On May 16, 1989, the five proposals that Zhao Ziyang placed before his Politburo Standing Committee colleagues set off a sequence of events that ended in tanks on the streets of Beijing. Zhao, then the Communist Party’s general secretary and China’s most senior reform-minded leader, presented those proposals at a session attended by Deng Xiaoping himself. According to historical research by Wu Renhua, a scholar who has documented the June Fourth crackdown in forensic detail, the proposals were the direct trigger for Zhao’s removal from power two days later. They also explain, in concrete terms, why the Party’s hardliners chose military force over negotiation when they confronted the Tiananmen protests.
A reformist’s plea against bloodshed; a hardliner’s written authorization
As martial law troops prepared to move on Tiananmen Square, Hu Qili, one of the few reform sympathizers among the Party’s five-member Politburo Standing Committee, made a final written appeal. In his chronicle A Complete Record of the June Fourth Incident, Wu Renhua records that Hu wrote to his Standing Committee colleagues expressing support for remarks made by Yang Shangkun, then China’s head of state and the standing vice-chairman of the Party’s top military command body. Yang had said publicly that China’s military was “definitely not aimed at dealing with students.” Hu urged that no bloodshed occur.
The letter circulated to Yao Yilin, a conservative hardliner on the Standing Committee and the primary political instrument of Party elder Chen Yun within the top leadership. Yao’s written response was brief and ruthless: “We should try as much as possible to avoid bloodshed, but we cannot demand there be absolutely none. If we do not use force, we will be tying our own hands and feet.”
Yao had spent the 1980s working to block Zhao’s political and economic reform agenda, and had formed a firm anti-Zhao alliance with then-prime minister Li Peng in multiple expanded Politburo sessions that spring, including informal decision-making gatherings held at Deng Xiaoping’s private residence. According to internal Party accounts that have circulated in overseas Chinese political circles, Yao worked in those sessions to portray the student movement as “turmoil” threatening to destroy Communist rule, and lobbied privately with other Party elders, including Wang Zhen and Li Xiannian, to isolate the moderate positions held by Hu Qili and Zhao. His written annotation on Hu’s letter was, in effect, a loyalty pledge to Deng and political authorization for the crackdown.
After the massacre, Hu was stripped of his Standing Committee seat alongside Zhao for refusing to endorse the use of force. He later returned to minor ceremonial roles, his political career finished. Yao not only kept his position but used the aftermath to consolidate economic privileges for his family network, a trajectory that would later attract scrutiny in connection with the collapse of HNA Group, the aviation conglomerate with alleged ties to Yao family interests.
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Zhao’s corruption disclosures cost him his post
On May 16, 1989, at a Politburo Standing Committee session with Deng Xiaoping present, Zhao put forward five proposals. Wu Renhua’s documentation provides the chronological context: on May 13, Zhao had already tried and failed to win Standing Committee approval for retracting the April 26 People’s Daily editorial, which had branded the student movement as “turmoil.” He lost four votes to one. On May 15, he attempted to go to Tiananmen Square to announce his personal position to the public and was blocked by the Party’s General Office, which cited a violation of Party discipline. Then, on May 16, with Deng in the room, he made his most radical move.
The five proposals were:
- Retract the April 26 People’s Daily editorial branding the student movement a threat to Party rule.
- Zhao would personally assume responsibility for that editorial’s publication.
- The National People’s Congress would establish a body to investigate the corrupt business activities of senior officials’ children, including Zhao’s own two sons.
- The personal backgrounds and conduct of all officials at or above the vice-ministerial level would be made public.
- Senior officials’ income, benefits, and special privileges would be disclosed and abolished.
All five proposals were defeated, four votes to one.
The first proposal directly repudiated Deng Xiaoping’s own authority, since the April 26 editorial had been issued with his personal backing. The second offered Zhao’s own political career as a sacrifice to restore peace. But proposals three, four, and five produced what contemporaneous accounts describe as visible fury among the Standing Committee’s hardliners. The social pressure of the Tiananmen protests was already targeting the corrupt business dealings of the children of major Party figures: Deng Xiaoping’s eldest son, Deng Pufang, and his company Kanghua; Chen Yun’s children; Wang Zhen’s son. Zhao was now proposing that the legislature itself investigate those dealings, and he was willing to offer up his own sons to demonstrate he meant it.
