Cardboard

I have read A LOT of obituaries. But I have never read of someone who is described as being so bland that, "if there is single colorful quotation to his name, it has not been found."

Li Peng is described as being without wit. But then again, the clue might have been found in the NYT obituary's headline announcing his death: "Li Peng, Known as the 'Butcher of Beijing' for Tiananmen Crackdown, Dies at 90."

The noun "butcher" is usually reserved for those whose vocation might be chopping pork chops for sale, or Nazi concentration camp commandants. Not that the word is poorly applied in Li Peng's case.

Li Peng is pretty much credited with ordering the bloody crackdown against the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as China's youth was expressing their displeasure with the government. No exact number of fatalities is ever given, but generally "hundreds, perhaps thousands" were killed by Chinese troops unleashed on the crowds to eventually restore order.

Li Peng was a trained engineer who was a professional Comrade who managed hydroelectric plants and who rose in the Party's ranks to eventually serve as premier, and later as "chief of the National People's Congress, the country's party-dominated, pro rubber-stamp Parliament."

The one black and white photo of Li Peng in the print edition of the NYT, shows him standing in front of three microphones in a 1997 ceremony for the Three Georges Dam, a massive hydroelectric project that displaced more than a million people before it was finished. He looks completely expressionless, a cardboard figure with four similar cardboard figures standing behind him. My bet is his lips never moved when he was talking, and he only moved when someone came by and picked him up and put him someplace else. No photo-op shirtless pose on horseback, like the Russian nemesis Putin.

But there is an alternate universe when you take in the digital version of the NYT Li Peng obituary. Scrolling through the text you are greeted with a color, 1995 photo of him taken in Mexico, waving a Stetson, smiling and looking like an Asian Harry Truman campaigning from the back of a train pulling through a whistle stop.

Li Peng is survived by a wife and three children. He must have said something that made someone laugh. Or at least smile.

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