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Red square of china

Govind Talwalkar

Even after the death of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, China’s political life and its acceptance of the market economy remained a secret. But now the recently-published memoir of Zhao Ziyang will throw some light on China’s history.

Zhao Ziyang came from the ranks of the Communist Party of China and eventually rose to be the Prime Minister and then general secretary of the party. His memoirs were dictated when as a general secretary he came under surveillance, was stripped of his powers and put under house arrest. His "crime" was that he opposed the hard measures against the students and rightly thought that all the students were not revolting against the regime but had legitimate grievances.

Though Deng Xiaoping, the supreme leader, advocated economic reforms, he saw danger in the student protest. He succumbed to pressure from the hardliners and agreed to remove Zhao from office and put him under house arrest shortly after the shootings on Tiananmen Square. Zhao remained under house arrest until his death in 2005. This was all done without any formal resolution of the party or the government.

During his detention, he secretly began to dictate his memoirs, recording them on tapes. Eventually all 30 tapes were distributed among his friends. After his death the surviving tapes were slipped out of the country, transcribed, and published in the present book Prisoner of the State.

Zhao’s tapes, after transcribing, were translated by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang and Adi Agnatius. Renee Chiang is a publisher and the English editor of New Century Press in Hong Kong. As a teacher in Beijing in 1989, she was an eyewitness to the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Adi Ignatius is an American journalist who covered China for the Wall Street Journal during the Zhao Ziyang era. He most recently served as Time magazine’s deputy managing editor. Prisoner of the State has a foreword by a renowned China scholar, Dr Roderick MacFarquhar.

Zhao’s memoir cannot be said to be complete as it does not describe life after the Communist takeover of China, Mao’s maniac leadership and the havoc wreaked by his several campaigns. Though Zhao was one among the millions of victims of the Cultural Revolution, he did not write about it in his memoirs.

Zhao, in fact, was condemned to work as an ordinary fitter from the position of a party chief in Guangdong province. All of a sudden he was taken to Beijing where he was told by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to go to Mongolia. But he came into his own when Deng succeeded as party chief and introduced economic reforms. By then Zhao had seen the conditions in several rural areas and was convinced that complete reversal of economic policies was the only remedy for China’s dire poverty.

Deng had come to the same conclusion and started taking measures to dismantle the superstructure built by Mao. Zhao was appointed to the Central Committee and sent to Sichuan, as first party secretary in 1975. Zhao began to disband the commune system in order to return private land to peasants while assigning production contracts to individual households. This meant that all the operations in the field became the responsibility of the family and not that of a commune. With this, agricultural production increased significantly and people could consume more food and were able to sell the surplus. This movement spread almost everywhere and China was able to gradually reduce food import, which was a drain on the exchequer.

Deng invited Zhao to take charge of the economic policy administration. In his memoirs Zhao describes how he was benefited by his visits to Switzerland. In Europe he saw that besides large-scale industries, small- and medium-scale industries generate more employment. He embarked on such a course. He also realised the importance of export trade.

From Taiwan, Zhao learnt to start export industry zones that helped bring in great deal of foreign exchange. He selected coastal areas and established a chain of special export zones.

But even if economically China was progressing fast, several high-ranking leaders were reluctant to go ahead with the reforms. Zhao describes how he encountered opposition. Only Deng’s intervention saved the reforms. His memoirs throw much light on the infighting in the Communist Party.

As a Prime Minister Zhao had the responsibility to bring forth plans and see that they were carried out, so he had first-hand experience of the tactics adopted by the rightists. His memoir shows how the party was divided and crisis-ridden. The picture has not changed much since then.

Student unrest, which triggered the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, was mainly the outcome of the economic crisis. Describing this crisis Zhao says food prices started rising in 1988. The government was not following the rules of the market. So food prices were allowed to rise but those of the meat and eggs were not allowed to increase. This created shortages and the two-tract price policy also gave rise to corruption. The economic crisis was an opportune moment for Zhao’s opponents. Deng also baulked. But the people were agitated by the price rise. Students had their own grievances besides the economic ones.

The conservatives succeeded in ousting a liberal party general secretary, Hu Yaobang, who died on April 15, 1989. Zhao took over his post after he was ousted. The death of Hu brought hundreds of thousands of people and students on the streets. As protests raged, the rift within the Communist Party widened.

Deng did not want public mourning for Hu but a very large number of students as well as others defied him. Zhao was to go to North Korea on an official visit. Before that, in the meeting of the leaders, he impressed upon his colleagues not to take any extreme measures. He pointed out that very little number of the students were involved in anti-party activities and they could be isolated.

This was agreed to. But in Zhao’s absence a very fiery editorial denouncing the students appeared in People’s Daily which angered the students and they gathered in the Tiananmen Square to demonstrate. On June 4, matters came to head and the Army was called. Till today the exact number of students who died is not known but it ran into some hundreds.

When the unrest started Zhao felt that China must opt for political democracy without which economic reforms would falter. But even Deng was opposed to it as he and others thought that multi-party democracy on the Western model would deprive the Communist Party of its monopoly. Zhao had to suffer indignity and die as an unsung martyr to the Communist authoritarian rule.