PENG, 95, CHINESE HARD-LINE LEADER, FORMER BEIJING MAYOR ASSOCIATED PRESS.

Peng Zhen, one of China's foremost hard-line leaders, died on Saturday at age 95.

Best known as the longtime mayor of Beijing who was the first prominent victim of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Peng spent 12 years in internal exile before re-emerging to help codify an authoritarian legal framework for China after the death of Mao Tse-tung in 1976. The legal framework included a harsh criminal code that gave the police, prosecutors and courts all-encompassing power under the Communist Party's direction.

As one of the party's toughest enforcers and legal experts, Peng was the epitome of politically correct Marxism-Leninism, and though his death is likely to further weaken hard-line influence here, his opposition to private property, capitalism and Western culture had been a powerful brake on the pace of economic reform and on the prospect for political change.

Peng helped draft China's 1982 Constitution, and as chairman of the National People's Congress, he worked closely with a senior hard-liner, Chen Yun, who died in 1995, to obstruct many of the economic reforms promoted by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

A dispatch by the New China News Agency said Peng died at 11:40 p.m. on Saturday of an unspecified ``illness.''