The Conscience of the Party
In writing his comprehensive biography of the late top Chinese Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, Robert Suettinger, a former senior CIA/Intelligence Community analyst and manager and now a senior adviser at the Stimson Center specializing on China and East Asia, has undertaken a monumental task. The result is not just a biography, but an excellent reading in China’s history since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.
Arguably, along with the PRC’s first prime minister, Zhou Enlai, Hu Yaobang is one of China’s most esteemed leaders: the deaths of each—Zhou’s on January 8, 1976 and Hu’s on April 15, 1989—catalyzed large political demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Although many Chinese-language biographies have been written about Hu, Suettinger acknowledges that Hu is not well known among Americans, even among today’s “China watchers” who closely follow events in the PRC. (1) Suettinger remedies this by introducing US readers to the life and legacy of Hu, one of China’s most important reformers in the 1970s and 1980s.