What does Xi Jinping's commemoration of Hu Yaobang mean?

Xi Jinping has lauded Hu Yaobang on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the famously fallen liberal party leader of the 1980s whose death in April 1989 triggered the Tiananmen protests. What does it mean?

Most likely, similar to his recent ploy in meeting President Ma of Taiwan, Xi is demonstrating ideological and political flexibility and practicality. The message he's sending to Chinese liberals is: "You don't have a monopoly on the legacy of our greatest reformers." Just like with the Ma meeting, he was telling Taiwanese: "Your fate ultimately lies with the Chinese world, not in drifting away from it."

These are subtle but politically astute moves for someone who has demonstrated a willingness to be tough and uncompromising on the fundamentals of CPC rule.

Perhaps Xi will one day reveal that he was privately sympathetic to the cause of political reform of both Hu and Hu's similarly disgraced successor, Zhao Ziyang, whose timidity during the 1989 Tiananmen crisis sealed the hardliners' triumph within the party before the June 4 crackdown. After all, his father had benefited so much from the bold reforms of the Deng era, which secured Xi Jinping's own political rise. Or maybe Xi wasn't too happy with his father when the elder Xi took a costly pro-Hu stance against the conservatives, effectively marginalizing himself within the council of "eight elders" that ruled China as the informal trustees of the revolution during Tiananmen.

Whatever the truth of the matter that can't be brought to the light yet, I encourage all Chinese liberals and China watchers hopeful of eventual political reform to grasp at the positive aspect of this commemoration of Hu by Xi: if we share a common figure of admiration and respect with Xi Jinping, that's a potential point of future accord.

Or to put it more bluntly, we should at least be thankful that the most powerful princeling of the current generation of leaders also happens to be the one most closely connected to the early reformers...considering how things nearly went awry with Bo Xilai, we shouldn't take this for granted.