Prisoner of the State

I recently finished reading the book "Prisoner of the State" by Zhao Ziyang. Zhao was one of the most important premiers of China during the early days of opening up after Mao's death and from '87-'89 he was General Secretary of the Communist Party, which is the top job today held by Hu Jintao, but at the time he was still second to Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader until his death. Zhao spent most of his career in Beijing as the top lieutenant of Deng Xiaoping in charge of economic reforms, which basically meant transforming China from a planned economy to a capitalist one. He was General Secretary when the June 4th Tienanmen Square protests began and it was his unwillingness to send in the army after the students which lead to him being forced out of the party and spending the rest of his life under house arrest. During his time under house arrest he secretly made tapes of his thoughts on the days leading up to the Tienanmen Square Massacre, his time trying to run the economy of China, and the future of China. I would highly recommend he book to anyone with any interest in China. The inner workings of the party are so opaque and the history of China so rarely told accurately that this book is of immense importance.

There were a few things that he talked about that I thought were really interesting. First there is some interesting stuff about why capitalism is better than communism, which he actually provides with some really simple examples. He talks about how under the old system farmers were all forced to grow basic food stuffs, but when he liberalized it somewhat some farmers could turn to growing cash crops which grew better in there area. The value of the cash crops was such that they could be sold for much more basic foods then the farmers would ever have been able to grow. He also paints himself as having been even more than Deng Xiaoping the person pushing for the early move towards capitalism. People in China just have no sense of who he was since he's been essentially erased from the history books. Next he talks about something which I had been saying also for a while. He notes that while some people saw the growing problem of corruption as a problem with capitalism it was really a problem with the dictatorial nature of the government. If the government perceives any complaints as anti-government than people can never point out corruption. Zhao ran into a lot of problems with the fact that people had no way to tell anyone interested in stopping corruption who was corrupt.

Finally near the end of the book Zhao talks about how he believes that the only way for China to continue forward both with economy and politics is to adopt a more western style of government including a real multiparty democracy. He writes here near the end of the book, "I once believed that people were the masters if their own affairs not in the parliamentary democracies of the developed nations in the West, but only in the Soviet and socialist nations' systems with a people's congress, making the latter system more advanced and a better-realized form of democracy. This, in fact, is not the case. The democratic systems of out socialist nations are all just superficial; they are not systems in which the people are in charge, but rather are ruled by a few or even a single person." It may not be anything earth shattering to say the communist countries aren't really for the people but it's not every day that a former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party says it. The last really interesting thing is the black and white picture I have in this post. The figure in the center with the bullhorn is Zhao here appearing in Tienanmen Square, after he was essentially forced out of power and only hours before the tanks would come rolling in, pleading with the students to leave. He said that while it was too late for him and too late for the protest that they were young and should still leave while they could. Standing just to the right of him and looking directly into the camera is Wen Jiabao the current Primer of China who worked under Zhao at the time. What is really clear from the book is that the legacy of that fateful day changed forever the course of Chinese history.