THE passing of Deng Xiaoping injects an element of uncertainty into Chinese political life, and nowhere more so than in the possibility of a new debate on the crushing of the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square on June 4th 1989.
It was Deng who gave the order for the army to move against the students, causing the bloody deaths of hundreds of people in Beijing and the most terrible political event in recent Chinese history.
Since then debate within China about that tragic episode has been forbidden. The leaders of the student movement have been punished, imprisoned, exiled, intimidated into silence, or gone into business.
But great funerals in China have a habit of unleashing hidden passions. A previous generation of students used the death of Premier Chou En-lai in 1976 as a pretext for protests against the ideological excesses of the Gang of Four. It was the death of the party veteran 73 year old Hu Yaobang on April 15th, 1989, which brought the students to Tiananmen Square. Hu was respected as an honest revolutionary. He was mourned by them as a symbol of honesty in a world which had become corrupt.
In a society where unauthorised demonstrations are quickly swept off the streets, the leadership could hardly stop young people mourning a former general secretary of the Communist Party. Hu was not that important and the praise heaped upon him was excessive but the students found in him a focus for their despair.
The next few days will be edgy ones for the new leadership which inherits the mantle of Deng without the great stature and authority which he had as the reformer who brought wealth to an impoverished country.
The moral authority of the party was severely damaged by Tiananmen Square. With Deng's passing the political authority may be eroded too.
The fact that Deng was responsible for the army actions means that his funeral is unlikely to become a focus for pro democracy sentiments now. Indeed the students reviled him by smashing bottles - his name means "little bottle".
But the argument may surface now that it is time for a reassessment of those days, and that the verdict of the leadership on the students as the instigators of turmoil be reversed. President Jiang Zemin is not linked with the bloodshed of that June. He was in Shanghai, where the prudent actions of the party leadership managed to prevent demonstrations there ending in carnage. But Premier Li Peng is closely associated in the minds of the students - now in their late 20s and early 30s, and the vanguard of the so called fourth generation of Chinese leaders - with the decision to use force in Tiananmen Square.
For this reason it is hardly conceivable that he could ever become China's paramount leader. Deng already had achieved that when the student movement was crushed and he retained his supreme authority even during his long decline.
While he lived his verdict on the student movement as a conspiracy which brought about turmoil could not be challenged in China. But he has passed on and a movement to reverse the verdict may now begin.
The discontent which inflamed the 1989 demonstrations included double digit inflation and blatant official corruption among the children of party leaders. One of the legacies of Tiananmen Square has been the cleaning up by the Communist Party of its own house and it is now widely assumed that the top leaders are not corrupt.
Some 350,000 troops were deployed by Deng and the party leadership around Tiananmen Square after marshal law was declared on May 20th, 1989.
The 27th Army Division fought its way through crowds to the square, the biggest public quadrangle in the world, on the morning of June 4th, along with other units loyal to Deng.
The number of deaths that resulted is widely disputed with the party maintaining that loss of life was minimal while western sources put the death toll at several hundreds.