PRISONER OF THE STATE: The secret journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang
Translated by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang and Adi Ignatius
Simon & Schuster, $55, pbk
This book is meant to be judged by its cover.
Former premier and party general-secretary Zhao Ziyang (1919-2005) stands front and centre photographed in colour and in a snappy western business suit.
Flanking him are Chinese Communist Party heavyweights Li Xiannian and Deng Xiaoping, both printed in black and white and wearing Mao suits.
That dreary garb and the grainy photography make them look about as lifelike as the extras who played corpses on the mortuary slabs in Six Feet Under.
Zhao, a successful provincial reformer, had a only a short time at the top before being brought down by internal politics, a backlash from the conservative elders alarmed by his economic liberalism (and the inflation it unleashed) and by the protest movement in Tiananmen Square.
He went to the square to plead with the protesters, but by then the conservatives had gained the ear of his former protector, Deng Xiaoping.
The bloody suppression of the pro-democracy movement that followed still colours East-West relations.
Zhao spent his last decade and a-half under benign house arrest, let out only occasionally to play golf.
As he ruminated over the events of his life, he began recording his thoughts on tape.
Those tapes form the basis of this book, prepared by his translators.
It makes curious reading.
All the familiar Chinese verbiage is here, the need for self-criticisms, and all those flowery names for policy changes.
It offers an unprecedented insider's view of Chinese politics at the top, but its tone is very different from a Western memoir like the Alistair Campbell Diaries or Dutch.
Although Zhao criticises policies, he's surprisingly restrained in his criticism of people.
Li Peng comes across as petty and querulous, and he writes more in regret than anger about his old mentor, the increasingly deaf Deng, who remained the power behind the throne even in semi-retirement.
Indeed, you come away with the feeling that at heart Zhao was a party loyalist.
He was a liberal by CCP standards but he was no Western-style democrat while in power.
In fact, the book makes it clear that it was only in impotent internal exile that he made the link between a modern capitalist economy and Western democracy.
The translators and the editors have done a good job of editing this book.
While many general readers will find some of Zhao's later reflections on CCP internal politics a little daunting, the book is prefaced by useful introductions, there is an extensive list of short biographies of most people mentioned in the text and each short chapter is headed by a short translators' summary of the themes it addresses.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian and reviewer.
