Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang

by Adi Ignatius

  Zhao’s account of his final years is dignified, yet sad. Under house arrest, he could do little but obsess over events, rewinding the clock to pore over the technicalities of the Party’s official case against him. From the outside it could be argued that he was handled gently, at least compared with earlier, violent purges of communist officials. He wasn’t put in jail, and the Party eventually lost interest in trying to tear him down. But his captors succeeded in keeping him out of view and making him irrelevant, throwing up enough obstacles to deter all but the most determined visitors. As Zhao says in this journal, “The entrance to my home is a cold, desolate place.”

  Scholars will no doubt wish to compare Zhao’s memoir with other accounts of that era. For one thing, he contradicts the widely held belief that the decision in 1989 to call in the military to crack down on student demonstrators was put to a formal vote of the Politburo Standing Committee. Zhao attests otherwise: there was no vote. For Zhao it’s a critical detail, since a proper vote could have lent the decision an air of procedural legitimacy. Zhao explains his own defiance in the clearest of terms: “I refused to become the General Secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students.”

  Just after the decision was made to call in the army—and aware that his own political career was probably finished—Zhao made a remarkable visit to the seething Tiananmen Square to speak with the student protesters. (Hearing that Zhao was making the trip, his rival, Premier Li Peng, tagged along. Zhao says Li was “terrified” and quickly fled the scene.) Accompanied in the end by director of the General Office Wen Jiabao, who would later become China’s Premier, a teary Zhao spoke to students through a bullhorn. “We have come too late,” he said, urging students to leave the square to avoid a violent outcome. They didn’t heed his words. Around two weeks later, the tanks were unleashed, and hundreds of demonstrators were killed.

  Though he was the main voice at the top articulating a gentle response to the protests, Zhao is largely forgotten today. For three years after Tiananmen, China stagnated under the repressive shadow of the Massacre. But then Deng Xiaoping, mindful of his own legacy, made a celebrated trip to China’s vibrant southern region and sounded a call to free up economic policy and let people get rich. The result is a China with a booming economy and a repressive government. If Zhao had survived politically—that is, if the hard line hadn’t prevailed on Tiananmen—he might have been able to steer China’s political system toward more openness and tolerance. His ultimate aim was a strong economy, but he had become convinced that this goal was inextricably linked to the development of democracy.

  Zhao’s call to begin lifting the Party’s control over China’s life—to let a little freedom into the public square—is remarkable coming from a man who had once dominated that square. Although Zhao now speaks from the grave, his voice has the moral power to make China sit up and listen.

  Foreword

  Roderick MacFarquhar

  I met Zhao Ziyang only once, when I called on him in his hotel bedroom in London during his June 1979 trip as head of a Sichuan Province delegation. The room swarmed with his colleagues, all somewhat bemused at my sudden appearance among them. I was aware of Zhao’s growing reputation as the Sichuan Province first secretary, since he was pioneering reforms in agriculture, and that this trip abroad was an opportunity to educate himself. But at that point my scholarly interests were more historical: If I came to Sichuan, would he talk to me about his experiences in running Guangdong Province in the 1960s? He would be happy to. I handed an aide my card and withdrew.

  From that brief encounter, I formed a few, doubtless superficial but nevertheless firm impressions. This longtime Party cadre was open, good-humored, and energetic. Sadly, I was never able to consolidate those impressions. When I made my next research trip to China, Zhao Ziyang was the country’s Premier and I knew better than to try to get past the barriers of Beijing’s bureaucracy.

