Question of Hu

Screenshot via ABC News, October 2023

I'll get to Carter in a moment.

But first I have a few words to say about Hu Yaobang, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party of China during the early parts of the Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-Up) of the 1980s, when the real power in China was held by Deng Xiaoping from his shadowy perch as chair of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Hu really was pretty popular, in a way that hadn't been familiar in the Mao years (when being popular could get you disappeared, like Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao), as an acknowledged architect of the government's move to what we call market socialism (and the CPC calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), especially among the people who stood to benefit the most from the reforms, such as university students; Deng didn't mind allowing him the credit for the hugely improving Chinese economy, perhaps because he also served as a lightning rod attracting the attention of Deng's enemies, the angry old Communists who saw the reforms as a political threat.

This became a big and problematic thing in 1986 and 1987, when students began agitating for political reforms in the context of a brutal 16% inflation rate and widely circulating stories of government corruption, particularly inside Deng's own family. The demonstrations began with students at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, who demanded the right to nominate their own candidates for the National People's Congress instead of having to choose from a government-nominated slate, and spread from there to some of the most prestigious schools in the most important cities in regions across China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Beijing, and others.

The protests were not very well organized, and not especially successful, but they had an important consequence for Hu Yaobang, in that he failed to crack down on them and thence fell out of favor with Deng; that was more Opening-Up than Deng was prepared to put up with. Hu was pressured into resigning his power posts, though he kept his seat in the Politburo, and went into semi-retirement in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, where he died of a heart attack suffered during a meeting on education reform, in April 1989, at the age of 73.

A spite to remember

Dost Mohammad Khan, via Wikipedia.

Commenter Blueskies at Booman notes on my happy birthday President Carter post:

While Carter was a better president than many give him credit for, we should not forget, in addition to his efforts for middle east peace, his efforts against middle east peace. We are still living (and dying) with the consequences of some of these acts.

1. Not to be too pedantic, the story linked to is about Afghanistan, which is not in the Middle East. Nah, that really is too pedantic, sorry. Also, Googling around, I find there's an aspect missing from the story, which is the correct apportionment of the blame between Carter and the CIA.

Somebody's birthday

In Plains in the 1970s. Hulton Archive/Getty Images, via New York Times.

Happy 90th birthday to President Jimmy Carter, greatest ex-president in the history of the United States! (With the possible exception of John Quincy Adams, who was not too proud to sit in the House of Representatives representing a Massachusetts district for the rest of his life after the presidency, 1831 to 1848, trying to put an end to slavery.)

Carter is maybe the only president who ever did anything directly personally for me, when he blanket-pardoned the Vietnam-era draft dodgers, so I'm biased from the start, but I think his quality as a serving president is drastically undervalued by most on the left even as it is demonized at an Obama level by the right (who can never forgive his efforts against dictatorship and for Middle East peace). Last April, when his book A Call To Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power came out, David Masciotra at The Daily Beast summarized some of the progressive aspects of his term that are consistent with, not in opposition to, the values he's shown since he left the White House, especially on the subject of environmental preservation, which has turned out to be the most crucial of all: