Zhao Ziyang, with bullhorn, made his final appearance in Tiananmen Square with student protesters on May 19, 1989. Mr. Zhao's aide, Wen Jiabao, second from right, is now China's prime minister.May 15, 2009 By ERIK ECKHOLM (NY Times)
In May 1989, as he feuded with hard-line party rivals over how to handle the students occupying Tiananmen Square, China’s Communist Party chief requested a personal audience with Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch behind the scenes.
The party chief, Zhao Ziyang, was told to go to Mr. Deng’s home on the afternoon of May 17 for what he thought would be a private talk. To his dismay, he arrived to find that Mr. Deng had assembled several key members of the Politburo, including Mr. Zhao’s bitter foes.
“I realized that things had already taken a bad turn,” Mr. Zhao recalls in a secretly recorded memoir only now coming to light — a rare first-person account of crisis politics at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
From Mr. Deng’s impatient body language and the scathing attacks he received from his rivals, Mr. Zhao says in the memoir, which is now being published in book form, it was obvious that Mr. Deng had already decided to overrule Mr. Zhao’s proposal for dialogue with the students and impose martial law.
“It seems my mission in history has already ended,” Mr. Zhao recalls telling a party elder later that day. “I told myself that no matter what, I would not be the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students.”
As Mr. Zhao anticipated, he was immediately sidelined and soon vilified for “splitting the party.” He was purged and placed under house arrest until his death in 2005.
But in this long, enforced retirement, it turns out, Mr. Zhao secretly recorded his own account, on 30 musical cassette tapes that were spirited out of the country by former aides and supporters, of his rise to national power in the 1980s, his battles with the old guard, and his alliance and tussles with Mr. Deng as he loosened Soviet-style controls and helped put China on a path to the dynamic economic power it has become today.
Mr. Zhao also tells how he was outmaneuvered during the lengthy student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in the spring of 1989, setting up his ouster shortly before the military crackdown on June 4 of that year.
One striking claim in the memoir, scholars who have seen it said, is that Mr. Zhao presses the case that he pioneered the opening of China’s economy to the world and the initial introduction of market forces in agriculture and industry — steps he says were fiercely opposed by hard-liners and not always fully supported by Mr. Deng, the paramount leader, who is often credited with championing market-oriented policies.
In the late 1970s, as the party chief in Sichuan Province, Mr. Zhao had started dismantling Maoist-style collective farms. Mr. Deng, who had just consolidated power after Mao’s death, brought him to Beijing in 1980 as prime minister with a mandate for change. Mr. Zhao, who like other Chinese leaders had little training in or experience of market economics, describes his political battles and missteps as he tried to give more rein to free enterprise.
Roderick MacFarquhar, a China expert at Harvard who wrote an introduction to the new book, said it had given him a new appreciation of Mr. Zhao’s central role in devising economic strategies, including some, like promoting foreign trade in coastal provinces, that he had urged on Mr. Deng, rather than the other way around.
“Deng Xiaoping was the godfather, but on a day-to-day basis Zhao was the actual architect of the reforms,” Mr. MacFarquhar said in an interview.
Recording over children’s songs and Beijing Opera performances on the cassettes in his guarded compound just north of Tiananmen Square, Mr. Zhao describes in generally modest terms his tenure as prime minister and then party secretary.
Mr. Zhao had initially written notes and then around 2000, encouraged by three sympathetic former officials who were allowed to visit him, decided to tape his memoirs, which he did partly in the presence of those supporters, said Bao Tong, a former close adviser to Mr. Zhao who remains under tight surveillance in Beijing.
Two of the former officials have since died, but one of them, Du Dao-zheng, a former senior official who oversaw press and publications, arranged for a copy of the tapes to be smuggled to Hong Kong. Mr. Du, who lives in China, decided in recent weeks to openly acknowledge his role in a statement that is quoted in the forthcoming Chinese edition of the memoir but not available in time for the English edition.
Mr. Bao, in an interview this week, called the memoir “very rare historical material” that “belongs to all the people of China and to the world.” He said that the voice was unmistakably that of Mr. Zhao and that the memoir’s authenticity was not in doubt.
Nearly 20 years after the crackdown and Mr. Zhao’s fall, the edited transcripts are being published by Simon and Schuster in a book, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang,” that will be formally released in the United States on May 19. A Chinese-language edition is being published in Hong Kong.
“This is the first time that such a high Chinese leader has been in a position to tell the truth,” said Bao Pu, a son of Bao Tong who is an editor of the book and a translator of the English-language edition. “At that point, the truth is all he had.”
Also credited as translators and editors are Renee Chiang, a publisher in Hong Kong, and Adi Ignatius, an American journalist who covered China in the 1980s.
Although the tumult of 1989 is distant for many Chinese, it remains a forbidden subject, heavily censored on the Internet and rarely if ever mentioned in the state-run media. Beijing authorities are likely to be unhappy with Mr. Zhao’s airing of inside conflicts as well as his conclusion, arrived at in isolation after he left power, that China must turn toward parliamentary democracy if it is to tackle corruption.
In a sharp break with Chinese Communist tradition, even for dismissed officials, Mr. Zhao provides personal details of tense party sessions. He attacks several officials, especially his archrival, the conservative former prime minister Li Peng, who fiercely opposed or, in his view, betrayed him. He describes how they schemed to turn Mr. Deng against him.
Mr. Zhao said that in 1989 he argued that most of the demonstrating students “were only asking us to correct our flaws, not attempting to overthrow our political system.”
These efforts to defuse tensions were “blocked, resisted, and sabotaged by Li Peng and his associates,” Mr. Zhao said.
Perry Link, emeritus professor of Chinese studies at Princeton who was in Beijing in 1989, said: “Laying bare the personal animosities from such a high position is something new here. It’s certainly the element that will send officials in Beijing through the roof.”
The debate over how to respond to protesting students was part of a continuing struggle over economic and political change. “What becomes clear in these tapes is that in the minds of Chinese leaders, Tiananmen was a continuation of their battles through the 1980s,” said Bao Pu, who is also a rights advocate and an editor in Hong Kong.
By forcing out Mr. Zhao and restoring a political grip that remains largely in place today, the conservatives squelched hopes that China’s economic reforms would be accompanied by systematic political change. But they were also surprised by the popular revulsion over the crackdown.
With the society in turmoil and especially after seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Deng began pressing even harder, in his waning years, for market-style changes, or what he renamed “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Despite his economic triumphs, Mr. Zhao may be remembered most for his futile effort to head off violence in 1989. In the tapes, he describes how he learned that the army had started its bloody march to the square at the heart of Beijing.
“On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire,” Mr. Zhao said.
Question
How far do Zhao Ziyang's revelations confirm your current understanding and perceptions of the workings of the CCP?
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