从1970年代四川的农田，到上海的高楼大厦，赵紫阳主管了初期的用以结束大跃进、文化大革命的政治狂热带来的饥荒的改革。他成功的试点是在邓小平的家乡，邓小平对中国的贫困感到吃惊，也同样为基于个人自治概念上的改革所带来的成效所惊讶。
这个初期的西南省份的成功经验是改变了每个中国人生活的深刻变革的开始。赵的原动力很简单：社会主义创造了痛苦的令人羞耻的贫困，还创造了把主动的精神、创造力都视为叛逆的制度。他在改革的十年当中，在北京的政治局里试图说服那些思想僵化的同事放松管制和放弃马列教条实际上是有益的。
他开创了地方选举并且支持公开的社会对话，最终导致邓小平和他的保守派在1989年天安门残暴镇压的前几天废黜了赵紫阳。如果说赵紫阳不同意示威学生的方法的话，他同情学生提出的某些建议。他从此被软禁，昨天两行字的讣告是中国官方第一次承认确有赵紫阳其人。
赵紫阳绝不仅仅暴露了中国政治的不透明，他的个人经验和政治理念应该在全球根治贫穷的争论中具有其影响力。他小心翼翼地不使他的业绩上成功同他务实的思维方式相联系，反而归功于社会主义的市场改革。他说“社会主义的初级阶段”是必经的道路，但是他清醒地从来没有提出这种“初级阶段”到底有多长。
他的一生对那些事事喧哗的喜好貌似科学术语的西方政治家也起指导性的作用。毛泽东以前的中国就神化权力，赵不喜好“奉天行道”也敢于去除权力的神秘色彩。在公共场合随意放松，允许记者在直播全国的记者招待会上直接提问。这些在八十年代的中国都是真正革命性的。
赵紫阳不是一个完美的民主派，但是他的思想和政策改善了千百万人的物质生活和心理环境。毛泽东思想对这个世界的某些地区还有影响实在是一件可恶的事情。如果政治家和学者真想懂得中国的崛起的话，他们应该学习赵紫阳思想，并且像赵紫阳那样更相信市场经济和人民的正直。让我们抛弃毛泽东，铭记赵紫阳吧！
原文：
The Times - Editorial:
January 18, 2005
Zhao lives
The death of the man who reformed China and changed the world When political figures are evaluated for their impact on history, it is the curse of the Chinese, apart from Mao, that their names are unpronounceable and that their policies are made difficult to divine by the demands of Politburo intrigue. But there is no doubt that few politicians have exercised more positive influence in the past century than Zhao Ziyang, the engineer of China’s economic reforms and an architect of gradual political reform who was consumed by the authoritarian system that he sought to change.
A straight line can be drawn from the top of Shanghai’s skyscrapers to the paddy fields of Sichuan in the 1970s, when Zhao oversaw the first phase of reforms designed to end the famines caused by the ideological extravagances that were the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. His successful experiments were conducted in the home province of Deng Xiaoping, who was appalled by China’s impoverishment and astounded by the results of reforms based on the concept of individual autonomy.
That early success in the south west was the starting point for the profound changes that have touched every Chinese. Zhao’s motivation was simple enough; communism had created a grinding, humiliating poverty and institutionalised a system in which any show of initiative or creativity was perceived as an act of insurrection. For almost a decade, Zhao attempted to work the Politburo in Beijing, convincing unreconstructed comrades that it was in their interest to relax control and feigning fealty to the dogmatic drivel of Marx and Lenin.
He commissioned local elections and encouraged public debate, which ultimately prompted a fatal conflict with Deng and his commode Communists, who purged Zhao days before the brutality of Tiananmen in 1989. Zhao had sympathised with some of the arguments, if not the methods, of protesting students and was put under house arrest─ the first official recognition of his existence since that moment was the two-sentence announcement yesterday of his death.
Zhao is more than merely a symbol of the opacity of Chinese politics, and his personal experience and political thoughts deserve to be influential in the global debate over remedying poverty. He was canny enough not to ascribe success to his own pragmatic thinking, but to cast it in the Communist tradition: market reforms, he said, were necessary in the“primary stage of socialism”, though, knowingly, he would never be drawn on the duration of that“primary stage”.
His life is also instructive for politicians in the West fond of ceremonial distance and pseudoscientific symbolism. The mystification of Chinese power long preceded Mao, but Zhao was contemptuous of the“mandate of heaven”and had the courage to demystify power, daring to appear relaxed in public and to allow journalists to pose questions in press conferences broadcast nationally, which, in 1980s China, was genuinely revolutionary.
Zhao was far from a perfect democrat, but his ideas and policy changes improved the lives of hundreds of millions, materially and psychologically. That Maoism remains an influential ideology in parts of the world is an abomination. If politicians and academics want to understand China’s rise, they should study Zhaoism and, like Zhao Ziyang, have more faith in the integrity of markets and of people. Forget Mao─ and remember Zhao.
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