OF WHAT INTEREST IS VITALITY TO THE PRC?:

Purged Chinese Communist chief wrote secret memoir: Zhao Ziyang, who reached out to Tiananmen protesters in 1989, issues a posthumous call for democracy. The book is not available in China, but readers are getting excerpts on the Internet. (Barbara Demick, May 16, 2009, LA Times)

Despite the Chinese government's intent to keep the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square out of public discourse, audio recordings and excerpts of a memoir by the Communist Party chief who was purged for opposing it have begun circulating quietly on the Internet.

Before his death in 2005, Zhao Ziyang secretly recorded 30 hours of tapes that have been turned into a memoir, "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang."

Among his revelations, Zhao contradicts the widely held belief that the Standing Committee of the Communist Party's Politburo made a formal vote to call in the military. And he lays out clearly the defiance that got him sacked.

"I refused to become the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students," Zhao declares.

The last time Zhao was seen in public was the early morning of May 19, 1989, at Tiananmen Square. With a bullhorn in hand and tears in his eyes, Zhao, who had resigned as premier two years earlier to focus on his job as party chief, begged demonstrating students to end their hunger strike. Later that day, Premier Li Peng called in the military, leading to the events of June 4, when soldiers killed hundreds of protesters.

The memoir is clearly intended as something of a manifesto for change. In his last year, the tapes reveal, Zhao became more convinced that China could not become a successful market economy without allowing democracy.

"In fact, it is the Western parliamentary democratic system that has demonstrated the most vitality," he says.

No regime with a one-child policy can even be argued to care about vitality.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 16, 2009 8:24 AM