Zhao Ziyang; led China's economic reforms before being purged after Tiananmen; at 85

BEIJING -- Zhao Ziyang, the former Chinese Communist Party leader who helped promote reforms that launched China's economic boom but was ousted after the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, died today at a Beijing hospital. He was 85.

Mr. Zhao was suffering from a lung ailment, said a prominent human rights activist, Frank Lu.

The official Xinhua News Agency confirmed the death.

There had been few official comments or reports on Mr. Zhao, who had lived under house arrest since the Tiananmen Square protest.

Mr. Zhao, a former premier, was a dapper, articulate protege of the late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Zhao helped forge bold economic reforms in the 1980s that brought China new prosperity and flung open its doors to the outside world.

In the end, he fell out of favor with Deng and was purged on June 24, 1989, after the military crushed the student-led pro-democracy protests. He was accused of ''splitting the party" by supporting demonstrators who wanted a faster pace of democratic reform.

During the Tiananmen protests, Mr. Zhao called for compromise and expressed sympathy for some of the students' demands. But his adversaries, led by Premier Li Peng, overruled him, called in the military and used the turmoil to attack Mr. Zhao.

Mr. Zhao was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, the day before martial law was declared in Beijing, when he made a tearful visit to Tiananmen Square to talk to student hunger strikers. He apologized to the students, saying ''I have come too late."

Reports said he occasionally traveled to the provinces. He sometimes was sighted teeing off at Beijing golf courses or paying respects at the funerals of dead comrades, but otherwise remained hidden.

Usually seen dressed in tailored Western suits, Mr. Zhao served as premier in from 1980 to 1987, then took over as general secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful post in China.

He helped initiate sweeping changes that invigorated an economy mired in the ruins of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Material incentives and market forces replaced austere central planning and made China the world's fastest-growing economy.

Those changes also brought inflation, income gaps between the rich and poor, corruption, and other problems that the conservatives blamed on Mr. Zhao as they drove him from power.

Mr. Zhao's 1989 downfall was not his first. Chairman Mao Zedong's ''Red Guards" dragged him from his home in Guangzhou in 1967 and paraded him through the streets with a dunce cap on his head before sending him off for years of internal exile.

The son of a landlord, he was born in 1919 in Henan Province. He joined the Communist Youth League in 1932.

An agriculture expert in a country in which 80 percent of the people are rural, Mr. Zhao spent most of his career in regional government and party posts.

In the early 1950s, he directed a harsh purge in Guangdong province of cadres accused of corruption, of ties to the Nationalists on Taiwan, and of opposition to land reform. In 1957, he oversaw a rectification campaign in which 80,000 officials were sent to the countryside to live, work, and receive criticism.

After four years in disgrace during the Cultural Revolution, he resurfaced in 1971 as a party secretary in Inner Mongolia. He won favor for his agricultural management.

Mr. Zhao was named party secretary and governor of Sichuan, China's most populous province, in 1975. With Deng's backing, he dismantled the communist commune system, restored private plots and sideline rural businesses, raised farm prices, and revived bonuses for extra work.

His policies there turned food shortages that had brought people to the verge of starvation into bumper harvests. Between 1977 and 1980, Sichuan's farm output went up 25 percent and industrial production rose 81 percent. The ''Sichuan Experience" became a model for the nation.

Mr. Zhao was known as a solid believer in the party. But he defined socialism much differently than Mao and other leftists.

''Of course we must keep to the socialist road. But what is socialism?" Mr. Zhao said in 1979. ''The hallmark of socialism is the public ownership of the means of production, and the principle of socialism is 'to each according to his work' "

Deng brought Mr. Zhao to Beijing in 1980 as a vice premier and member of the party's powerful Politburo. Six months later, he was named premier, becoming a role model for the younger technocrats installed by Deng in key positions.

In 1987, Mr. Zhao was named general secretary of the Communist Party.