  What we have in this book is Zhao’s personal account of what it was like being Premier, and later Party General Secretary, and later still, what it was like living under house arrest. The documents give us a close-up of the vicious world of Beijing high politics as Deng Xiaoping’s acolytes—Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Ziyang—battled on behalf of Deng’s reform program. Much of this has been documented by Western scholars, but here we have an account of the internal struggles that underlay the vague turbulence visible on the surface.*

  What clearly emerges is that Zhao greatly enjoyed his role as Premier, including the research and thinking it required, the mistakes and disappointments, and the satisfaction that came with China’s accelerating expansion. He had his opponents among the Old Guard “elders,” in particular Chen Yun and Li Xiannian. Chen had been the voice of economic reason in the 1950s, whenever Mao Zedong went off the rails, and he still believed that the Five-Year Plan system under strong central control would have worked even better but for the Chairman’s errors; after all, it had turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. Effectively, Chen Yun proposed that China should go back to the future. He devised the model of a “birdcage economy”: the planned economy was the cage and the birds were the market economy. This way the market could be prevented from getting out of control. Zhao respected Chen Yun—he is the only one of the elders discussed in this book whom Zhao normally designates as “Comrade”—and always tried to visit with him to discuss new policies and bring him around. If that proved impossible, there was always Deng to fall back on to keep Chen Yun in line.

  Li Xiannian was a totally different personality, and Zhao seems to have developed an active dislike for him early on. Li was the only senior civilian official to serve alongside Zhou Enlai throughout the Cultural Revolution. As Hua Guofeng rose to leadership during the last days of Chairman Mao, Li became Hua’s principal economic adviser and, had Hua survived as leader, would have been a power in the land. Li never got over this, nor his resentment that Zhao inherited his role. Li regularly grumbled that his own achievements during the brief Hua interregnum should be acknowledged as part of the basis for current progress. “The economic successes are not all the result of reform. Weren’t there successes in the past too? Weren’t the foundations laid in the past?” In fact, Hua’s “great leap outwards”—the massive buying of plants from overseas—grossly overstretched the Chinese economy. But because Li was an elder, nobody stuck it to him, certainly not Zhao, and so Li grumbled on about Zhao’s fixation with “foreign stuff,” his willingness to learn from what had been successful for the Asian Tiger economies, and even from the West. Li, who later was consoled with the post of head of state, was the most prominent opponent of reform and, according to Zhao, “he hated me because I was implementing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, but since it was difficult for him to openly oppose Deng, he made me the target of his opposition.”

  Other than his problem with Li Xiannian, Zhao was fortunate that of Deng’s two standard-bearers, it was Hu Yaobang who took most of the heat from the elders and the conservatives. According to Zhao, this was because as General Secretary, Hu was in charge of politics and ideology, and the conservatives found Hu decidedly uninterested in their concerns. Zhao, who writes warmly about Hu, suggests that in part it was because Hu sympathized with intellectuals and did not want to persecute them as had been done during the Cultural Revolution. Hu also had a tendency to shoot from the lip with little concern for the impression conveyed. In fact, one major divergence between Hu and Zhao was over Hu’s tendency to press for faster economic progress, overriding Zhao’s preference for slower but steady. Both were committed to introducing a market economy, but Hu seemed still to hanker after movement economics, Maoist-style. In 1983, Deng had to call them both in and expressly order Hu not to counteract the government’s economic officials. Zhao believed that Deng had lost faith in Hu long before an outburst of student demonstrations at the end of 1986, which became the occasion for his dismissal as General Secretary; all in all, being allowed to retain membership on the Poli
tburo was not too bad a fate for Hu under the circumstances.

  And yet Hu had had one advantage that Zhao could never emulate. He had worked at the center for most of his political career, which meant he had a constituency, connections; indeed, Zhao tells us, Hu was accused by his many enemies of promoting a Communist Youth League faction, since he headed that organization during the 1950s. By contrast, Zhao had worked in provincial apparats in different parts of the country, and on being summoned to Beijing in 1980, he had no connections, or as he put it, “fewer channels. Therefore some of the behind-the-scenes dealings remain obscure to me, even now.” Instead, Zhao had a constituency of just one: Deng Xiaoping. Of course, it was the best one-man constituency to have, but even Deng had occasionally to bob and weave when faced with strong opposition from his fellow elders. No wonder that Zhao begged Deng not to resign every time the latter had mentioned the possibility. For his part, Deng was assuring Zhao as late as April 1989—only a month before his career crashed in ruins—that he had secured the agreement of Chen Yun and Li Xiannian for Zhao to serve two more full terms as Party General Secretary, the job that Zhao had taken when Hu Yaobang was dismissed in January 1987. But before turning to that sad final phase of Zhao’s career, it is worth pausing to consider his role in the reform program.

