Hu Yahobang Short Story

Twenty-five years ago today, on April 15, 1989, a man named Hu Yaobang died in a hospital in Beijing, China following a heart attack he’d suffered several days earlier. You’ve probably never heard of this person, and the fact I’ve just related sounds like an ending–especially to a life as eventful and tumultuous as Hu Yaobang’s–but in fact it was only the beginning of another story. It was a story so momentous that it was one of the pivotal events of the 20th century.

Hu Yaobang’s life could fill several books, and would make a fascinating movie. Born in Hunan in 1915, four years after the Chinese Revolution began, Hu’s life was closely linked with that revolution, arguably the longest, bloodiest and most complex of the many political revolutions of the 20th century. Hu became a Communist at age 14. He participated in the Long March, the quintessential event that came to symbolize the political and social struggle of Communists during the Chinese Revolution, and cheated death many times. He was captured by the Nationalists and forced to join a labor gang. During World War II, like most Communist Chinese, Hu laid low in Yenan, where Communist leader Mao Zedong hoped that their Nationalist enemies would
He didn’t follow the strict orthodoxy of the Party and was sometimes viewed as an enemy by Mao, especially during the Cultural Revolution. In this upheaval Yu was arrested and paraded through the streets wearing a wooden collar as punishment for political crimes. He was also sent to do forced labor (again) and might have died in obscurity if his mentor Deng didn’t have the good fortune to win the knock-down, drag-out power struggle that convulsed the Chinese government in the late 1970s after the death of Mao Zedong. With Deng’s victory Yu was on top again, and by the 1980s was the General Secretary of the Communist Party, second in power in the state only to Deng