THE LONG, tempestuous political career of Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party leader ousted for opposing the use of military force to crush the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, provided tragic testimony of the limits of reform in China.

It also exposed the secrecy, fear and forces of brutality still operating at the heart of Chinese Communist politics during the 1980s, despite a decade of economic reform.

Zhao was dismissed by a badly shaken cabal of revolutionary veterans, the “Elders”, who regarded corruption, the protests over inflation and demands for greater freedom that broke out in almost every major city between mid-April and early June as a huge personal affront — and a direct threat to their hold on power.

Led by Deng Xiaoping, Zhao’s mentor, they came to the view that the situation was so serious that only the People’s Liberation Army stood between them and political disintegration. Accordingly, in one of the most dramatic episodes in China’s modern history, they swept Zhao aside and ordered the army to end the unrest, which it did with heavy civilian casualties in central Beijing on the night of June 3-4.

Zhao was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, when he made an unauthorised visit to the square to plead with the protesters to end their hunger strike and go home.

Hardliners had already decided to impose military law in central Beijing, and Zhao’s appearance was a last desperate attempt to prevent a tragedy. “We have come too late, and it is only right that you criticise us,” a tearful, exhausted Zhao told a largely sympathetic audience. Within a few days, he would be formally sacked and disgraced, and confined to house arrest in Beijing.

Zhao remained under detention for the rest of his life, the broken icon of political reform. He was the man whose name no senior Chinese official dared utter in public for fear that it would provoke an inquest into the brutal suppression of the democracy movement — and into the legitimacy of those who had benefited politically from it — and rejuvenate demands for political change. Party leaders, fearful of the political impact of Zhao’s death, will be as careful in handling his posthumous reputation.

He was born in 1919, in Huaxian county, Henan province, in central China. He matured in a land under attack by Japan, at a time when patriotism and Marxism had converged to swirl around each other in what was for many a heady mix of idealism, the one feeding the other.

The son of wealthy parents in a family of landlords, Zhao joined the Young Communist League as a schoolboy. In 1938, aged 19, he became a party secretary in an anti-Japanese base area of his home province. He spent the war years in northern China, in what was, in effect, the productive civil and military training ground that gave force to the Communist movement.

When the Japanese war gave way almost immediately to civil war, Zhao served under the command of Li Xiannian, who later ended his career as China’s President when Zhao was Prime Minister.

In 1951, two years after the People’s Republic was proclaimed, Zhao was posted to Guangdong province to oversee land reform. His abilities soon brought him promotion and, astutely, he attached himself as a loyal lieutenant to the leading party figure in the region, Tao Zhu.

However, his rise soon brought Zhao up against a morass of political frictions in the upper ranks of the party. When in 1958 Mao Zedong initiated the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to implement communism almost overnight, many of his comrades in arms were hesitant, Tao among them.

Tao had deployed the far better-educated Zhao as a speechwriter. It was one of Zhao’s reports on agriculture, circulated for discussion over the Great Leap, that came to Mao’s attention, marking Zhao as an opponent. He did not, however, suffer at this stage from Mao’s displeasure.