'Butcher of Beijing' Li Peng Who Declared Martial Law at Tiananmen Dies at 90

Li Peng, the former Chinese leader who declared martial law before the bloody crackdown on student demonstrators three decades ago in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, has died. He was 90.

Li died Monday in Beijing while receiving treatment for an illness, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday, citing a statement from the Communist Party’s Central Committee and other state bodies. The statement described him as a “long-tested and loyal communist fighter, outstanding proletarian revolutionary, politician, and outstanding leader of the party and the country.”

As China’s premier, Li argued against taking conciliatory policies toward students who began demonstrating in the square in April 1989 after the death of Communist Party Chief Hu Yaobang, who had pushed for more political openness. Paramount ruler Deng Xiaoping sided with Li and ordered the People’s Liberation Army to disperse the protesters. Li declared martial law in Beijing on May 20, leading to the eventual deaths of hundreds and possibly thousands of people in the center of Beijing.

The statement announcing Li’s death praised him for working with other party leaders to take “decisive measures to stop the unrest and quell the counter-revolutionary riots” in 1989. “It has stabilized the domestic situation and played an important role in this major struggle concerning the future of the party and the country,” the statement said.

China -- and the world at large -- remain haunted by the deaths that followed Li’s decision. The unforgettable massacre in the square and the surrounding streets have shadowed China’s rising global ambitions, while the spirit of the movement -- including the famous photo of a solitary man confronting a row of tanks -- continues to resonate around the world.

“The role Li Peng played in the Tiananmen crackdown is something the world will never forget and is the greatest tragedy in his life,” Wang Dan, a top student leader during the Tiananmen protests, who spent years in jail before being released in 1998, said in a 2010 e-mail.

Li’s death comes as his present-day successors in Beijing find themselves under pressure from historic unrest in Hong Kong, whose residents are yearning for greater political freedoms even as President Xi Jinping leads China in a more authoritarian direction. Democracy advocates in the former British colony were galvanized in opposition to the Tiananmen crackdown, clouding the 1997 handover and setting the stage for the current protest movement.

Taking advantage of then-Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang’s absence overseas in the spring of 1989, Li called a meeting of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee. The meeting led to Deng condemning the student protests as “anti-party turmoil,” according to Zhao’s memoir.

After the party’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper laid out the ruling in an editorial on April 26, 1989, the number of demonstrators swelled to the hundreds of thousands and they demanded the party reverse the ruling. Li “used resistance and sabotage to ensure that efforts to resolve the student demonstrations on the basis of democracy and law would fail, with the intention of looking for an excuse to crush the student demonstrations using violent means,” Zhao said in a later account of the Tiananmen events, published posthumously as “Prisoner of the State” in 2009. Zhao died in 2005 after living under house arrest for 16 years.

Li was dubbed the “Butcher of Beijing” by human rights groups for his leading role in the crackdown. His low popularity probably doomed his chances of succeeding Zhao for the top job, said Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shanghai party boss Jiang Zemin was later tapped to replace Zhao while Li remained on as premier. Party elders probably “recognized that Li Peng as general secretary was not a good idea because he would always be associated with student deaths,” MacFarquhar said.

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