddaughter.
"She's unruly, unlike some Chinese girls," he said. "Unfortunately, she has my genes."
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