Far Eastern Economic Review, 14 May 2009, Paul Mooney
In a memoir released this month, a late former senior Communist Party official provides an unprecedented insider’s view of the brutal opaque party politics in China’s march toward economic and political reforms during the late 1970s and 1980s.
Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, based on 30 hours of secretly taped recordings that were smuggled out of China, is the first genuine memoir to be published by a senior Communist Party official without heavy self-censorship. The memoirs of China’s former premier and party general-secretary, comes four years after his death and almost 20 years after his fall from power, brought about by the student demonstrations that rocked China in the spring of 1989.
Speaking from the grave, Zhao describes the vicious political infighting and petty disputes that frustrated his economic-reform program, and the events that lead up to the bloody crackdown in June 1989. The memoir is bound to anger and embarrass China’s senior leadership, which prides itself on keeping the Party’s internal debates shrouded in secrecy.
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