Secret Memoir Offers Look Inside China’s Politics

[groovedaddy]

In May 1989, as he feuded with hard-line party rivals over how to handle the students occupying Tiananmen Square, China’s Communist Party chief requested a personal audience with Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch behind the scenes.

The party chief, Zhao Ziyang, was told to go to Mr. Deng’s home on the afternoon of May 17 for what he thought would be a private talk. To his dismay, he arrived to find that Mr. Deng had assembled several key members of the Politburo, including Mr. Zhao’s bitter foes.

“I realized that things had already taken a bad turn,” Mr. Zhao recalls in a secretly recorded memoir only now coming to light — a rare first-person account of crisis politics at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.

From Mr. Deng’s impatient body language and the scathing attacks he received from his rivals, Mr. Zhao says in the memoir, which is now being published in book form, it was obvious that Mr. Deng had already decided to overrule Mr. Zhao’s proposal for dialogue with the students and impose martial law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15zhao.html?em