After two weeks of dithering and delay, the Chinese Communist Party permitted a low-key memorial ceremony for disgraced former premier Zhao Ziyang at Beijing?s Babaoshan cemetery for Communist heroes on Saturday. He was often portrayed as China?s lost Gorbachev, the reformer who might have democratised China if he had not been ousted from power at the time of the Tienanmen Square crisis in 1989.

That was why the country?s current rulers were so nervous about publicly acknowledging his death, and why even now the regime?s police are beating up citizens who appear in public wearing white mourning flowers, in his memory. But, actually one of the last of the breed of Communist true believers, he will not be missed.

Zhao was born at a time when fanatical ideologies were sweeping Europe and Asia, and he never deviated from his loyalty to the Communist Party whose youth wing he joined at thirteen. He did not even object when his own father was murdered by Communists as a ?rich peasant? in 1948.

When collectivisation led to famine in Guangdong province in 1958-61, he led the campaign to torture peasants whom Mao accused of causing the famine by hiding (imaginary) grain reserves. His subservience to the Party was not even shaken when his mother died after being denounced during the Cultural Revolution.

By the late 70s Zhao had become one of Deng Xiaoping?s allies in opening up the Chinese economy to capitalist ideas, and by the late 80s he was even dabbling in notions of political reform. When university students occupied Tienanmen Square in 1989 and demanded political change, he sympathised with them ? but when the Party elders insisted that the protests must be suppressed, he submitted to Party discipline yet again.

Much has been made of Zhao?s tearful visit to the students on the square the night before martial law was declared ? ?I?m sorry; I have come too late,? he said ? but he didn?t actually stay with them. Nor did heprotest aloud when the army massacred them two weeks later on 4 June, 1989: he lived and died a loyal son of the Party.

But the last of the Communist true believers are dying off in China now. What has taken their place is a band of careerists whose mutual loyalty mainly depends on the fact that they must hang together lest they hang separately. Their only claim to popular support is the economic miracle that they have allegedly wrought in modern China ? but the real question is whether China would be better off if their genuinely Communist predecessors had never seized power at all.

In the dying days of the old Soviet Union it became popular to calculate how much better off Russia would have been if the Communists had not seized power in 1917. In 1914, Russia had reached about the same level of urbanisation and industrialisation as Italy, and was growing about as fast. By 1989 Italians were about three times richer than Russians, and the gap remains as wide today.

It is harder to make the same argument for China, which was still scarcely industrialised in 1949. But Communist rule merely redistributed misery and produced very little net growth during their first thirty years in power ? and they caused the deaths of about forty million Chinese through murder and starvation. The subsequent 25 years have seen rapid economic growth, but it?s hard to believe that even the most corrupt Nationalist regime would have delivered less net growth since 1949.

In fact, if you consider Taiwan, which started out under exactly that sort of regime in 1949 and today enjoys three or four times China?s per capita income, it is quite impossible to believe. Zhao changed as he aged, becoming less fanatical and abandoning his old enthusiasm for murder and torture as political tools, and he always meant to do good for China. But if he is the last of the ancient breed, good riddance.