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Review: Smuggled memoir of Communist leader under house arrest deepens insight into China's strainings toward democracy

18.06.2009

Until now, the key books on modern China have been "The Tiananmen Papers," a leaked account of how an aging, frightened Deng Xiaoping bungled his way into a bloody crackdown two decades ago, and "Mao: The Unknown Story," an explosive biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Here comes a third: "Prisoner of the State," the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang.
Zhao is the former premier and secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party who was put under house arrest after seeking an accommodation with the students in the Tiananmen Square revolt 20 years ago.
Best known as the communist leader who cried when he met the demonstrators in the square, Zhao was forbidden to give interviews - or even play golf - during the 16 years of seclusion that preceded his death in 2005. Yet he managed to record his memoirs over tapes of children's music and have them smuggled out of the country.
Though the book covers the years before and after the uprising, its most dramatic revelations occur in Zhao's account of the infighting among Communist Party officials as they hesitated before crushing the pro-democracy protest on June 4, 1989.
In these pages, Deng, the country's leader and himself a victim of Mao Zedong's tempestuous Cultural Revolution, emerges as a man for whom stability was everything. If it meant turning the army on the people, so be it. Though a reformist, Deng opposed any separation of powers. There were three governments in the U.S., he once grumbled: You never knew which one you were dealing with, so you couldn't get anything done.
Though we knew something of this from "The Tiananmen Papers," Zhao's memoirs offer new insights. He had, after all, been in effective charge of the economy; his disclosures about how the country lurched forward in the teeth of conservative opposition are important to today's China, the world's largest developing economy. That's why the first Chinese edition of this book, published in Hong Kong (but not the mainland) sold out within hours.
Zhao's tales of palace intrigues over economic policy in the 1980s don't make for easy reading. Yet anyone who does business in China, invests in the country or just wants to know where it's headed should ponder this book. Here we have an insider's explanation of China's zigzag advance under leaders seeking to open up the economy while keeping a lid on politics.
As described in these pages, the development of today's soaring Pudong district of Shanghai is reminiscent of Chicago in the 1920s, with China's ideological conservatives playing the gangsters who do the wrecking. Old-time Maoists, they long feared that giving leases to foreigners could drag China back to the humiliating colonial era of "foreign concessions," when the country forfeited its sovereignty.
We witness the battle between market reformers and the old guard, with their phobias about "bourgeois liberalization" and "spiritual pollution." We also follow the evolution of Zhao's own thinking. Zhao, who had long stood for political as well as economic reform, realized that a market economy meant more corruption. This, he came to see, demanded more press freedom, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Unconsciously echoing Winston Churchill, Zhao writes that the Western democratic system was "the best one available," though the transitional period would be long. In a country the size of China, a sudden lurch into a multiparty system could bring chaos, as it did under Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia.
Zhao's willingness to contemplate democracy at all is the most startling aspect of this book. For a former secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party to conclude that the American way is the answer is like a leader of the U.S. Republican Party deciding in retirement that Vladimir Lenin had been right all along.
His experiences, however bleak, offer hope. The promise lies in the fact that someone of his humanity and open-mindedness managed to emerge from the viciousness and obscurantism of the Maoist regime. In a totalitarian state, the only roads to change are mass insurrection or enlightened leaders inside the system. Zhao's attempts at a democratic revolution from above were cruelly frustrated, but - who knows? - perhaps there will be more.
(George Walden witnessed the Cultural Revolution as a U.K. diplomat in Beijing in 1966-69. A former Member of Parliament, he is the author of "China: A Wolf in the World?")
Nonfiction
TITLE: "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang"
EDITOR: Adi Ignatius
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster
PRICE: $26; PAGES: 336

Source: Mercury News

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