Zhao Ziyang and The Road Not Taken
NEW YORK, June 17, 2009 - After living under house arrest for over a decade, Zhao Ziyang, former Chinese Premier and Party chief, secretly began recording his memoirs onto cassette tapes that were then smuggled out of the country.
Four years after his death, and 20 years after Tiananmen, Zhao Ziyang’s memoir, Prisoner of the State, offers new insights into the debate over the 1989 student movement that led to Zhao's dismissal, the role he played in China’s economic reform, and the schisms within the Communist Party under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.
Two of the book's editors, Adi Ignatius and Bao Pu, were joined at Asia Society headquarters for a conversation with former US Ambassador to China Winston Lord and Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society.
Zhao Ziyang's Prisoner of the State is available from the AsiaStore.