http://www.smh.com.au/world/ghost-of-tiananmen-cant-be-silenced-on-tale-of-bloody-suppression-20090515-b63c.html?page=-1
Ghost of Tiananmen can't be silenced on tale of bloody suppression a.. John Garnaut Herald Correspondent in Beijing b.. May 16, 2009 Last appearance in public ... Zhao Ziyang addresses pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square on May 19, 1989. Photo: AP ZHAO ZIYANG, the name most feared by today's Communist Party leaders, has returned to Chinese politics with an extraordinary book from the grave. Prisoner Of The State is being published in Chinese and English days before the 20th anniversary of when Deng Xiaoping and other party elders imposed martial law, forced Zhao from the helm of the party and set in train the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. Zhao describes the party's backroom manoeuvrings in chilling detail and leaves readers to ponder the progressive, more egalitarian and even democratic China that might have been. He details the machinations of his conservative rival, Li Peng, who excitedly exaggerated the "counter-revolutionary" activities of protesting students and, Zhao says, eventually bent the ear of Zhao's mentor, Deng Xiaoping. On the afternoon of May 17, 1989, Deng called the country's leaders to his home and told them they would be implementing martial law. It was there Zhao broke a cardinal rule of Chinese politics by refusing to publicly support a decision already taken. "It seems my mission in history has already ended," he told his colleagues at the time. Privately, his memoirs record, Zhao told himself: "No matter what, I refused to become the general secretary who mobilised the military to crack down on students." Unlike Hu Yaobang, Liu Shaoqi and other leaders purged over the decades, Zhao refused to pen a humiliating self-criticism to save his skin. Twenty years on, he remains alone among purged leaders not to have been rehabilitated. Now he has become the first leader to speak at length in public against the party, albeit from the grave. To describe Zhao's name and the June 4 "incident" as sensitive in China would be to grossly understate matters. Censors block his name and that date (and dozens of permutations of them) from the media and the internet. But erasing the ghosts of Zhao and Tiananmen is a never-ending battle in the internet age. Yesterday, Taiwanese and Hong Kong reports on Zhao's book could be read online in Beijing - complete with downloadable audio of Zhao's original recordings. No doubt the propaganda authorities will catch up. Zhao's memoirs were composed on 30 tapes and smuggled out of his home, where he lived under house arrest until his death of natural causes in 2005. The tapes have been confirmed as authentic by close Zhao associates, including his former aide, Bao Tong. Zhao's memory has been kept alive in China by supporters such as Bao (who is under continuous police surveillance) and former party elders including his former colleague Hu Qili (who joined Zhao in opposing martial law in 1989) and some editors at the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu. They do so at great personal cost. As one former Zhao adviser told the Herald, his name is so acutely sensitive because "all current leaders had some blood of Zhao Ziyang on their hands". There are also hundreds of China's brightest administrators and advisers who privately keep Zhao's policy ideals alive after working with him in the 1980s. Before Zhao's name was airbrushed from official history he was recognised as the primary architect of China's economic reforms, under Deng's guidance. By the late 1980s Zhao had come to believe that stability and economic reform could not be assured without political reform. But his vision remains unfulfilled after he and like-minded leaders were removed in 1989. "It would be wrong if our party never makes the transition from a state that was suitable in a time of war to a state more suitable to a democratic society," he wrote. One wonders at the country China might now be if the tumult of May and June 1989 could somehow be unwound. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
