Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang

Posted June 5, 2009

The publication of Zhao Ziyang’s secret memoirs on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre has consolidated the late liberal party chief’s reputation as the Chinese Communist Party’s most committed—and resolute—reformer. The tome, based on some 30 tapes clandestinely recorded during Zhao’s 16 years of house arrest, examines issues ranging from factors behind the Tiananmen bloodbath to the future of the world’s largest political party. Its disquieting conclusion is that the CCP lost a golden opportunity for bloodless, far-reaching liberalization in 1989, and that the prospects for reform are now dismal.

In CCP history, Zhao, who lost power a few weeks before the crackdown, has remained the only senior cadre who dares to say no to both party dogma and to Deng Xiaoping, the reigning, emperor-like patriarch. In a fateful showdown in Deng’s home held on May 17, 1989, Zhao’s rational approach of seeking reconciliation with the students was spurned by Deng, as well as conservative cadres such as then Premier Li Peng. Zhao refused to call in the People’s Liberation Army to crush the prodemocracy student demonstrators. He recalls wistfully: “I refused to accept the assignment to chair the meeting of cadres to announce martial law. I said, ‘It seems my mission in history has already ended.’” Zhao also put up a spirited defense of his prodemocracy stance in a CCP Central Committee meeting called in late June to confirm his dismissal for “splitting the party.”

While a couple of memoirs were published soon after Zhao’s death in January 2005, Prisoner of the State has a ring of authenticity and a poignancy that brings tears to those who care about China’s fate. Incarcerated in a well-guarded alley in central Beijing, Zhao lifts the veil over the Byzantine skullduggery behind much of high-level CCP politics. For example, despite the fact that Deng had said much about rejuvenation and other institutional changes within the party, there was no question that the country was under the yoke of Maoist-style “rule of personality.” The firing of Zhao’s predecessor Hu Yaobang as party general secretary in January 1987 was done without the convention of a Central Committee meeting, as mandated by the CCP Charter. Zhao, who had been prime minister since 1980, reluctantly took over Hu’s job—and had to yield economic decision-making to the conservative, scheming Li.

And as Deng lapsed into paranoia and self-denial after student protests that were ignited by Hu’s death on April 15, the patriarch only listened to what he wanted to hear: trumped-up, conspiracy reports filed by Premier Li and Maoist elders such as Li Xiannian and Wang Zhen. Meanwhile, the conservatives did everything to taunt and provoke the students, making a confrontation all but impossible to avoid.

Prisoner of the State is the testimony of a lonely man who feels that his life work for China’s modernization has gone down the drain. Yet Zhao indulges in neither self-pity nor self-glorification. He recalls his run-ins with Hu—who often did not see eye to eye with Zhao on economic policies—with fairness and objectivity. Zhao is candid about the fact that he went along with Deng’s decision to sack Hu in 1987—and that he said nary a word in defense of his comrade-in-arms.

The liberal titan also admits that his power and standing in the party suffered a severe blow the year before the 1989 massacre. In mid-1988, Zhao was at least partly responsible for unleashing radical price reforms that resulted in panic buying and bank runs. Not surprisingly, Premier Li and Vice Premier Yao Yilin tried to pin the blame on Zhao while refusing to carry out liberalization measures that would have cushioned some of the shock of price reform.

Surveying half a century of Chinese history, Zhao comes to the conclusion that Western-style parliamentary democracy is the only way out. He urges his former colleagues to “allow other political parties and a free press to exist.” The old man realizes, however, that the path to political liberalization is strewn with near-insurmountable obstacles. Recalling the relatively mild and limited steps forward that he had taken in the mid-1980s, Zhao notes that such efforts became “more difficult” if they impinged upon vested interests. “The resistance to political reform primarily came from the leadership, at all levels within the Party,” he writes. “If economic reform can be said to have easily gained the support of the ‘dukes’ [regional leaders], political reform met with their reluctance and resistance.”

Although Zhao was only allowed to see a score or so of old associates during his long incarceration, the former party chief must have realized that China’s “ruling class” had metamorphosed into a nexus of power blocs consisting of party factions, business groups and other entrenched interests. The slightest truncation of this conglomerate’s near-omnipotence would translate into losses worth hundreds of billions of dollars. If it was at least theoretically possible 20 years ago for a dedicated core within the CCP to push through reform, this possibility seems to have petered out.

The 1989 democracy movement came about thanks to a monumental split in the CCP leadership. Since then, the party elite have learned the lesson from not only the massacre but also the collapse of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc. Despite perennial wrangling among the CCP’s disparate cliques, all senior cadres realized they must hang together on the one imperative of maintaining orthodoxy, sustaining ironclad control of the country, and, in Deng’s words, “nipping destabilizing forces in the bud.”

At the end of his journals, Zhao calls upon both cadres and ordinary citizens to heed the dictum of pioneering revolutionary Sun Yat-sen: “Worldwide trends are enormous and powerful; those who follow them prosper, and those who resist them perish.” Unfortunately, few senior officials today pay much attention to “world trends” or ideals of whatever stripes. Their sole preoccupation is staying in power—and seeking benefits for themselves and their cronies. Zhao’s demise spelled the end of a whole generation of CCP members who still cared about lofty, nonmaterialistic goals. It is fortunate, however, that we have these journals to remind posterity that such idealistic cadres once existed.

Willy Lam is a sinologist and author of The Era of Zhao Ziyang: Power Struggle in China 1986-88 (A.B. Books, 1989).