BOOK OF THE DAY: CLIFFORD COONANreviews Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang. Translated and edited by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang, and Adi Ignatius. Simon Schuster. Pp306, £20
THERE IS fear, disappointment and dread in the way Zhao Ziyang, once leader of China’s Communist Party, but arrested in 1989 for backing the student demonstrators, describes the opening salvos of the massacre on Tiananmen Square.
“While sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire. A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all.”
These lines are transcripts from secret tapes Zhao made during 16 years of house arrest until his death in 2005 which are now published by Simon Schuster. The 20th anniversary of the massacre takes place this week. In a canon overstuffed with pointless, self-serving political memoirs, Zhao Ziyangs book is a genuine sensation. It gives real insight into how decisions are made inside the cabal that lives at the heart of Zhongnanhai, the impenetrable black box that holds supreme power in one of the world’s great rising superpowers.
In terms of understanding the political process in China, it is the most important book since The Tiananmen Papers from 2001, a gathering of documents about the Beijing spring of 1989 edited by Andrew Nathan and Perry Link. Where this book goes even further is how it gives a personal account of what happened 20 years ago today, the first personal narrative from a leadership perspective about the events leading up to and including the massacre.
This gives real substance to descriptions of the dramatis personae. Former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping comes across as wily and ruthless, reserving judgment until the last on what policy to adopt on the pro-democracy movement.
The detail with which he describes how Deng summoned the standing committee to his house to purge Zhao gives a gangster movie feel to the narrative. At the same time, Zhao is no political naïf, he also recognises Deng as the architect of economic reform, and credits him with a deep intelligence. Zhao’s descriptions confirm the image of then-premier Li Peng, still known among exiled student leaders as “The Butcher of Beijing”, as a hard-nosed political hit-man.
The book is being published in Chinese by New Century Press, which is run by Bao Pu, a Hong Kong-based publisher and son of Zhaos former top aide, Bao Tong, who is under police surveillance in Beijing.
When Zhao gives his views on economic reforms, he sounds very much like current president Hu Jintao. On political issues, student leaders say that he was known even then as a moderate, or at least as more of a moderate than the hardliners who ultimately ousted him from power. The book has some remarkably frank admissions about Zhao’s democratic tendencies.
The big difference between Zhao and the hardliners is that he backed the students, he went on to the square to talk to them, making his last public appearance on May 19th, 1989, in front of the Forbidden City. He urged them to leave the square and said police would use force if they did not.
“At that moment, I was extremely upset. I told myself that no matter what, I refused to become the General Secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on students.”
This decision to do what he thought was the right thing, rather than follow the urge to protect the party, sets him apart from the rest of the leadership, and ultimately cost him his career.
The last word should be Zhao’s. “Whether the Communist Party persists should be determined by the consequences of societys political openness and the competition between the Communist Party and other political powers . . . The trend is irrefutable, that the fittest will survive.”
Clifford Coonan is China correspondent of The Irish Times