Zhao Ziyang

Zhao Ziyang joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1938 and rose through military and regional posts during the war years and the early People's Republic. Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, he was later rehabilitated and appointed to lead Guangdong and then Sichuan, where he broke with Maoist orthodoxy and pioneered free-market reforms that caught Deng Xiaoping's eye. He became premier in 1980 and general secretary in 1987, pushing privatization, bureaucratic reform, and the separation of party and state. But his sympathy for the student protesters in 1989 put him at odds with party elders and with Deng himself. After the crackdown he was purged and confined to his home for the remainder of his life, during which his views radicalized toward full liberal democracy. He died of a stroke in Beijing in January 2005, denied the funeral rites given to senior officials, his memoirs smuggled out four years later and his story still censored at home.