Author: Adi Ignatius
Publication: Time
Date: May 25, 2009
URL: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1898042,00.html
Introduction: Twenty Years after China's tragedy,
a secret journal reveals new details of the power struggle that led to the
massacre
When the tanks and troops blasted their way
into Beijing's Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, crushing the student-led protest
movement that had captivated the world, the biggest political casualty was
Chinese Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, the man who had tried hardest to
avoid the bloodshed.
Outmaneuvered by his hard-line rivals, Zhao
was stripped of power and placed under house arrest. The daring innovator
who had introduced capitalist policies to post-Mao Zedong China spent his
last 16 years virtually imprisoned, rarely allowed to venture away from his
home on a quiet alley in Beijing. As his hair turned white, Zhao passed many
lonely hours driving golf balls into a net in his courtyard.
Yet as it 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 stature
- as head of the party, Zhao was nominally China's highest-ranking official
- has spoken frankly about life at the top. Most significantly, Zhao's account
could encourage future Chinese leaders to revisit the events of Tiananmen
and acknowledge the government's tragic mistakes there. Hundreds of people
were killed or imprisoned by government forces, though few Chinese today know
the full story.
In the 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 three weeks before the Tiananmen massacre. Zhao argued that the
government should back off from its harsh threats against the protesters and
look for ways to ease tensions. Two conservative officials immediately stood
up to criticize Zhao, effectively blaming the escalating protests on him.
Deng had the last word with his fateful decision to impose martial law and
move troops into the capital. In a rare historical instance of a split at
the party's highest levels, Zhao wouldn't sign on: "I refused to become
the General Secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students."
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 in.
When the assault on Tiananmen began, he could
only wince as he heard the pop-pop-pop of automatic rifles near his home:
"While sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire,"
he wrote. "A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was
happening after all."
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 few recordings
were of discussions with friends. But most were taped alone, and Zhao apparently
read from a text he had prepared.
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, perhaps the
originals, was found hidden among his grandchildren's toys in his study.
The power structure described in the book
is chaotic and often bumbling. In Zhao's narrative, Deng is a conflicted figure
who urges Zhao to push hard for economic change but demands a crackdown on
anything that seems to challenge the party's authority. Deng is at times portrayed
not as an emperor but as a puppet subject to manipulation by Zhao or his rivals,
depending on who presents his case to the old man first.
Once placed under house arrest, Zhao could
do little but obsess over past events, rewinding the clock to pore over the
technicalities of the state's case against him. His few attempts to venture
out met with almost comically Kafkaesque resistance. For example, when authorities
finally permitted him to play pool at a club for party officials, they first
swept the place of other people, ensuring that Zhao played alone. His captors
ultimately succeeded in keeping him out of view and silencing his voice, and
they put up enough obstacles to deter all but the most determined visitors.
As he said in his recordings, "The entrance to my home is a cold, desolate
place."
Yet inside the gate, Zhao was busy at work,
taping the journal that now gives him a final say about what really happened
and what might have been. It's a fitting final act for a man who made enormous
contributions to today's China. Although Deng generally gets credit for modernizing
China's economy, it was Zhao who brought about the innovations - from breaking
up Mao's collective farms to creating freewheeling special economic zones
along the coast - that jolted China's economy from its slumber. And it was
Zhao who had to continually outflank powerful rivals who didn't want to see
the system change.
The China that Zhao describes is very much
alive now. The country's team of leaders continues to promote economic freedom
yet intimidates or arrests anyone who dares to call for political change.
At the end of last year, more than 300 Chinese activists, marking the 60th
anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, jointly signed Charter
08, a document that calls on the party to reform its political system and
allow freedom of expression. Beijing responded as it often does: it interrogated
many of the signatories and arrested some, including prominent dissident Liu
Xiaobo, who was active during the Tiananmen protests.
At the end of his journal, Zhao concludes
that China must become a parliamentary democracy to meet the challenges of
the modern world - a remarkable observation from someone who spent his entire
career in service to the Communist Party, and one that might well provoke
a debate on China's Internet discussion boards and in its chat rooms. Zhao's
ultimate aim was a strong economy, but he had become convinced that this goal
was inextricably linked to the development of democracy. China's ability to
avoid another tragedy like Tiananmen might depend on how quickly that comes
about.
- Ignatius is the editor of Harvard Business
Review and one of the editors of Prisoner of the State.
