Zhao Ziyang’s Tiananmen memoirs to be published
http://www.weeklystandard.com/
It could be time for a long overdue reckoning.
The Timesonline reports that the people’s hero Zhao Ziyang managed to secretly record his account of the events of 20 years ago despite having been purged and forced to live out his days under the watchful, punitive eye of the paranoid state:
The memoirs of the Chinese Communist Party leader purged for favouring the students during the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square – prepared with the utmost secrecy during years of house arrest – will finally been revealed.
So sensitive is this document, the first memoir ever to be written by such a senior Chinese party official, that even its existence had been kept a closely guarded secret. Speculation had been rife during his nearly 16 years of house arrest and after his death in 2005 as to whether the man with the most intimate knowledge of the behind-the-scenes machinations that led up to the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 3-4 1989 had provided his own account of those dramatic days.
The record made by Zhao Ziyang, Secretary General of the Communist Party from 1987 until his fall from power in 1989, are to be published this month as Prisoner of the State: The secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang.
Now let’s wait for the ‘hurt feelings’ or ‘interfering in our affairs’ squeals from China’s leaders. Read more of Jane Macartney’s report here.
Update
Jeremiah at Granite Studio has injected some great humour into Zhao’s possible embarrassing revelations. He also points to the NYT’s site where they are running excerpts of Zhao’s Prisoner of the State.
Update 2
Richard of Peking Duck fame has written a guest blog for Global Post in which he praises Philip Cunningham’s observations on the release of Zhao’s memoirs. Cunningham takes a swipe at Beijing’s revisionist policy on Tiananmen:
To blame it on the students, as many young people in China do today, is to fall for a propaganda line, to take one’s eye off the ball.
The value of releasing Mr Zhao’s belated memoir, which goes for the jugular by singling out a hard-line clique within the CCP, on this, the 20th anniversary of an unnecessary tragedy, is to get the public eye back on the culpability of those most culpable.
And well he might – he was most definitely there.