  Deng is normally seen as the architect of reform. Certainly, without his strong initial push for it and for opening up to the outside world, there would have been no such program. Thereafter he remained among the elders the godfather of the effort, ready to sally forth from seclusion to defend it against all comers. But reading Zhao’s unadorned and unboastful account of his stewardship, it becomes apparent that it was he rather than Deng who was the actual architect of reform. It was Zhao who, after countless inspection tours, finally realized that the commitment to rural collectivization was passé, a view that was reaffirmed when Deng came back to power in December 1978. Zhao supported a national household responsibility system as the way to develop agriculture and raise farm incomes. As Zhao acknowledges, without Deng’s support it would never have been possible to proceed. But Deng did not make the conceptual breakthrough. Zhao did.

  It was Zhao, too, who conceived of the hugely successful coastal development strategy. This was not the Special Economic Zone policy launched early in the reform era. Rather it was an effort to mobilize all the coastal provinces to develop an export-oriented economy, importing large quantities of raw materials, transforming them, and then exporting the results in equally large quantities. There were many different kinds of objections that Zhao overcame, but again, once he convinced Deng, it was relatively smooth sailing. Zhao devised the policy in 1987–88 and it outlasted his political demise, but thereafter it was no longer referred to as the coastal development strategy because that phrase was so closely linked to Zhao and no credit could be allowed to go to him.

  Zhao takes responsibility for failures, too. One of the big issues in the late 1980s was price reform, but late in the debate Zhao agreed to postpone it because of the state of the economy. This was one of the few occasions that he and his principal opponents, Premier Li Peng and Vice Premier Yao Yilin, were on the same side. But Li and Yao took advantage of the economic problems to sideline Zhao. Deng had lain it down that Zhao would still be in overall charge of the economy even after he took over the general secretaryship, but Li and Yao now increasingly ignored Zhao’s inputs. As veterans of the Chinese political system, they were quick to sense erosion of power.

  Zhao’s record remains impressive. What is even more impressive is that he was working virtually single-handedly at his level. He developed a loyal coterie of reform officials who worked for him, notably his aide Bao Tong who remains under house arrest till this day. But it was Zhao in the first instance who had to persuade or do battle with the elders. It was Zhao who had to watch his back for the slings and arrows of outraged “colleagues” such as Li Peng and Yao Yilin. It was Zhao who had to argue with the bureaucrats at the national and provincial levels, officials who probably had not had a new idea since well before the Cultural Revolution, but who were determined to protect their turf and their ways of managing it. And yet, throughout the 1980s, till he left office, Zhao was thinking, questioning, inspecting, discussing, and arguing over the next step forward. Deng had displayed excellent judgment in choosing Zhao as the architect of the reform program.

  Zhao never wanted the formal promotion to the position of General Secretary. He loved what he was doing and didn’t want to become involved in disputes over theory or politics. Had Deng come up with another candidate for the office, Zhao would have gladly stayed where he was. But the only suggestions of alternate names came from conservatives who were playing their own devious games, which Zhao naively took at face value, but which Deng saw through. So Zhao, duty-prone, was trapped.

  He soon realized how lucky he had been to have had Hu Yaobang running interference all those years. Zhao now inherited two new nemeses: Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun (“little Deng,” no relative of Deng Xiaoping). Hu Qiaomu was the prince of pens, Mao’s onetime secretary and favorite ghostwriter. Deng Xiaoping had refused to have any dealings with him for some years. Deng Liqun was a longtime leftist theoretician with considerable contacts among the conservative elders. He ran a research office under the Central Party Secretariat that could be relied upon to produce the most anti-reform ideas and commentaries. According to Deng Xiaoping, “little Deng” was very stubborn, “like a Hunan mule.” His supporters, on the other hand, doubtless thought he was admirably determined in standing up for the truth.

