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Opinion | Li Peng wasn’t the butcher of Tiananmen, just the man who took the fall for Deng Xiaoping
- Li’s arrogance made him easy to hate in 1989, but he was picked on because his boss Deng Xiaoping had a no-nonsense manner that intimidated even rebels.
- It is to Li’s shame that he enabled Deng’s will and did not resist the crackdown
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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Li Peng was not the “butcher of Beijing”, but he certainly was an embarrassment.
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Awkward and homely, bumbling and bashful, he was a loyal apparatchik pushed far beyond his own meagre talent, a tech nerd out of his depth and forced into a wholly inappropriate role at a historic moment.
The protesters on the streets of Beijing in the spring of 1989 loved to hate him and it was not hard to see why, even if he was picked on for the wrong reasons.
His imperious airs, his unbridled arrogance made him a natural target, doubly so because he was under the command of a rather more competent and charismatic man.
Li came off looking bad, deservedly so, but what did it matter? A crackdown was coming, a crackdown he came to be the symbol of, not because he was the author of it, but because that was the role he was assigned to play
I can still hear the echoes, the chorus of the crowd marching up and down Changan Avenue shouting “dadao Li Peng!” or “down with Li Peng!” over and over.
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