BEIJING (AP) — Li Ximing, Beijing’s Communist Party boss during the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests, has died at 82, Chinese state media reported Tuesday.

Li, a longtime bureaucrat in the power and water conservancy fields, died Saturday in Beijing of an unspecified illness, the official Xinhua News Agency said. No other details were given.

Li had been a leading member of the group of conservative veteran cadres who supported the military assault on the student-led protests in the capital’s central Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed in the action, most of them ordinary citizens seeking to block the troops’ advance.

The defiance and resulting bloodshed marked the last serious challenge to the party’s authority. …

Fareed Zakaria asks direct questions to Premier Wen Jiabao — about China’s abridgement of free speech and information on topics like Tiananment Square, about the books Wen Jiabao reads, and whether China will have national elections in 25 years. Premier Wen gives amiable non-answers about Tiananmen and elections, but opens up about his reading of a Roman Emperor’s “Meditations.”

Ma Jian says Chinese writers need to speak up about the past:

“The most powerful words written in Chinese last year were not by a novelist, but an unknown citizen who placed in a Sichuan newspaper an ad that simply said: “Respect to the mothers of the victims of 6/4.” The young clerk who had approved it for publication hadn’t grasped the significance of the date. The slip was soon discovered by the authorities, and three of the paper’s editors lost their jobs.

The Chinese people have been denied knowledge of their past and the right to reflect on it. Large gaps exist in the collective memories of the nation. It is the role of Chinese novelists, poets, bloggers and journalists around the world to help fill them.”

This year, fewer Hong Kong residents called 1989’s Tiananmen killings the “wrong decision.”

“That’s another way of saying they aren’t basing their opinions solely on what happened 19 years ago. When people generally think better of the Communist Party, as during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and just after the government has done a good job of disaster recovery after a deadly earthquake, then they don’t think so negatively about a horrible incident nearly 20 years ago. In 2003, when tempers were running high because a killer disease—SARS—spread amid government secrecy and Hong Kong was on the verge of enacting a harsh anti-subversion law at Beijing’s urging, then people were less willing to overlook old errors. That year 62% felt Beijing was in the wrong, which climbed again to 67% in 2004 before beginning a decline to today’s level.”

According to Ma Jian, the exiled author of Beijing Coma, the American media “should step up the pressure it puts on the Chinese government. Otherwise, all that is wrong with China will become a virus that will infect the world.”

An excerpt from Ma Jian’s recent novel, Beijing Coma, published my Macmillan:

“Technically speaking, he’s a vegetable,” says a nurse to my right. “But at least the IV fluid is still entering his vein. That’s a good sign.” She seems to be speaking through a face mask and tearing a piece of muslin. The noises vibrate through me, and for a moment I gain a vague sense of the size and weight of my body.

If I’m a vegetable, I must have been lying here unconscious for sometime. So, am I waking up now?

Liu Xiaobo’s essay “That Holy Word, ‘Revolution,’” written 5 years after June 4, 1989, from the book Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China:

“In Communist China, there is no word more sacred or richer in righteous indignation and moral force than ‘revolution.’ In the name of revolution, one-party despotism and individual autocracy have been carried out. Again and again, in the name of ‘revolution,’ inhumane political movements have been launched. In the name of revolution, individuals have been stripped of all the rights that they ought to enjoy. In the name of revolution, the economy has been destroyed and historic culture has been extinguished.”

When China’s rulers declared martial law on June 4, 1989, they were following one of the oldest tenets of Chinese rule:

“The student demonstrators in the square may have lacked a coherent message. The atmosphere may have taken on aspects of a carnival. But, underlying it all, was a basic questioning of the right of the Communist Party to exercise monopoly power, a demand for discussion and plurality.

“That questioned a tenet of Chinese rule dating back to the First Emperor of 221BC. The doctrine of legalism - rule by law rather than rule of law - co-existed with the more benevolent strains of Confucianism. Mao had identified himself with the First Emperor, and in 1980, Deng and his colleagues were in no mood to cede the authority they had spent all their lives fighting for.

“Their decision to declare martial law and send in the People’s Liberation Army was not taken lightly. As shown in the smuggled-out records in the book, the Tiananmen Papers, they deliberated long and hard, often in deep disgruntlement as they discussed how to deal with the pesky students who could draw on the traditional esteem in which their class was held in China. Reformists in the leadership, led by the party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, tried to find an accommodation. By the beginning of June, some student leaders were ready to return to campus and build on the moral victory they had won since launching the protest in mid-April. But the moderates were overruled on both sides and the tragic result unfolded.”