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Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang Bao Pu, Renee Chiang, Adi Ignatius, tran.s and ed.s Simon & Schuster, 2009
Zhao Ziyang was the General Secretary of China's Communist Party for the two years preceding the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, and had previously been in charge of China's economic development as Premier. He fell out of favor with Deng Xiaoping, China's behind-the-scenes ruler, when he refused to carry out Deng's decision to invoke the Army against the student demonstrators. Zhao was removed as General Secretary and spent the remaining 16 years of his life under house arrest. Thanks to successful efforts by the Party of obliterate him from memory, he is now a nonperson" in China.
In about 2000, Zhao taped about thirty hours of memoirs devoted mainly to the three years before his removal from power. He distributed the tapes to various friends, who managed to gather them after his death in 2005. A second set was found in his study. One of the friends, who is also one of the people who edited and translated the tapes, was Bao Pu, whose father was imprisoned for seven years for allying himself with Zhao's opposition to the declaration of martial law. The present book is the first public presentation of the memoirs.
The book has historic significance as one of the few "insider's" accounts of people and events within the Chinese Communist inner circle. It is no doubt of considerable interest to expert China watchers, and for the rest of us it tells us much that we haven't known before. The memoirs are strong in recounting a number of political and economic facts about China over the forty-year span between the Communist victory in 1949 and Zhao's ouster in 1989. Oddly, however, it is devoid of much that one would expect in a memoir: any introspection on Zhao's part; any explication of the reasons for the positions he took, which he simply posits as desirable; very much serious discussion of the evolution of Chinese Communist ideology; and any description of the intellectual influences that (somehow) came to Zhao's attention to convert him into one of China's "liberals." These voids leave the memoirs surprisingly empty of intellectual and psychological...