Zhao Ziyang, who served as China’s prime minister and Communist Party general secretary during the 1980s, was among the most consequential reformers in the Party’s history. He was stripped of power, placed under house arrest for sixteen years, and erased from official memory after he refused to endorse the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. A landmark biography by journalist Lu Yuegang, drawn from thirteen years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, recovers a voice that history nearly lost: Zhao’s mother, an illiterate peasant woman who saw the Party for what it was long before her son did, and said so plainly.
‘The Communist Party is no good. It takes what belongs to other people.’
Zhao Ziyang joined the Communist Youth League at thirteen and the Party itself at nineteen. By 1939, serving as the Party’s committee secretary in Hua County, Henan Province, he had already engineered the defection of a Nationalist county magistrate, his former schoolmate Chen Shuhui, to the Communist side. His revolutionary credentials were impeccable. His mother’s verdict on the organization he served was not.
According to Lu Yuegang’s biography, she told her son: “The Communist Party is no good. It takes what belongs to other people. And none of what it takes was ever theirs to begin with.”
The three-volume biography is the product of thirteen years of research, hundreds of interviews with historical participants, and access to local archives. Lu accepted no funding from Zhao’s family and submitted to no editorial review. The result is the most exhaustive account yet of a man the Party has tried to forget.
Zhao’s mother could not read. She compensated with something rarer: she listened to traditional opera and historical storytelling, absorbed the moral frameworks embedded in classical Chinese narrative, and applied them without sentimentality to what she saw happening around her. When she looked at the Communist Party, she saw thieves.
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A father ruined by the movement his son ran
Zhao Ziyang’s father, Zhao Tingbin, was a respected figure in Sangcun Township, Hua County. He practiced Chinese medicine alongside farming, lent money without demanding repayment from those who could not afford it, and supported his son’s decision to join the anti-Japanese resistance. By the mid-1940s, he was a man of property and standing in his community.
The land reform campaigns of the late 1940s destroyed him.
As the Communist Party consolidated control over the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border region, it unleashed waves of “struggle sessions” against landlords and wealthy farmers, public denunciation rituals designed to humiliate, isolate, and dispossess the targeted class. Zhao Tingbin, classified as a landlord, was subjected to this treatment. Work teams confiscated the silver ingots and coins hidden beneath his bed. The family’s quilts and winter clothing were hauled away. In the cold that followed, his health gave out. He died in July 1947 at fifty-five, his lungs and heart failing under the combined pressure of material ruin, humiliation, and fear.
His son Zhao Ziyang was serving as a senior Party official in a neighboring county at the time, close enough to reach home in a matter of hours. He did not go. To mourn a father denounced as a class enemy would have been a political act the Party would not forgive.
Earlier accounts, circulated in Hong Kong during the 1980s, alleged that Zhao Tingbin had been beaten to death in a struggle session or executed by local Party authorities. Lu Yuegang’s biography does not support those claims. The record it establishes is damning enough: a man hounded to his deathbed by a movement his own son was administering, while that son remained at his post and said nothing.
He did not return for his mother’s death either. When she died in 1976, Zhao was serving as the Party’s top official in Sichuan Province, one of China’s most populous regions and one of its most powerful provincial posts. He did not go home. By then, he and his mother had not seen each other in decades. She had warned him. He had chosen the Party.
A village woman’s verdict on the Party that destroyed her family
When the Cultural Revolution convulsed China from 1966 onward, Mao Zedong, the founding chairman of the Communist Party and architect of the campaigns that had destroyed her family, launched a new wave of internal purges against his own senior officials. Zhao’s mother reached for an image from traditional Chinese opera to describe what she was witnessing: the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, who, legend has it, invited the generals who had helped him seize the throne to a banquet and then burned the hall down around them. The Party, she was saying, was devouring the people who had built it.
When a grandson visited her in the countryside and sang a popular propaganda song praising Mao Zedong as “the great savior of the people,” she stopped him. According to Lu’s account, she said: “Mao Zedong is a great villain.” A country seized through killing and robbery, she told the boy, cannot hold together.
To her son, who by then held senior provincial Party positions, she delivered the judgment she had long since reached: “You are pulling a harness for the Communist Party. It will not end well for you.”
In rural Chinese, “pulling a harness” carries the image of a draft animal laboring for an owner who will discard it when the work is done. It was an accurate description of her son’s situation, and she knew it.
Zhao Ziyang saved the Party, and the Party discarded him
After Mao’s death in 1976 and the resulting economic collapse, Zhao Ziyang became the most important reformer in the Party’s history. As Sichuan’s Party secretary, he dismantled collective farming and restored household production rights, generating results visible enough that the slogan “Want grain? Find Ziyang” spread across the country. Elevated to prime minister in 1980 and then to general secretary in 1987, he built the institutional foundations of China’s market economy, pulled hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty, and preserved the Party’s hold on power at a moment when that hold was genuinely threatened.
The Party repaid him exactly as his mother had predicted.
When the student-led protests of spring 1989 filled Tiananmen Square, Zhao went to the square in person on May 19 and told the gathered students, visibly moved: “We came too late.” He opposed the declaration of martial law. He refused to endorse the military crackdown that Deng Xiaoping, the senior Party figure who held ultimate authority over the regime despite holding no formal top office, had already decided to carry out. Within days, Zhao was stripped of all his positions. He spent the remaining sixteen years of his life under house arrest in Beijing, forbidden from publishing, speaking publicly, or leaving his compound without permission.
The official charge was that he had tried to “split the Party.” He had refused to authorize a massacre.
Under house arrest, Zhao Ziyang rejected the system he had served
Zhao Ziyang did not remain still during his confinement. He read. He received visitors. He recorded his memoirs on hidden cassette tapes, smuggled out after his death and published internationally in 2009 under the title Prisoner of the State. In those recordings, he rejected the political framework that had defined his entire career. He endorsed multiparty democracy. He called for the rehabilitation of the 1989 protests. He concluded that no meaningful reform was possible within a Leninist one-party system.
He also gave his blessing to a granddaughter, the daughter of his second son Zhao Ergun, who had become a Christian and wanted to serve as a missionary. Her father objected. Zhao lost patience with him. “What is wrong with believing in religion?” he reportedly said. “What is wrong with being a missionary? Go and buy her a Bible, a Chinese-English edition. Tell her I fully support her. I fully support her becoming a missionary.”
His mother had reached the same destination decades earlier, without the benefit of house arrest, hidden recordings, or a democratic theory. She arrived there through the evidence of her own life: a husband ruined by a movement her son administered, a family stripped of everything it owned, a government that had taken what did not belong to it and called the theft liberation. She had warned him. He had not listened.
Zhao Ziyang died in January 2005, still under house arrest, still forbidden from speaking publicly, his rehabilitation refused to this day.
This article draws on Zhao Ziyang: The Life of a Failed Reformer by journalist Lu Yuegang, a three-volume biography based on thirteen years of research, hundreds of firsthand interviews, and local historical records. Some details of Zhao Tingbin’s death, including accounts circulated in earlier Hong Kong publications, remain subject to historical dispute; this article reflects Lu’s findings as the most thoroughly documented source on the period. Direct quotations attributed to Zhao’s mother are drawn from Lu’s interviews and cannot be independently verified against a primary source.