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, President Jiang Zemin delivered the eulogy for Deng, praising him as the man who “first put forth the idea that the market economy can be pushed under socialism.”

As Deng’s handpicked successor, Jiang, 70, vowed to continue Deng’s economic reforms and policy of international engagement, including a continuing “readjustment” of relations with the United States, Japan and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Deng, who led China to unprecedented prosperity while maintaining the Communist Party’s firm grip on control, died Wednesday in Beijing at age 92.

“Without Comrade Deng Xiaoping,” Jiang said, “the Chinese would not live a new life like today’s and there would not be today’s new situation of reforms and opening up and the bright prospects of socialist modernization.”

Mao Tse-tung led the Chinese out of the “darkness,” Jiang 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, a carefully written document that will be scrutinized by analysts for subtle hints of changes in China’s overall policy in the post-Deng era. On the auditorium stage, under a 15-foot-high color photograph of a smiling Deng, an urn containing the late leader’s ashes was draped in a red hammer-and-sickle Communist Party flag.

The ceremony began with the national anthem and ended with the Communist “International.”

Jiang used the speech to loudly condemn the reign of political terror of Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, which he termed a “grave mistake.”

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But he treaded softly over the country’s most recent shame, the June 4, 1989, army crackdown in Tiananmen Square in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese civilians were killed in the streets of Beijing.

Without referring to it directly, he described the 1989 incident as a “severe test” that demanded a “firm and sober” response from the leadership.

Nevertheless, some of the millions of Chinese viewing the speech on television praised Jiang’s sensitive handling of the issue.

“The way [Jiang] referred to it was vague,” said Wang Miaogen, 68, a retired Shanghai propaganda official. “If he had made things too clear and referred directly to June 4, it would have been inappropriate because some people still feel angry about it. But you can’t ignore such a big event. Jiang did it in a smart way.”

Outside the hall, in the deserted square that 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 Jiang, 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.

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 flag of the 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.

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.

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Still, the Communist Party gave Deng more of what he had wanted than Mao 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.

Times staff writer Maggie Farley in Shanghai contributed to this report.