AFTER months of internal dispute, the Chinese Communist Party is to hold its first official commemoration of a liberal leader whose death led to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

At the grave of Hu Yaobang, officials were jubilant at the decision, announced yesterday by the Foreign Ministry. “The party’s central leadership will hold a memorial here on Sunday to mark the 90th anniversary of his birth,” one official told The Times. “We believe this means that in future the grave of this leader will no longer be a politically sensitive place.”

The commemoration was approved by President Hu Jintao, who overruled colleagues on the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee who feared that it would threaten China’s stability. The level of opposition underscores the sensitivity that still surrounds people linked — in Hu Yaobang’s case only by his death — to the demonstrations suppressed by the army on June 4, 1989.

China avoids mention of the crackdown and the memory of the late party leader — whose funeral in April 1989 at the Great Hall of the People brought thousands of students into the streets to honour his more liberal views — has until now been officially ignored.

President Hu, 62, regards the commemoration as a way to consolidate his power because like Hu Yaobang, to whom he is not related, he relied on support within the Communist Youth Leagues as he rose to power. The move is also intended to burnish his reformist credentials, party insiders say. The President has nurtured eco- nomic reform while prohibiting liberalisation of the media.

A Western diplomat said: “The younger Hu believes that by honouring a man so closely linked to the youth league he can count on the support of its 71 million members.”

A party insider said: “This is a way to use Hu Yaobang to show any enemies that he, too, is a reformer.”

Hu Yaobang became general secretary of the party in 1980 but was sacked in 1987, accused of taking too soft a line against student demonstrators in Shanghai and Beijing. He is one of the most popular party leaders, remembered for his campaign in the late 1970s to rehabilitate many who had fallen victim to Mao Zedong’s purges in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in 1966-76.

“I’m here because people have a special feeling for the party secretary,” said one visitor who braved driving rain to visit Hu’s grave on the outskirts of Gongqingcheng, a town that he had built in honour of Youth League members in the central Jiangxi province.

The exact arrangements for the commemoration were not clear because the date of Hu’s birth, November 20, clashes with President Bush’s visit to China on November 19-21.

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