Deposed Chinese leader's memoir released ahead of Tiananmen anniversary
But just weeks before the 20th anniversary of the brutal quelling of pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, the former Chinese premier ousted for opposing the crackdown has broken his silence in a posthumous memoir.
The 306-page book, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, provides rare insight into the inner workings of the Communist Party during a critical time.
And in a conclusion extraordinary for someone who devoted his career to the party, Zhao Ziyang urges China to become a parliamentary democracy in order to truly modernize.
The memoir, which will be released May 19, was crafted over four years from tapes recorded in secret by Zhao, who lived under tightly monitored house arrest for 15 years until his death in 2005.
It chronicles the events that led up to the 1989 protests and details how party leaders grappled with the situation. It also describes for the first time the loneliness the snowy-haired, bespectacled Zhao — who loved golf and Western suits — felt while under house arrest.
"The entrance to my home is a cold, desolate place," Zhao says.
Book offers intimate details of political infighting
While the book covers the same ground others have explored, the first-person account and intimate details of political bickering and machinations are new.
"It's absolutely invaluable," Bao Pu, one of the book's editors and the son of Bao Tong, Zhao's top aide, said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong. "[It will] restore some of the history that has been intentionally erased or distorted.
"The man himself did not leave any instructions on how these recordings should be used. But there is no doubt in my mind that he wants his version of the story to survive." "He's in the position to tell the truth. It's the only thing he's got."
While it may raise eyebrows among the Communist Party leadership, it is unlikely to cause real waves among the top cadre. The leaders who took over after Zhao's ouster have marginalized his liberal wing of the party. Their official verdict — that the crushing of the Tiananmen protests paved the way for China's economic success — is generally accepted among the political and business elite.
A protégé of the then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, Zhao helped launch China's economic boom in the 1980s through bold reform that brought new prosperity to an economy stagnated by the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
But because he clashed with other party factions over the Tiananmen protests — centered around calls for more political freedom and an end to corruption — and was sympathetic to the demonstrators, he was accused of "splitting the party" and purged on June 24, 1989.
Zhao was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, the day before martial law was declared in Beijing, when he made a tearful visit to Tiananmen Square to talk to student hunger strikers. He famously apologized to them, saying "I have come too late."
Two weeks later, on June 3-4, the military crushed the dissent, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people.
Based on nearly 30 hours of secret recordings
In the preface, Adi Ignatius, another editor, describes how Zhao methodically captured his memories in the year 2000 by "recording over some low-quality cassette tapes that were lying around the house — kid's music, Peking opera."
"Members of his family say they knew nothing about the project," Ignatius said, adding that Zhao used only light pencil markings to indicate the tapes' order but did not write titles or notes.
In audio clips from Zhao's recordings posted on the New York Times website, he sounds unhurried and pauses to think, despite the tight guard and immense risk. The recording catches his sighs, the sound of pages turning and the pop of static associated with cassette recordings.
"It's said that the goal of this event was to overturn the Communist Party," he says of the protests. "Where's the evidence for that?"
Road to publication a 'complex, clandestine effort'
When he was done, he passed the tapes to various trusted friends for safekeeping, giving each one only a small part of the recordings to minimize the risk. After Zhao's death, all the materials were gathered to be transcribed in one place in a "complex, clandestine effort," Ignatius said.
The whole process took two years, and another two were needed to translate Zhao's words and bring the book to fruition, Bao said.
In the last chapter, Zhao praises the Western system of parliamentary democracy and says it is the only way China can solve its problems of corruption and a growing gap between the rich and poor.
"We must establish that the final goal of political reform is the realization of this advanced political system. If we don't move towards this goal, it will be impossible to resolve the abnormal conditions in China's market economy," he says.
In another key chapter, Zhao describes the chaos and political tussle surrounding the party's decision to impose martial law to quash the Tiananmen protests. Zhao says he told Deng in a May 17 meeting that "if we take a confrontational stance with the masses, a dangerous situation could ensue in which we lose complete control."
Even so, Deng decided on his own to start a military crackdown. Zhao says he left the meeting "extremely upset."
"I told myself that no matter what, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students," Zhao says.
On the night of June 3, when tanks rumbled down the Avenue of Eternal Peace and the shooting began, Zhao was sitting in his courtyard with his family, and the significance of the event sank in.
"A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all," he said.