Liberal theorist who supported June 4 students dies in Beijing, aged 91
Former propaganda department official Li Honglin spent 10 months in jail for sympathising with protesters
Li Honglin, a prominent liberal Communist Party theorist who was jailed for supporting the 1989 pro-democracy movement, died in Beijing on Wednesday at the age of 91.
A former associate of late reformist party leader Hu Yaobang, Li spent 10 months in jail after the Tiananmen Square crackdown for sympathising with student protesters.
In March 1989, he joined 42 prominent intellectuals in signing an open letter to the party leadership calling for the release of political prisoners and greater freedom in Chinese society. He was arrested in July of that year and released in May 1990 with 200-odd jailed intellectuals and political activists as Beijing sought to improve its international image.
A protégé of Hu, Li was promoted to head the party’s propaganda department’s theory bureau in the early 1980s to help promote Hu’s de-Maoist “thought liberalisation movement”.
Dai Qing, a journalist with the Guangming Daily newspaper who was jailed and released together with Li due to her role in pro-democracy movement, said Li had been a banner carrier for “thought liberalisation” and China’s “new age of enlightenment”.
“Li was one of those who refused to act as the [party’s] mouthpiece,” Dai wrote in a lengthy article in memory of Li.
Li, also a literary critic, made his name in China in the late 1970s and ’80s for his pro-reform writings, including People’s Daily articles which argued that the interests of the people should come before those of the party and economic development should come before Stalinist orthodoxy.
Li was ousted from the propaganda department in 1985 after a conservative backlash. But Hu protected him by sending him to Fujian province, where he became the head of the provincial academy of social sciences.
Li finally lost his party position in 1986 when Hu was ousted for expressing sympathy with the nascent pro-democracy student movement.
During the 1989 pro-democracy movement, triggered by Hu’s death on April 15, Li printed a small newspaper in support of the students at his home near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
His last public appearance was in 2012 when he attended a seminar in Beijing to commemorate the 20th anniversary of late leader Deng Xiaoping’s famous southern tour and called for bolder political reforms. He also proposed competitive elections within the Communist Party to restrict the influence of powerful interest groups.
He moved to Hong Kong in 1996 to be with his son, Li Shaomin, who was then a City University academic. The younger Li, a Princeton-trained sociologist and US citizen, was deported from the mainland in 2001 after being convicted of spying for Taiwan. Some analysts said his father’s political record might have helped make him a target of the security police.
