President Reagan walking with Premier Zhao Ziyang of the Peoples Republic of China during his visit to the White House. 1/10/84.
Posted on 05/15/2009 1:52:58 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
China's Zhao Details Tiananmen Debate
Posthumous Memoir Castigates Party
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 15, 2009
Zhao Ziyang violated one of the central tenets of Communist Party doctrine: He spoke out. But it is only now, four years after his death, that the world is hearing what he had to say.
In a long-secret memoir to be published in English and Chinese next week, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party claims that the decision to impose martial law around Beijing in May 1989 was illegal and that the party's leaders could easily have negotiated a peaceful solution to the unrest.
The posthumous appearance of Zhao's memoir, which he dictated onto audiotapes and the publisher has titled "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang," marks the first time since the establishment of the People's Republic of China 60 years ago that a senior Chinese leader has spoken out so directly against the party and its system.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ping!
Just the thing to re-ignite the Tienanmen debate; the memoir of the man who should have been Mao’s and Deng’s successor.
John “Pomfret”, eh?.....sounds fishy to me.
Good article TLR.
It’s amusing that the Publisher would call Zhao Ziyang a prisoner of the state. He was the general secretary of the Communist Party whose fate was the result of a purge after loosing out in an inter-party power struggle. He was no victim, no more than Nikita Kruschev was after being ousted.
The cunning and the ruthless rule the Communist Party, not the weak and timid. Zhao Ziyang is held up as a martyr by the new left in China, weak kneed irrelevant euro-socialists that they are, and it is unsurprising that it is a sentiment echoed by the same breed of American Journalist. It’s become de rigueur for these people to beatify complex men (in this case a sentimentalist fool determined to follow Gorbachev) as part and parcel of a propaganda effort to use shrill flaccid counter-factual historical hectoring against their enemies. Not unexpected, as that is the only weapon left in the arsenal of a spent force still fighting a rearguard action twenty years after the war was originally lost.
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