BEIJING, Jan 17 (AFP) - Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader who died Monday aged 85, was the reformer who laid the groundwork for China's economic miracle before falling from grace for opposing the military crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement.
Zhao was last seen in public tearfully pleading with Beijing students on Tiananmen Square to call off their protests and go home. The date was May 19, 1989, one day before a deeply-divided leadership declared marshall law.
On the night of June 3 tanks rolled into the square to crush the protests. Days later Zhao was fired, disgraced and placed under house arrest where he remained until his death 16 years later.
Following the killing of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of unarmed students and citizens in Beijing that night, a government report put the blame squarely on the urbane and modernising Zhao.
"Comrade Zhao Ziyang committed the serious mistake of supporting the turmoil and splitting the Party. He had the shirkable responsibility for the shaping up and development of the turmoil," the report said.
Rather than entering the history books as the Chinese equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev, who engineered the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Zhao is more likely to be remembered as one of the symbols of China's biggest but ultimately unsuccessful outpourings of mass democratic sentiment.
As China's most eminent political prisoner, Zhao languished away the last years of his life under arrest at his Beijing house just north of the Forbidden City, just a few minutes' drive away from the scene of the 1989 bloodshed.
In a series of interviews conducted in the 1990s and recently published in Hong Kong by a Xinhua news agency journalist, Zhao blamed late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping for the fateful events of Tiananmen and insisted he could have brought the protests to a peaceful end.
"Bringing in hundreds of thousands of troops means that the manpower of several military regions was mobilized," Zhao said of the assault.
"It would have taken someone like Deng, and Deng only, to decide on such a course of action."
Virtually forgotten by the outside world, Zhao was allowed no contact with foreigners. In the last few years of his life, premature rumours of his death would surface as he was shuffled in and out of hospital.
Even though he was China's second most powerful man after Deng during the first decade of economic reform in the 1980s, Zhao was never mentioned by China's tightly-controlled state media.
His death on Monday at a Beijing hospital was announced in a short dispatch by the Xinhua newsa agency, breaking a long blackout.
Born in 1919 in central Henan province to a family of well-known landowners, Zhao became one of the architects of agrarian reform in the southern province of Guangdong after the communists took control of China in 1949.
Stripped of high office in Guangdong in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, Zhao was later rehabilitated in 1971 and went on to become Communist Party Secretary of the province three years later.
However his star really began to shine when he became governor of the large southwestern province of Sichuan where he was instrumental in turning around the disastrous economic polices of Mao Zedong's 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution by instituting pragmatic rural land reforms.
Convinced that China needed economic and political reform of its communist system to survive, Zhao was handpicked by patriarch Deng Xiaoping to become prime minister in 1980.
He was credited with introducing market-oriented reforms that served as the basis of China's 25 years of spectacular economic growth. Zhao was seen as an efficient technocrat, a realist who was not burdened by communist dogma.
However in the late 1980s, with inflation and over-investment threatening an economic crash, Zhao was forced to cede much of his power over the economy to the conservative Li Peng who was premier at the time. It signalled the start of Zhao's long decline.

01/17/2005 03:22 GMT - AFP