The World - News from April 16, 1989

Students plastered Beijing campus bulletin boards with posters mourning the death of former Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang and calling for more democracy in China. Hu, 73, died after suffering two heart attacks within a week. The posters described Hu, bundled into political obscurity after pushing the country too far and too fast into reforms, as a heroic “fighter for democracy” and indirectly attacked the Beijing leadership. Hu allowed a cultural thaw and openly questioned Marxism before being forced to resign in early 1987. Conservatives had accused him of failing to stop the spread of “bourgeois liberal” ideas blamed for the student unrest of late 1986 which erupted at Beijing University and other colleges.