Zhao Ziyang's Testament

Posted May 14, 2009

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 led 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.

The book is based on some 30 hours of recordings, each about 60 minutes long, made secretly by Zhao while under house arrest in his lonely courtyard house in Beijing. His family denies any knowledge of the tapes, which were recorded over low quality cassette tapes of kid’s music and Peking operas.  When finished, Zhao distributed different portions of the recordings to trusted friends for safe-keeping. After his death, people aware of this carried out a clandestine attempt to pull them together in one place.

While Western scholars have already written much about these events, Harvard political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar in his foreword to the book says that Zhao provides a first-hand account of the “internal struggle that underlay the vague turbulence visible on the surface.” The memoir opens with a description of Zhao’s daunting effort to halt the bloody crackdown against student demonstrators in June 1989, and how his soft response to the student protests angered party hardliners, and eventually led to his downfall.

He describes how then Premier Li Peng maneuvered behind the scenes while he is on an official trip to North Korea to publish an editorial in the official People’s Daily on April 26 labeling the protests “anti-party, anti-socialist turmoil.” Zhao says the editorial reignited the anger of the students, who were on the verge of retreating from the square, and set the two sides on a collision course. Zhao argued that the students had legitimate gripes, that they should be allowed to freely express themselves, and that they could have been persuaded to return to their campuses.

He contradicts the widely held view that the decision to call in the army in 1989 was put to a formal vote of the Politburo Standing Committee, saying that party strongman Deng Xiaoping was actually unable to win a majority of the five-man Politburo Standing Committee. He says there was no vote, and that the decision lacked procedural legitimacy. Emphasizing his own staunch opposition to the move, he says, “I refused to become the General-Secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students.”

Zhao says that on the night of June 3 he was sitting in his courtyard house with his family when they heard the sound of “intense gunfire.” “A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all,” he said.

What follows are years under house arrest in a heavily guarded Beijing home, in which his movements and contacts with outsiders were often severely restricted. Efforts are made to stop him from visiting local golf courses, and when the former leader insists on going to a club frequented by top officials to play pool, he discovers that the entire club has been cleared of other members to prevent him from meeting with anyone.

He provides intimate details of how party elders, such as Chen Yun and Li Xiannian, jumped on any excuse to undermine him and derail economic reforms, making it difficult for both Zhao to carry out his plan to move toward a market economy.

Chen Yun, China’s former economic czar, and after Deng the most influential party elder, fears that special economic zones are becoming capitalist enclaves and fights back. He questions the motives of foreign investors and launches a Strike Hard Campaign Against Economic Crimes that is really aimed at neutralizing the liberal polices allowed in the zones. Chen Yun argues that  the region around Shanghai and in Zhejiang is “famous for its concentration of opportunists who would, with their consummate skills, emerge from their cages if given the slightest chance.”

While Deng is largely seen as China’s architect of reforms, Zhao’s account gives the former party head more of a supportive role, making it clear that he himself was the first one to make breakthroughs in economic thinking regarding the development of the household responsibility system, which sharply increased agricultural output and raised rural incomes, and the rise of special economic zones, which boosted the economies of coastal China.

Zhao, somewhat of a lone voice crying out for reform in the top Party leadership, manages to push his reforms through the cultivation of Deng. Realizing that he himself doesn’t have the power to keep reforms on track, he pleads with Deng not to retire. Mr. MacFarquhar says that Deng was the “best one-man constituency to have,” but points out that even Deng had to “bob and weave” when faced with opposition from fellow party elders.

Zhao also relies on skillfully playing a game of semantics, using Communist-speak as a cover for what he’s actually trying to do. When preparing for the 1987 Party Congress he uses his newfound power as Party head to devise theoretical arguments to support economic liberations, persuading the Congress to endorse the idea that China is only in the “initial stage of socialism,” a rhetorical invention to cover up the failure to follow orthodox socialist policies.

When he is forced to launch a nationwide Anti-Liberalization Campaign, he spends most of his energy trying to figure out how to prevent the campaign, instigated by Party leftists, from going too far. He immediately places limits on the campaign, ordering that it can only be applied within the Party and cannot touch rural polices or science and technogly and culture. He works hard to limit the number of liberals who fall from power as a result of the campaign.

Zhao says he first begins to change his thinking after making a visit to Europe in 1978, where he finds that instead of trying to “change the conditions defined by heaven and earth,” as was the case in China, where for example, wheat was planted in areas not suited to wheat production, Europeans did farming that was appropriate to the climate and geography, and profited as a result.

He later comes to the conclusion that the lack of an independent judiciary and rule of law means that the problem of corruption can never be resolved. Writing while under house arrest, and lacking information on current developments, he muses that “it appears that up to this day, the problems have not been resolved.”

Zhao admits that that he was initially an economic reformer, and politically conservative, with no interest in political reforms, and he says that the turning point came around 1985 when he realized “a need for political reform from the perspective of economic reform.”

He says between 1986 and 1989, ideas about political reform began to form in his mind for the first time. He said that he saw no need for the Party’s ruling status to be changed, but that the way it governed had to change. In other words, in order to realize rule of law, the existing situation of rule by men had to be changed.

He then advocates far-reaching reforms. He says that the Party should increase transparency of decision making. Next, he calls for multiple channels for dialogue with various social factions and interests to be created. Most important, he says that social groups, unions, youth organizations, and others should no longer be in “monotonous unity” with the Party, and should truly represent the people they are meant to represent. He urges the protection of citizen’s rights, saying “Our constition was a good one, but there were no laws in place to support its implementation.” He also calls for freedom of association, assembly, demonstrations, petitions and strikes, and calls for limited press freedom.

Zhao points out that Deng had on several occasions said that political reform was necessary, but that the reform the strong man had in mind was more of administrative reform, rather than modernization and democratization of politics. For Deng, a precondition of reform was upholding the Communist Party’s one-party rule. Reforms were intended to further consolidate the Party’s grip on power, and not weaken it. According to Zhao, Deng was particularly opposed to a multiparty system and the parliamentary system of Western countries.

After some discussion of other political parties being allowed to establish leading groups, Deng Maomao, Deng’s daughter, sends a message to Zhao saying, “When Deng spoke of expanding participation by other political parties, he was just talking. How can this be taken seriously?”

In an instance that appears to be extreme naivete, he confesses to once believing that people were once the masters of their affairs only in the Soviet and socialist nations. He concludes, however, that this is, in fact, not the case, and that the democratic systems of socialist nations are “all just superficial,” adding that “they are not systems in which the people are in charge, but rather are ruled by a few or even a single person.” Zhao then confirms that parliamentary democracy, while albeit not perfect, is the only system currently suitable for China.

Reading his prescient economic and political views, one can only wonder what might have happened had he not had his political career cut short at such a transitional period in China’s history. Had Zhao had been allowed to proceed with his plan for for such reforms, what would China be like today?

Paul Mooney is a free-lance writer based in Beijing.