The Talkative Hu Yaobang May at Last Have Tripped Over His Tongue

Two years ago, Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, suggested that the people of China start switching from chopsticks to knives and forks.

“We should prepare more knives and forks, buy more plates and sit around the table to eat Chinese food in the Western style, that is, each from his own plate,” the party leader said during a trip to Inner Mongolia. “By doing so, we can avoid contagious diseases.”

That hasty proposal was ignored and promptly forgotten, but it was an incident that revealed much about the character of Hu, who on Friday resigned from the top post of his country’s ruling party.

For more than six years, Hu, 71, served as the party’s general secretary and as senior aide to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. For much of that period, he was regarded as a leading candidate to take over power some day from Deng, 82.

Yet over that time, Hu also developed a reputation as a mercurial figure, one whose personality does not fit with the traits of caution and calculation expected of Chinese leaders. He has too often been regarded as a leader too eager to imitate Western ways and as one who talks too much.

Caricatured as Westerner

Last summer, at a time when the official Chinese press was being allowed a small degree of freedom to treat party leaders with irreverence, a Shanghai newspaper published cartoons of both Deng and Hu. The caricature of Deng portrayed him as a bridge player. The one of Hu showed him in a Western suit, leading China in a Western symphony.

During the recent student demonstrations in China, one group of protesters put up a wallposter that made fun of several Chinese leaders. “Deng Xiaoping, 10,000 Taxes,” it said. “Mao Tse-tung, 10,000 Sleeps. Hu Yaobang, 10,000 Talks.”

Hu’s network of allies within the Communist Party was extensive, and in private meetings he was often relaxed and impressive. Last fall, dressed in a three-piece brown suit, he entertained Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II with the chatty air of one monarch speaking to another.

“And how is your meimei (little sister), Princess Margaret?” he asked.

University of Michigan Prof. Michel Oksenberg, who accompanied former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to a meeting with Hu last July, said he was “animated, engaging and a real politician.”

Lacked Military Support

“This guy is definitely the kind of politician you can see running for office in the United States,” Oksenberg said at the time. “The big question is whether he can elicit the support of the military.”

That was one thing Hu was apparently unable to do. Although Deng repeatedly sought to give his top aide a prominent role in military affairs, the efforts failed.

True to form, the first public indication that Hu was in political trouble came at a military event. On Jan. 7, more than 3,000 soldiers and political leaders gathered for the funeral of an 84-year-old general named Huang Kecheng.

Last October, at the funerals of two of China’s great military leaders, Ye Jianying and Liu Bocheng, Deng had presided over the ceremonies but left it to Hu, as party secretary, to deliver the memorial speeches. This month, at Huang’s funeral, Hu was not even present, and the meeting was presided over by Premier Zhao Ziyang--the man who was named Friday to replace Hu at the helm of the party.

Network of Connections

Hu’s political base came from the series of connections that he once built up as the head of the Communist Youth League. It was a network that he called upon again and again after he became the Communist Party leader under Deng.

Hu’s ties to Deng had been extremely close for more than 45 years. The two men’s careers were inextricably linked. When Deng was in favor, so was Hu. When Deng fell from power, Hu was out.

As a 19-year-old boy, Hu had taken part, along with Deng, in the Long March of 1934-35, a trek of about 6,000 miles that Communist forces made to escape the Nationalist Chinese armies of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1941, Hu and Deng began a close association when both served as political commissars in the famous 8th Route Army.

In 1949, after the Communist victory over the Nationalists in the Chinese civil war, Deng and Hu worked alongside one another as party officials in Sichuan province. Three years later, they came to Peking together, Deng as a vice premier and Hu as head of the Communist Youth League.

Hu took charge of the Youth League for more than a decade, and there he began to work closely with men who later ascended with him to the top ranks of the party.

Along with Deng, Hu was criticized during the Cultural Revolution. Hu, by his own account, was sent to the countryside and required “to sleep beside the cows” for more than two years. Like Deng, Hu returned to Peking in the early 1970s and was purged with Deng in 1976.

After Mao Tse-tung’s death in 1976, as Deng gradually assumed control of the Communist Party, his trusted aide took charge first of the party’s powerful Organization Department and then as director of the Propaganda Department. He replaced Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, as head of the Communist Party in 1981.

As party leader, Hu’s strength was in personnel. He placed his own proteges and allies as the party secretaries and governors of China’s provinces. Invariably, these were younger men, committed to Deng’s philosophy of pragmatism, and they often took the place of men who had ruled their provinces for years.

In effect, Deng, a man more than a decade older than Hu, relied on his party secretary to bring in a new generation of leaders who might carry out and perpetuate Deng’s modernization program.

Hu’s personnel network from the Communist Youth League was extremely useful. Deng himself is a member of the Communist Party’s first generation of leaders, and Deng’s own close personal ties are with the older party stalwarts and generals who are now dying off.

In other areas besides personnel, Hu was far less successful. When he dabbled in foreign policy, he sometimes got into trouble. When Hu visited Tokyo in November, 1983, for example, he developed such close ties to the Japanese that the relationship turned into a liability for the Chinese government.

Japanese diplomats and visiting politicians were later allowed such easy access to Hu that other countries became envious. Anti-Japanese student demonstrations in China in 1985 were perceived by some Chinese and foreign analysts as indirectly aimed at Hu.

In the fashion of President Reagan, Hu sometimes made loosely worded public statements that later required correction. Once, in discussing China’s policy toward the Soviet Union, he simply left out the routine mention of the disagreements between the two countries. It seemed like a significant change, until the Foreign Ministry quickly restated China’s old policy.

American policy-makers were irked when Hu told a group of reporters that the United States had agreed not to include nuclear-armed vessels in a port call that the U.S. Navy was planning to make to Shanghai.

The United States, which has a policy of never saying whether its ships carry nuclear weapons, denied ever giving such assurances, and in the wake of Hu’s remarks, the port call was postponed for more than a year. It finally took place last fall in Qingdao.

Hu’s greatest weakness, however, was not foreign policy but ideology. As party leader, he was responsible for coming up with an ideology that would both justify Deng’s economic reform program and satisfy the dedicated Marxists in the ranks of China’s 44-million-member Communist Party.

Under Hu’s leadership, the party regularly told its members that Marxism is not a fixed dogma but a philosophy that needs to be constantly developed. But this line was never enough, and the party under Hu engaged in repeated ideological skirmishes between reformers and more orthodox Marxists.

In the end, Hu’s downfall may have been simply that his own ideology turned out to be too unorthodox and too liberal for the Communist Party--and even for his own longtime patron, Deng.

The record shows that for years, Hu has been far more outspoken than Deng in attacking Communist orthodoxy. As head of the Communist Youth League in the 1950s, he was urging policies of pragmatism before Deng did. Hu was more critical of Mao than Deng was and far more scathing in his denunciations of the Cultural Revolution.

The crucial difference between the two men turned out to be the issue of how much the Communist Party needed to change its way of operating.

More than seven years ago, Hu told the Communist Party’s Central Discipline Inspection Commission that he thought the party needed to decentralize power and to set up a system of checks and balances to prevent abuses.

Back then, even before becoming party leader, Hu spoke of the importance of political reform in China.

Last June, apparently with Hu’s sponsorship, the calls for political reform were revived in China once again. Reform-minded writers, social scientists and journalists began talking about the idea of checks and balances on the power of the Communist Party, the same ideas that Hu had discussed many years earlier.

The campaign for political reform went on for more than half a year. When it was over, the Communist Party launched a major new counteroffensive against departures from Marxist orthodoxy. And Hu was out of a job.