  Zhao had displayed no interest in the ideological battles that Hu Yaobang had fought with Hu Qiaomu and little Deng, and they viewed him as neutral, concerned only with preventing ideological issues from disrupting economic development. But when Hu Yaobang was dismissed and they thought they could embark on an anti–bourgeois liberalization campaign, they ran up against Zhao’s opposition. In short order Zhao achieved what Hu Yaobang had failed to do: he dissolved little Deng’s power base by liquidating the research office of the central Secretariat, and he closed down left-wing magazines such as Red Flag.

  As a quid pro quo, Zhao proposed that little Deng be given a seat on the Politburo at the next Party Congress so that he could air his views. This was agreed to, but when the necessary first step had to be taken—election to the Central Committee from which the members of the Politburo were drawn—little Deng failed to get elected. Despite his earlier agreement to little Deng’s promotion, Deng Xiaoping decided to let the vote stand. Little Deng’s supporters among the elders were furious and began to regard Zhao as worse even than Hu Yaobang.

  Yet Zhao was to have one more triumph. He decided to solve once and for all the nagging problem that had underlain the whole reform era: If China had completed a socialist revolution in the 1950s, why was it adopting capitalist methods now? He decided to take a phrase that had been around for some years—“the initial stage of socialism”—and assign it a theoretical prominence it had so far lacked. This would not deny the socialist achievements thus far but it would free China from rigid socialist dogma. He also tried to please everyone by emphasizing the status of the “Four Cardinal Principles,” enunciated by Deng in 1979: upholding the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought. Zhao proposed that the Central Committee plenum that had brought Deng back to power in December 1978 had implicitly meant to say that the Four Cardinal Principles and reform and opening up were on an equal level and that these were the two basic points, with economic development as the main focus. This was turned into a colloquial phrase by Bao Tong and his colleagues as “one central focus, two basic points.” Not everyone saluted it, but Deng Xiaoping loved it, and that was what mattered. The idea became the theoretical centerpiece of Zhao’s Political Report to the 13th Party Congress in the fall of 1987.

  When we come to the events of April–June 1989, when the students began their march
es to Tiananmen Square to show their respect for Hu Yaobang, who died on April 15, it is possible that Western readers have access to more knowledge than Zhao Ziyang had at the time. This is as a result of the publication abroad of secret Communist documents on the crisis,* some of which Zhao probably never saw, particularly the minutes of the meetings of the elders who decided on Zhao’s dismissal and the selection of his successor. What Zhao provides here is his analysis of the student movement and his policy for handling it.

  Zhao infuriated his conservative colleagues, such as Li Peng, with his relaxed attitude toward the student activities. He was convinced that after their initial demonstrations, with persuasive handling the students could be induced to return to their campuses. With Li Peng promising to follow Zhao’s line, the latter left on a long-scheduled visit to North Korea. Unfortunately for Zhao, Li Peng found a way to get around his promise. Shortly after Zhao’s departure, Li Peng rushed the leaders of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee to report first to the Politburo Standing Committee and then to Deng. Their report was full of fire and brimstone, prophesizing that if control were not immediately restored, there could be a nationwide upheaval. Deng, with his memories of the Cultural Revolution—during which his son was crippled for life—was bound to be impressed by such a report, and he designated the events “anti-Party, anti-socialist turmoil.” Zhao was contacted in North Korea and in the absence of any other information, perforce had to agree with Deng’s analysis. Li Peng ensured that Deng’s words and sentiments were immediately expressed in a People’s Daily editorial on April 26. Contrary to Li Peng’s expectations, however, the editorial, far from frightening the students into submission, infuriated them further because their patriotic actions were so misdescribed. On the 27th, the students marched again to the square, breaking through a police cordon. Li Peng, with Deng’s help, had reignited the student movement.