China mourns Deng Xiaoping

Fri, 21 Feb 1997 | Source: REUTERS

BEIJING (Agencies): Peacefully and calmly, China yesterday began mourning for Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who lifted the world's most populous nation out of rank poverty and put it on course to become an economic superpower.

A single red flag fluttering at half-mast over Tiananmen Square was one of the few public signs of sorrow over the loss of the chief architect of China's capitalist-style reforms.

Deng, in the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease, died of complications from lung infection on Wednesday night. He was 92.

Authorities decreed six days of mourning, but in contrast to the public outpouring of grief following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Beijing residents reacted calmly and analysts dismissed fears of any immediate power struggle.

People who gathered in Deng's home village of Guang'an yesterday were reduced to tears at the news of his death -- even though he had not been there for decades, Chinese state television reported.

Television interviewed several people in the Sichuan province who could not control their tears at the death of their patriarch.

Beijing's students were left unmoved by the Deng's death as they straggled back to the capital to enrol for the summer semester.

"We already heard that Deng's dead, but then he was very old," said a economics student eating lunch at one of the private restaurants on the People's University campus in western Beijing.

Further north at the prestigious Beijing University, the mood was similarly nonchalant.

It was also reflected citywide, where Beijing's 12 million citizens continued to go about their business and displayed little emotion about the 92-year-old's passing.

Privately-operated fruit and clothing stalls maintained a brisk business on the streets of the capital, befitting a nation liberated from its Maoist shackles by a pragmatic reformer who decreed that "to get rich is glorious".

Deng's chosen heir, Jiang Zemin, 70, remained silent and invisible.

The only hint that the mantle of supreme authority had passed to the former tractor factory manager was an announcement that Jiang would head a 459-strong funeral committee.

Funeral

Sources said Deng will be cremated in a brand new incinerator to avoid contamination from other people's ashes, but there was no word on a date. No foreign dignatories will be invited to the no-frills, non-state funeral, and foreign media will be barred.

A letter to the nation from the Communist Party, State Council and Central Military Commission expressed profound grief at the death of "a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat".

Chinese sources said doctors performed an emergency tracheotomy to try to save Deng in the crimson-walled Zhongnanhai government compound just off Tiananmen Square.

China's 1.2 billion people had been amply prepared for the shock, and Jiang had been shoring up his power base against possible challenges from figures such as Qiao Shi, former security tsar who now heads the Chinese parliament, and premier Li Peng.

Stock markets in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan -- which had widely been expected to slump when Deng died -- moved higher yesterday after gyrating wildly at the opening.

Other than cordons sealing off the alley leading to Deng's home near Tiananmen Square, there was little intrusive police or military presence in the streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities yesterday.

Nationwide tranquility was a fitting tribute to a leader whose career tracked China's tumultuous 20th century journey from the last emperor through civil war and revolution to fledgling superpower status.

Deng led China from Mao's ultra-leftist fervor to a nation at its most stable and prosperous for nearly 200 years.

But death robbed him of his cherished dream -- to be in Hong Kong after June 30 when Britain returns the colony, wrested from China during 19th century opium wars.

Hong Kong residents, despite anxiety over looming rule by Beijing, appeared unruffled by his demise.

Taiwan, the next target of Beijing's drive to recover all historically estranged territory, sent condolences and urged a "peaceful, cooperative, prosperous new era" between Taipei and Beijing.

But the island, which Beijing regards as a renegade province, maintained a military alert.

Hours after the death announcement, flights arrived as usual at Beijing international airport, disgorging foreign tourists and business travelers.

It was one of the most visible signs of Deng's "open door" policy that ended almost three decades of isolation and turned swathes of coastal China into foreign investment boom zones.

Editorial -- Page 4