主题：【文摘】社会主义国家最好的经济学家 -- Chieftain

SHANGHAI, China - While he lived, China's Communist Party considered ousted leader Zhao Ziyang such a potent threat that it kept him under house arrest for 15 years.

After his death, China's leaders face an even tougher challenge: how to give a fallen comrade his due without stirring up support for a figure accused of endangering communist rule in 1989.

Zhao helped launch China's economic boom as then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping's protege. But after he suggested compromising with pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen Square, he was dismissed, charged with "splitting the party" and forced into house arrest.

"It certainly is a delicate issue for the government," said Kenneth Lieberthal, an expert on Chinese politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "They will want to show respect without being overly glorifying."

Acting quickly to head off unauthorized commemorations, the government posted extra guards outside Zhao's home in central Beijing hours after his death. Paramilitary police swarmed Tiananmen Square, China's symbolic political center, with two busloads of reinforcements standing by.

As they prepare to memorialize him, Chinese leaders are sure to have in mind the parallels with 1989. Then, the Tiananmen Square protests grew out of public mourning for Hu Yaobang, Zhao's predecessor as party leader, who had himself been purged after student-led protests.

But China has changed vastly in the years since Zhao was banished, and analysts said a repeat is unlikely.

Today's students, just children during Zhao's era, tend to be focused on carving out careers and are far less politically active.

China has few active dissidents left. The rest are in jail or exile.

The economy is booming, while inflation - a bane of protesters in the late 1980s - appears to be under control.

"Today is a different time," said Lieberthal. "Then, it was a great period of inflation, a sense the reforms were off-track, a great sense of underlying malaise."

Activists are still pushing for the government to overturn its ruling that the protests were a counterrevolutionary riot.

Throughout the rituals for dead communists, many in China will be watching for nuances in eulogies and state media reports on Zhao, and to see who attends his funeral.

"I think the leadership will have to walk a very careful, very fine line," says Richard Baum, a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Too much praise might encourage more pressure for a "reversal of verdicts," Baum said. But too little would anger many and might stir up a backlash similar to the one following Hu's death.

"My guess is that they'll try to split the difference by remaining officially silent about the events of 1989 while praising his role in the economic reforms of the 1980s," he said.

President Hu Jintao and his fellow top leaders have so far rejected demands for political reforms and appear determined to crush any hint of a threat to the party's monopoly on power.

Yet many believe that the leadership is moving, though slowly, toward political reform.

"There is a slow drumbeat of pressure for reform within the party. I'd expect that within five to 10 years we may see change," said David M. Lampton, a professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

"Zhao really was a forward-looking individual," Lampton said. "He had a vision for political reform, but he was far ahead of his time."