The former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, who has died aged 85, will be remembered for having tried and failed to prevent the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989. Whether it was a glorious or inglorious failure is still debated, but it condemned Zhao to years of compulsory oblivion.
Throughout the 1990s Zhao was occasionally seen playing golf, at times confined to his house, and at others allowed to move around the country. He wrote several letters to his successors to call for "reversing the verdict on Tiananmen Square". Otherwise he remained silent, accepting the discipline of the Communist Party that he once led.
The student protests of 1989 had been sparked by the death of his predecessor, Hu Yaobang. Zhao was more acceptable to the party conservatives than the radical Hu: Zhao had learnt over decades how to soften harsh policies without drawing attention to himself. But he found it much harder to do that as the conservative backlash to the reforms of the 1980s increased. The student democracy movement "sharpened the contradictions" until Zhao was impaled on them.
In April 1989, during Zhao's absence abroad, the party paper, the People's Daily, condemned the student protests as a "planned conspiracy". That inflammatory editorial brought more students into the square, paralysing Beijing.
Zhao argued that the editorial should be withdrawn and proposed to visit the square, but was voted down. After two more crucial votes in the party's highest body went against him, he withdrew from office, while his arch-rival, Li Peng, prepared to declare martial law. Only then did Zhao defy internal party discipline and make his pilgrimage to the students.
When he appeared at last, early on the morning of May 19th, his first words were a confession of failure: "I am sorry. I have come too late." He urged the students to stop their hunger strike, saying that the government would then talk with them (a commitment he no longer was qualified to make).
"We all used to be young," he said. "We took to the streets." Zhao's apology, sincerity and tears moved the students, but also told them that he was politically finished.
Zhao was dismissed from all posts in the Communist Party, accused of having made serious political errors by "supporting the turmoil". Party diehards wanted to see him put on trial, but his successor, Jiang Zemin, was astute enough to see that Zhao could never be presented as a Gang of One.
Instead, he was given the silent death treatment. His standard of living - a comfortable courtyard house in Beijing - was maintained, and he was allowed to indulge his passion for golf. But he was prohibited from public utterance and had to apply for permission, often refused, to travel within the country.
Zhao's former personal secretary, Bao Tong, suffered in his stead, jailed for seven years after being found guilty of "releasing state secrets". Both men were regarded as disloyal to the party, because they had revealed the extent of the inner-party split.
There was perverse truth in the charge. The students concluded, with tragic consequences, that they could benefit from this internal division, which in reality had strengthened the powers of the diehards.
Zhao Ziyang's political skills were different from those needed in the 1989 crisis. He was adept at getting things done quietly and without a stir. His best-known achievement was after the Cultural Revolution, started by Chairman Mao in 1966, when he began to dismantle the collective-based communes in the vast ricebowl of Sichuan province, while Beijing still proclaimed their virtues.
Zhao dealt with the emphasis on politics at the expense of economics by combining them. "Economic work at the present time," he said, "is the biggest concern of politics. While going for economic construction, we must, of course, hold to the path of socialism. But we have had a lot of muddled ideas about socialism in the past."
Grain production shot up in Sichuan, while Deng consolidated his power against the post-Mao leadership of Hua Guofeng in Beijing.
Before long, Zhao had taken over from Hua as the premier of the state council.
Zhao was the son of a small landlord of Huaxian county in the northern province of Henan, not far from the origins of China's first imperial dynasty, the Shang, 3,000 years ago. Though his family was modestly well-to-do, Zhao witnessed the hardship in China's heartland when the Yellow River broke its banks or the rains failed.
Sent to a new-style school with modern ideas, he joined the Young Communist League at 13 in 1932. The branch soon collapsed as local Nationalist authorities suppressed popular agitation, but it gave Zhao an important revolutionary credential. Five years later, as the Japanese menaced Henan in their invasion, Zhao joined the Communist Party. A year after that, as the anti-Japanese struggle grew, he met Deng Xiaoping.
As a party official in a base area from which the struggle was organised, Zhao soon learned the need to blend revolutionary aims with keeping people fed and alive. In 1947, when civil war broke out after the defeat of Japan, Zhao joined the army, in which Deng was political commissar, and headed south to liberate China.
He was soon detached to do what he did best, run a local administration. By the communist victory in 1949, he was in charge of five million people. As new China looked for cadres, he was plucked from rural Henan and sent to a different world - the city of Guangzhou (Canton).
Zhao was soon grappling with land reform, the basis of the Communist Party's success and yet, when pushed too far, too fast, the main cause of its setbacks and divisions.
While still in Henan, he had lost his father, Zhao Tingbin, in the fierce class struggle of 1947-48 against rural landlords, which was carried too far by ultra-left enthusiasts. The details are unclear, but Zhao must have had to subordinate family feeling to party discipline in a traumatic way. His biographer, Chao Wei, thought that might explain why he returned home only once thereafter.
By 1954 Zhao was a deputy secretary in the South China party bureau, with special responsibility for land reform. His speeches on the subject in the co-operative movement of 1954-55, and in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60, hint at unease, but not enough to check his advance.
By 1960 he was the No 2 party leader in Guangdong province, and as the Leap collapsed into famine, was one of the first leaders to order the restoration of private plots, where peasants could supplement their meagre collective harvest.
Zhao took full advantage of a shift towards moderation in Beijing to push the responsibility system, which allowed farmers in effect to farm their own land, even though it belonged to the people's commune.
When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Zhao, by now the first party chief in Guangdong, was a natural target for Red Guards. A big-character poster challenged him to clarify his background, saying that he came from a landlord's family and his father had been condemned to death. His elderly mother in Henan died after being denounced.
Zhao was removed from office, but saved from a worse fate on the instructions of Premier Zhou Enlai. An army guard made sure that he was only denounced verbally in struggle sessions. Zhao spent four years either under house arrest or working in a factory.
In 1971 the army chief who had replaced him in charge of Guangdong, Huang Yong-sheng, was implicated in the plot against Mao Zedong, led by the minister of defence, Lin Biao. In the musical chairs of the Chinese power struggle, Zhao was rehabilitated. Four years later, he was transferred to the most populous province, Sichuan.
Mao died the next year, but provincial leaders were less affected by subsequent political upheavals in Beijing. Zhao was well placed to turn Sichuan into a pilot scheme for Deng's new economic reforms.
From 1980 until his dismissal, Zhao revitalised the role of state premier with calm assurance, focusing on practical steps needed to set out a new economic path. Though hard work, it was the easier part of the leadership act which he shared with the party secretary-general, the more ebullient Hu Yaobang; both were under Deng's watchful eye.
By 1987 Hu had fallen foul of Deng (as Deng in the same role had lost the confidence of Mao before the Cultural Revolution). Hu's overthrow in 1987, which began the crisis leading to Tiananmen Square, put Zhao in the same position, vulnerable to the sniping of ex-Maoist party veterans.
This coincided with a new stage in the economic reforms, with the door to the outside world flung open. Zhao shrugged off the resulting corruption and spoke of a Chinese gold coast. Researchers in his think-tanks openly dismissed socialism as irrelevant to the task of promoting development.
A month before Hu Yaobang died, Zhao was already being denounced by party elders as "an ultra-rightist who oppresses genuine Marxism". Zhao, a centrist by nature all his political life, was about to demonstrate in his downfall that, at times of crisis, the centre cannot hold.
Zhao Ziyang: born October 17th, 1919; died January 17th, 2005