June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square massacre of its own people. The man who was the Chinese Communist Party chief at that time, Zhao Ziyang, was the person within the party who tried hardest to avoid bloodshed by pleading with the tens of thousands of protesters to back off. Hard-liners, led by Deng Xiaping, imposed martial law and moved troops in to crack down. Zhao refused to sign on. He spent the last 16 years of his life virtually imprisoned in his own home, which was closely monitored.
Zhao, the man who daringly introduced capitalism to China, amazingly snuck his memoirs out of the country by distributing to selected friends tapes he had made, mostly on casettes he had lying around the house, such as Peking opera and kids tapes. He methodically noted their order by numbering them with faint pencil marks. After he died four years ago, his trusted friends who had also been high-level party officials, gathered the materials in one place and had them transcribed.
One of the editors of the book, which is titled Prisoner of the State, is Adi Ignatius, who is also editor of the Harvard Business Review. Ignatius writes in the May 25 Time Magazine that at the end of his journal, Zhao concludes that China must become a parliamentary democracy if it is to meet the challenges of the modern world.
China's current team of leaders continue to promote economic freedom, but intimidates or arrests anyone who dares call for political change. I am guessing Zhao's book will be the subject of much interest on the internet.
2 comments:
My company once sponsored a young woman from China. She was convinced that Tiammen Square was a western plot to make her country look bad. Maybe this book will convince her otherwise.
On the other hand, in 1989, I was sharing an office in North Dallas with a young man from China. He was prominent in organizing some of his friends for a trip to D.C. to protest the Chinese government's suppression of the demonstrators.
Oddly enough, a few months later, he entered Parkland Hospital on a weekend with some breathing problems. Within hours he was dead.
He had been fine on Friday. We always thought it was a little suspicious.
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