Remembering Bao Tong

Bao died Wednesday in Beijing at the age of 90

Earlier today Bao Pu posted on Twitter that his father, Bao Tong had passed. He had just turned 90 years old four days ago.

Bao Tong was the former top aide of reformist premier Zhao Ziyang, who was sympathetic to the student movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

Bao's daughter Bao Jian said in another post that her father was "full of hope for this land" on his 90th birthday on Saturday.

Zhao on the left, Bao on the right

"Man has a minor historical existence in the world... whether I turn 90 or not is insignificant, but what is important is that we strive for today and the future... and to do what we can, should and must do," she reported him saying.

Dissident journalist Gao Yu said Bao died of myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), a type of rare blood cancer.

Before the Tiananmen Square crackdown 33 years ago, Bao was the director of the Communist party's Political Reform Office and Policy Secretary of Zhao, who was Premier from 1980 to 1987, and CCP General Secretary from 1987 to 1989. Bao was in charge of planning reforms, and he was the political secretary of the Politburo Standing Committee from 1987 to 1989.

On May 28, 1989, just days before the democracy movement was crushed, Bao was arrested and charged with "revealing state secrets and counter-revolutionary propagandising", the highest government official to be charged in relation to the 1989 movement.

He was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to seven years in prison with two years deprivation of political rights. He served the full sentence in isolation.

Bao facilitated this publication

Afterwards he was under constant surveillance, while Zhao was under house arrest. Before Zhao died in 2004, he made a series of audio tape recordings of his memoirs that Bao was instrumental in getting out to his son Bao Pu, a publisher in Hong Kong. This led to the publication of Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang.

Bao Tong was a strong critic of the government and spoke to foreign journalists whenever he could. Louisa Lim remembers meeting him at McDonald's, where if he arrived first, he would buy her a coffee and sundae.

"I didn't know if you wanted hot or cold, so I got both," he said. She describes him as "having such clarity of vision and such strength of character, but also such grace and kindness".

When she last saw him in 2013, Lim said on Twitter that he looked frail and disheartened by China's direction, as Xi Jinping was in charge. 

According to The Guardian, Bao said he had no regrets about his personal fate, but grieved for his countrymen, who had been deprived of free speech for more than two decades, and that the silencing of dissent had had disastrous consequences.

Thank you for speaking up for your country. Your soul is free.