Something extraordinary happened in China on the eve of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to Qinghai, the country's latest earthquake zone. Wen eulogized Hu Yaobang, who has long been a pariah to China's communist leadership. The article was published Thursday, April 15th, in the People's Daily, the official organ of China's communist party.

Why is this significant?

The answer lies in Hu Yaobang's career. Hu was one of China's leading reformers in the 1980s. He rehabilitated many figures who had been purged by Mao during the Cultural Revolution and supported China's economic and political liberalization. After a tour of Tibet to view for himself the damage done there by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, Hu Yaobang published an order respecting Tibet's culture and religion and decreeing an end to the repression -- the closest China's one-party dictatorship has come to officially acknowledging Tibet's right to self-determination, at least in cultural and religious matters.  But in 1987, he was forced from office by Deng Xiaoping, for being too lenient on student demonstrators. 

When Hu Yaobang died 21 years ago, students and young people gathered in Tiananmen Square, and the rest is history. The violent repression was followed by a long period in China when the mere mention of Hu's name was verboten. Only in 2005 was Hu eulogized, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, but even that was in a closed-door ceremony at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, attended only by China's elite.

So why is Wen Jiabao resurrecting the memory of Hu Yaobang at this specific moment? Is Wen Jaibao signaling the coming of the long-awaited period of political reform in China? Or is he merely trying to cement his own populist legacy, by linking himself to Hu, before Wen leaves office in 2012?

In China's opaque world, the motivations of political insiders are hard to determine. China watchers concur that the article's publication in the People's Daily could not have happened without consensus among China's ruling circle. Wen has been outspoken over the two years of the economic crisis about the lack of sustainability of China's development model, which depends too heavily on foreign export markets, especially the U.S. and Europe, and lacks sufficient domestic demand. He has also been outspoken about the unevenness of wealth from China's growth rate, with the coastal zones and middle class in the cities benefitting handsomely, while in the interior of China some 600 million people still live on a few dollars a day. Economists see this disparity in wealth as an impediment to China developing strong domestic demand capable of sustaining its economic growth. So perhaps Wen is signaling a shift, with China placing even more emphasis on growth and development in the interior, in order to wean China off its dependence on exports to consumers overseas. Cloaking such a policy shift in the populist legacy of Hu Yaobang would make sense.

But that legacy also carries an implicit promise of political reform, and in the past two years China has been anything but reformist on that front. Crackdowns on human rights, dissidents, and freedom of the press have been tougher than at any time in the past decade. So perhaps Wen is signaling that the crackdown -- coinciding with the 2008 Olympics and the 2009 60th anniversary of the Communist Party's takeover of China -- will now soften. Maybe.

What are the implications, if any, for Tibet? Wen is only Number Two. Hu Jintao remains Number One. He rose to power based on his fierce repression of Tibet. So it seems unlikely that any change is signaled toward Tibet. But, Hu Jintao was out of the country, at a Latin American summit, when the People's Daily eulogy of Hu Yaobang was published. The intriguing possibility exists that Wen Jiabao pulled this off while Hu Jintao's attention was diverted by the foreign summit. If so, perhaps there is a schism in China's leadership. On the one side, the hardliners may favor a continued crackdown on human rights and the pre-2007 economic crisis growth model which depends on exports -- with reformers like Wen Jiabao and other allies on the opposite side, supporting a softening on human rights, a shift to domestic consumption, and even a rise in China's currency. China is, after all, at a crossroads in its dealings with the West. Protectionist wars are rising, and some 130 members of the U.S. Congress are pressuring the Obama Administration to impose tariffs on Chinese imports. 

Whatever its ultimate meaning, Wen Jiabao's resurrection of Hu Yaobang represents an enigmatic turning point in Chinese politics.