A visitor to Bao Tong's apartment – with armed guards in the parking lot and another checking the identifications of guests – might think they're about to meet one of China's most dangerous criminals, rather than a former top official in the Communist Party.
But to the men who rule this country, Mr. Tong is both, which makes him a bigger threat than the sprightly 76-year-old looks like he could be. To them, Mr. Tong is the party official who, along with his boss, former Communist Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, almost brought down the whole system 20 years ago by daring to agree with the students demanding change in Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Tong is still campaigning for change, criticizing the government when he gets the chance, and helping pen a recent manifesto for change that was quickly banned.
“There are four buildings in this compound, and only this one has this much security,” Mr. Tong says with a resigned smile as he receives a rare foreign guest. “And only visitors to this apartment need to register.”
Mr. Tong's main “crime” was a speech he wrote 20 years ago today. On the morning of May 4, 1989, Mr. Zhao asked him to write remarks that he would deliver a few hours later in an indirect address to the crowds of students who had been protesting for three weeks in Beijing and other cities.
As he furiously scribbled speaking notes in the back of a car as it moved through the streets of the capital, Mr. Bao, then the director of the Office of Political Reform and policy secretary to Mr. Zhao, knew his country's fate hung in the balance. He dared believe he was helping to change China, setting it on a more open and democratic course.
“I was very excited. I thought that the party was bringing its opinions into the same line as the people. It was historic progress,” Mr. Bao remembered in a recent interview.
The instructions Mr. Zhao gave him were as delicate as they were monumental: a speech making it clear there were factions in the government that sympathized with the students calling for more freedoms and an end to official corruption.
The speech, delivered to delegates of the Asian Development Bank meeting in Beijing that afternoon, criticized China's “flawed legal system” and “our lack of democratic supervision as well as our lack of openness and transparency.” These were historic words that caused an eruption of joy among the nervous and weary protesters on Tiananmen Square.
If the reformers had won out, the May 4 speech might be celebrated today as the moment China's one-party state started to dissolve, as other such regimes fell apart in Eastern Europe that same year. Instead, it is a speech that few young Chinese have heard of and no one is allowed to publicly discuss.
The speech evenly split the Chinese leadership, eventually placing Mr. Zhao in conflict with the country's senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, who Mr. Bao says was behind the eventual decision to declare martial law and use tanks and soldiers to break up the protests on Tiananmen on June 4, 1989. Hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, were killed in the bloody crackdown.
In the aftermath, Mr. Zhao was purged from the leadership, and lived under house arrest until his death in 2005. Mr. Bao spent seven years in the maximum-security Qincheng Prison for “revealing state secrets and counter-revolutionary propagandizing.” He was the only senior Communist Party official to be prosecuted in connection with the events of 1989.
Since his release, he has also been under effective house arrest, trailed whenever he goes and only allowed visitors his guards screen.
During the rare and lengthy interview inside the apartment he was assigned in west Beijing, he spoke out again against the Tiananmen massacre and the system that persists today after so nearly crumbling in those dramatic days.
