The former Chinese leader Wan Li, who has died aged 98, was a reform-minded communist. In the post-Mao Zedong era he achieved one great success only to fail dismally in another crucial enterprise. Wan pioneered a reform that transformed life in the 1980s for hundreds of millions of peasants, but at the end of the decade he missed the best chance to avert the Tiananmen Square catastrophe. Before long, like other “moderate” colleagues who failed to speak out at that critical time, he lapsed into semi-silent retirement.
A year before the 1989 confrontation between the Communist party old guard and the pro-democracy student movement, Wan had become chairman of the standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the state body roughly equivalent to China’s parliament. After nearly a decade of reform the NPC was becoming more assertive, and opposed, for example, controversial plans to build the Yangtze river’s Three Gorges Dam.
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