Chinese Leaders Give Emotional Farewell to Deng

The nation’s train whistles blew and factory sirens wailed this morning as China marked the end of an era with a final memorial ceremony in the Great Hall of the People for senior leader Deng Xiaoping.

At precisely 10 a.m. Beijing time, the country erupted into a noisy, three-minute tribute to China’s tough “paramount leader.”

Breaking into tears as he spoke, Chinese President Jiang Zemin delivered the eulogy for Deng, who died Wednesday at age 92. Jiang spoke of China’s “unlimited grief” for the man he called “an important member of China’s first generation of revolution with Mao Tse-tung at the core.”

“Without Deng,” Jiang said, in tribute to the remarkable economic advances of the past two decades, “it would not have been possible for the Chinese people to have the new life they enjoy today.”

Mao led the Chinese out of the “darkness,” he said, but Deng gave them prosperity.

In the main auditorium of the Great Hall, the hulking Stalinist building that anchors Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square, 10,000 Communist Party officials, wearing dark suits and white paper flowers, gathered to hear Jiang’s eulogy. Outside, in the deserted square, which had been cleared of common people by security police, television showed hundreds of late-model automobiles that brought the party officials to Deng’s final send-off.

In Shanghai, ships in the harbor of China’s most populous city sounded their foghorns. But inside the city, the tribute was mixed with the grating sound of motorcycles and the shouts of street vendors hawking steamed xiao long dumplings.

Across China, from Kashgar in the west to Shanghai in the east, at least 400 million people watched the event on television sets most never dreamed of possessing when Deng came to power in 1979.

But in fitting testimony to the pragmatist who turned ideological Maoism on its head and told Chinese that “to get rich is glorious,” many watched from their offices and workplaces. Most businesses and schools remained open.

The nationally televised memorial service followed another remarkable moment Monday night when China state television showed top Chinese leaders bowing three times before the catafalque on which lay the body of Deng.

Led by Chinese President Jiang Zemin, the top rank of China’s leaders, faces frozen in solemn respect, circumnavigated the body in a counterclockwise direction and consoled Deng’s widow and five children, who stood at the side of the bier.

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As if to prove to the Chinese people that the man who led them to unprecedented prosperity was really dead, the cameras repeatedly zoomed in on the waxy visage of Deng in the casket, draped with the red hammer-and-sickle flag of the Communist Party that the senior leader had joined as a young student in France.

After a private funeral service Monday at the 301 Military Hospital on the western edge of Beijing, Deng had been cremated at the Babaoshan heroes’ cemetery. Tens of thousands of Chinese, many organized and bused in for the occasion by Communist Party work units, lined Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace as the cortege of 30 vehicles made its way to the cemetery.

The urn containing the ashes was then placed in the central chamber of the Great Hall of the People, where party leaders, Deng allies and villagers from Deng’s native Sichuan province assembled early today for the national memorial ceremony.

Although elaborate and carefully choreographed, the ceremony, in keeping with the family’s wishes and China’s rejection of the cult of personality that once dominated political life here, was about as austere as a memorial attended by 10,000 people could be.

In an effort to prevent the national mourning from spilling into the streets as political protest, authorities this morning instituted martial law in the city’s central Tiananmen Square.

Spontaneous protests in the square followed the 1976 death of Chinese leader Chou En-lai and the 1989 death of former Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. The death of Hu, whom many considered a political reformer, sparked the student demonstrations that resulted in an army crackdown in June 1989 in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, died.

The Chinese regime had more than seven years to prepare for Deng’s final send-off after his retirement from his last official post, chairman of the Central Military Commission, in 1989. Because of the country’s shaky history in times of political transition, the emphasis was on continuity.

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Despite the busy schedule of national mourning, the Chinese leadership insisted, for example, that a planned visit by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright take place on the eve of the memorial service, although it was cut short so that Albright could depart before the 10 a.m. commencement of the Deng memorial ceremony. Albright, who met with China’s top three leaders Monday, departed Beijing on her way home from her inaugural, round-the-world voyage as America’s chief diplomat.

China’s state television provided complete coverage of the final rites leading to Deng’s cremation, which was quite obviously a state occasion rather than the strictly private affair that Deng had requested before he died.

Still, the Communist Party gave Deng more of what he had wanted than Chairman Mao Tse-tung had gotten 21 years earlier. Mao, like Deng an atheist who denigrated “feudal” concerns for the remains of the dead, had also asked to be cremated but was instead embalmed; in the period of crisis surrounding his death, over-anxious morticians pumped Mao’s body so full of fluid that it leaked from his pores, his personal physician would later relate.

The enormous mausoleum containing Mao’s preserved corpse, in a crystal coffin, still dominates the southern side of Tiananmen Square and is the focal point of the view from the Gate of Heavenly Peace; that gate leads into the Forbidden City, where China’s Qing Dynasty emperors once lived.

In contrast, Deng’s ashes will be scattered into the sea; according to one report, some of the ashes will go into the harbor in Hong Kong, the British colony that will revert to Chinese sovereignty in July.

On Monday, Deng’s waxy corpse had been laid out on the catafalque at the military hospital where he died. He received a service that was only a slightly heightened version of what might be done for a private Chinese citizen. In a funeral tradition that dates back thousands of years, the walls of the “farewell room” were draped in gray and black silk. Fresh and artificial flowers were banked around the bier. Wreaths accented with white paper mourning streamers filled in the spaces. A huge wreath of black and yellow sunflowers dominated the foot of the bier.

The sunflower seemed especially appropriate for Deng. That is because in China’s complex, age-old beliefs about colors, yellow is said to represent progress and change; black is the color of death and honor.

At variance, though, with Chinese funeral traditions, in which the family of the deceased is on center stage, the ranking leadership of the Communist Party was obviously the focus of all the attention in the Deng rites.

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The television cameras did give viewers a look at Deng and his sobbing relatives, but they then turned the focus on the Politburo members and kept it there. As is usual on the Chinese evening news, almost all of the footage was dominated by shots of Jiang and Premier Li Peng, for example, leading lesser party lights in the traditional, waist-deep bows to salute the dead.

* LOOKING BACK IN SADNESS

Chinese mourn Deng, reflect on how their lives changed under his leadership. A6