The Secret Memoirs of Zhao Ziyang

Posted on May 14, 2009

The secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the top Chinese Communist official during the Tiananmen Square massacre, are going to be published, four years after his death. The contents are incendiary. Zhao was imprisoned under house arrest for sympathizing with the students during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstration. The tapes had to be smuggled out of China to get to a Western publisher.

The tapes were smuggled out of China and will be published in English and Chinese this month � as Prisoner of the State: The secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang � days before the 20th anniversary of the massacre. In them, he praised western-style democracy and insisted that the activists were not attempting to overthrow the system, according to extracts obtained by Reuters.

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Zhao, who was kept under intense surveillance at his home after his downfall and whose excursions and visitors were vetted, recorded his memoirs in such secrecy that even family members were unaware of his project. He recorded about 30 hours, on Peking Opera [school] and children's music tapes, in or around the year 2000. The 30 tapes were later smuggled out of China by three former high-ranking officials.

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Concerns over news of the project leaking were so great that publishers Simon and Schuster listed it as Untitled by Anonymous in their catalogue. "There was real concern about security, because if Chinese officials had found out early they would have used whatever means they had to make sure this didn't appear. It wasn't just commercial reasons," Ignatius added. Although the book is certain to be banned on the mainland, Ignatius said he believed some of its content would spread through the internet or bootleg editions. Bao Pu, the Hong Kong-based publisher of the book's Chinese edition and son of Zhao's former top aide, said: "There were no instructions [but] the fact he did this shows very clearly that he wanted his version of the story to survive.

"The material was very dense; he had actually prepared before he started recording and we think he had a draft [text] from as early as 1993." He added: "I hope it will have a direct impact on politics in China; politicians are going to be reading this and reflecting."

Prisoner of the State: The secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang will be published on May 19th.

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