Plea to reopen the verdict on Tiananmen protest

The top Chinese politician purged after Tiananmen Square demonstrations has savaged the official verdict which branded the student-led protests as a "counter-revolutionary rebellion". A forlorn appeal from a forgotten man, or a glimmer of political change in China? Teresa Poole studies the latest twist in what is still the most sensitive political issue in China.

Zhao Ziyang, now a white-haired 78-year-old, made his last appearance on 19 May 1989 when he tearfully visited the students in Tiananmen Square and tried to persuade them to go home. Since then he has been living under virtual house arrest. In February this year he was refused permission to attend the funeral of his former mentor, China's late patriarch Deng Xiaoping.

Mr Zhao remains a popular figure in most ordinary Pekingers' consciousness, a man who represents an era of relative political openness in the mid- 1980s, when the possibility of change reaching beyond the economic sphere was briefly alive. In 1989, he was the ultimate victim of a vicious internal power struggle in the Chinese Communist Party between fellow liberals and hardliners who wanted to roll back the Deng reforms. His was the scalp that Mr Deng provided in order to safeguard the programme to modernise the economy.

The two-and-a-half page typed letter which yesterday found its way to the Reuters news agency was dated 12 September 1997 and ended with Mr Zhao's typed name, but there was no handwritten signature. If authentic, it represents the first direct political move by Mr Zhao in eight years, and a most blunt demand for the verdict to be rewritten.

"No matter how radical, wrong and blameworthy the students' movement was, to call it a `counter-revolutionary rebellion' was groundless. And if it was not a counter-revolutionary rebellion, it should not have been solved by means of military suppression," the letter reads. Unknown hundreds of people are believed to have died when troops were sent in to clear the demonstration.

Mr Zhao said the bloodshed could have been avoided. "It was well-known that the request of the majority of the students then was to punish corruption and accelerate political reform, not to overthrow the Communist Party or subvert the nation," he wrote.

There was no independent confirmation of whether the letter had come directly from Mr Zhao. It was sent to the 15th Communist Party Congress on Friday, the opening day. No China analyst expects Mr Zhao to make a political comeback, but he could re-emerge as a very disruptive influence for a party desperate to present a picture of unity.

The question of the Tiananmen Square verdict is the last issue which China's leaders want on the agenda at this juncture. This is the congress at which President Jiang Zemin, who is also general secretary of the party, is determined to establish himself as the primus inter pares for the post- Deng era.

Mr Jiang was not directly involved in the decision to send in the troops to Tiananmen Square, but his sudden elevation to party chief in 1989 was as a result of the deposing of Mr Zhao, who until then had been Mr Deng's anointed successor.