Li Peng

Who would have thought that tainted pet food and toys would threaten to unravel the authoritarian export model of Chinese growth that the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 was partly meant to secure? China's then "paramount leader" Deng Xiaoping,...

Zhao Ziyang, the former leader of China's Communist Party who spent the last 15 years of his life under house arrest, came to symbolize an incident that the nation's political elite want to ignore but the world cannot forget: the Tiananmen massacre....

Along a narrow mud road that cuts through the unending farmland of central China sits a peasant village so modest it hardly deserves its evocative name. At the end of the lane is the dirt-floored hovel of Bai Li Yun, an illiterate farmer who cannot...

BEIJING -- Chinese leaders Friday ordered soldiers into Beijing to attempt to restore order after a month of massive pro-democracy demonstrations, but residents swarmed to block the army's way. By 8 a.m. today, more than 10 hours after the army advance...

BEIJING -- Defiance of martial law by masses of Beijing residents and power struggles within the Chinese leadership left pro-democracy protesters still in control of central Beijing at noon today. For about 50,000 student demonstrators gathered in the...

BEIJING -- Tens of thousands of students took to the streets of the capital today, defying martial law with a boisterous call for democracy and demanding that Premier Li Peng resign, just as he and other hard-line Communist Party leaders were mounting a...

BEIJING -- China's leadership puzzle began to fall into place Friday with the reappearance of Communist patriarch Deng Xiaoping, who endorsed last weekend's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators but promised that economic reforms will continue....

BEIJING -- China teetered this morning on the edge of civil war, with troops presumed loyal to hard-line President Yang Shangkun in control of central Beijing but positioned defensively at strategic points in apparent anticipation of attack by rival...

BEIJING -- Chinese troops of the People's Liberation Army opened fire with automatic weapons early today on huge crowds of civilians in Beijing, killing at least 100 of them and perhaps many more, according to medical and diplomatic reports, in a...

BEIJING -- Premier Li Peng, whose martial-law order for troops to clear Tian An Men Square of student protesters resulted in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths, appeared publicly Thursday for the first time since the weekend massacre and briskly...

WASHINGTON -- In the decade after Chinese leader Deng Xiao-ping came to power in 1979, he broke down the isolation in which China found itself under Mao Tse-tung and set the world's most populous nation on a steady course of ever-growing involvement in...