The following day, May 17, the Politburo voted, by a narrow margin, to remove Zhao from power, with his duties to be assumed by Li Peng. The ripple effects inside the system were immediate: deputies in the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the legislature’s permanent governing body, nearly unanimously moved to reject the Politburo’s decisions, and Li Peng threatened them with Party discipline. Ten government bodies, including the State Commission for Restructuring the Economy, announced plans for sit-ins and hunger strikes in solidarity. The hardliners’ response to this institutional revolt was to accelerate the timeline to martial law. The Party’s own constitution had become an obstacle; they stripped away its pretense and moved to crush dissent by force.
Deng had the legislature’s chairman detained in Shanghai
The reformists had one remaining legal avenue. Under the Party’s own constitution, the National People’s Congress held formal authority as China’s supreme state power organ. It could, in theory, revoke the martial law order issued by the State Council under Li Peng, and it could remove the prime minister. For that process to begin, Wan Li, then the chairman of the National People’s Congress’s permanent Standing Committee and the one person with formal authority to convene an emergency session, had to return to Beijing.
Wan Li was abroad at the time, on a visit to Canada and the United States. During that trip, he had made public remarks expressing sympathy for the students and praising their patriotic spirit. Meanwhile, Hu Jiwei, a Standing Committee deputy, had gathered 57 signatures from National People’s Congress Standing Committee members demanding an immediate emergency session to address the Beijing crisis.
According to accounts that have circulated in overseas Chinese political networks and among former Party insiders, Deng issued a private order: Wan Li was to cut his trip short, but his plane was under no circumstances to land in Beijing. In the early hours of May 25, Wan Li’s aircraft was diverted to Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai.
Jiang Zemin, then the Shanghai Party secretary, had received instructions from the center: keep Wan Li in Shanghai until he publicly endorsed the martial law decision. Jiang met Wan Li at the airport and delivered a handwritten letter from Deng. Wan Li was then installed at the Xijiao State Guesthouse in Shanghai, officially described as “recuperating,” in what amounted to house arrest. All contact between Wan Li and his political allies in Beijing, including Zhao’s associates and National People’s Congress deputies, was severed. On May 27, after several days of this treatment, Wan Li issued a written statement declaring his support for the martial law decision.
Wan Li’s capitulation sealed the last constitutional path to a peaceful resolution. It also launched Jiang Zemin’s national career. His handling of the Shanghai intercept, and his broader management of the city during the crisis without major unrest, earned him the trust of Deng and the other Party elders. Within weeks, he was summoned to Beijing to assume the post of CCP general secretary.
Hardliners ousted Zhao to protect elite family wealth
Cheng Xiaonong, a US-based economist and former policy adviser to Zhao Ziyang, has argued directly that proposals three, four, and five constituted an existential threat to the economic interests of the major Party elder families. The “dual-track” pricing system of the late 1980s, under which officials could exploit the gap between state-controlled prices and market prices, had made those families extraordinarily wealthy. That system was the engine of the corruption the student protesters called “official profiteering.”
Ming Juzheng, a Taiwan-based scholar of Chinese political affairs, has added an institutional dimension: Zhao’s third proposal, to vest investigative authority in the National People’s Congress, represented an attempt to shift the locus of crisis resolution from the Party’s own internal bodies to China’s formal state institutions. In a system organized around the principle that the Party controls everything, that shift was intolerable. The immediate reaction of the National People’s Congress deputies, who moved to block the Politburo’s decisions, confirmed the hardliners’ alarm. For Deng and Yao, Zhao’s proposal meant surrendering the Party’s monopoly on political authority. A system built on concealed power and coercive force cannot survive the disclosure of officials’ backgrounds, income, and privileges; Zhao’s proposals threatened precisely that opacity.
The June 4 massacre buried Zhao’s five proposals along with the students who had demanded the same accountability he sought. The Party elite families implicated in his third, fourth, and fifth proposals went on to accumulate wealth on a scale the protesters never imagined: Deng Pufang’s Kanghua Corporation was quietly wound down, but the system that produced it was left intact, and the offshore fortunes documented decades later in the Panama Papers traced directly back to the families who voted Zhao out on May 17, 1989.