Word: zhao
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With his political career more or less finished, Zhao went to Tiananmen Square to talk to some of the tens of thousands of protesters massed there. Premier Li Peng, Zhao's primary rival, tagged along - though Zhao says Li was "terrified" and quickly left the scene. A teary Zhao spoke to student leaders through a bullhorn. "We have come too late," he said, urging students to leave the square to help calm things down. Few heeded his words. About two weeks later, the tanks and troops were sent...
...turns out, Zhao never stopped thinking about Tiananmen. Through courage and subterfuge, he found a way, in the isolation of his heavily monitored home, to secretly record his account of what it was like to serve at China's highest levels of power - and more amazingly, he sneaked his memoir out of the country. Published this month, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang provides an intimate look at one of the world's most opaque regimes during some of modern China's most critical moments. It marks the first time a Chinese leader of such...
...book, Zhao, who died in 2005, details the drama and conflict behind the scenes during the Tiananmen protests. The priority of the party's leaders ultimately wasn't to suppress a rebellion but to settle a power struggle between conservative and liberal factions. China's hard-liners had tried for years to derail the economic and political innovations that Zhao had introduced; Tiananmen, Zhao demonstrates in his journal, gave the conservatives a pretext to set the clock back. The key moment in Zhao's narrative is a meeting held at Deng Xiaoping's home on May 17, 1989, less than...
...Zhao's effort to record and preserve his memoir required both secrecy and conspiracy. Under the noses of his captors, he recorded his material on about 30 tapes, each roughly an hour long. Judging from the content, most of the recording took place in or around 2000. Members of his family say even they were unaware that this was taking place. The recordings were on cassettes - mostly Peking opera and kids' music - that had been lying around the house. Zhao methodically noted their order by numbering them with faint pencil marks. There were no titles or other notes. The first...
...When Zhao had finished the taping after a couple of years, he found a way to pass the material to a few trusted friends who had also been high-level party officials. Each was given only some of the recordings, evidently to hedge against their being lost or confiscated. After Zhao died four years ago, some of the people who knew about the recordings - they can't be named here because of fears of retaliation from Chinese authorities - launched a complex, clandestine effort to gather the material in one place and transcribe it for publication. Later, another set of tapes...