The Secret Memoir of a Fallen Chinese Leader

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When Zhao had finished the taping after a couple of years, he found a way to pass the material to a few trusted friends who had also been high-level party officials. Each was given only some of the recordings, evidently to hedge against their being lost or confiscated. After Zhao died four years ago, some of the people who knew about the recordings — they can't be named here because of fears of retaliation from Chinese authorities — launched a complex, clandestine effort to gather the material in one place and transcribe it for publication. Later, another set of tapes, perhaps the originals, was found hidden among his grandchildren's toys in his study.

The power structure described in the book is chaotic and often bumbling. In Zhao's narrative, Deng is a conflicted figure who urges Zhao to push hard for economic change but demands a crackdown on anything that seems to challenge the party's authority. Deng is at times portrayed not as an emperor but as a puppet subject to manipulation by Zhao or his rivals, depending on who presents his case to the old man first.

Once placed under house arrest, Zhao could do little but obsess over past events, rewinding the clock to pore over the technicalities of the state's case against him. His few attempts to venture out met with almost comically Kafkaesque resistance. For example, when authorities finally permitted him to play pool at a club for party officials, they first swept the place of other people, ensuring that Zhao played alone. His captors ultimately succeeded in keeping him out of view and silencing his voice, and they put up enough obstacles to deter all but the most determined visitors. As he said in his recordings, "The entrance to my home is a cold, desolate place."

Yet inside the gate, Zhao was busy at work, taping the journal that now gives him a final say about what really happened and what might have been. It's a fitting final act for a man who made enormous contributions to today's China. Although Deng generally gets credit for modernizing China's economy, it was Zhao who brought about the innovations — from breaking up Mao's collective farms to creating freewheeling special economic zones along the coast — that jolted China's economy from its slumber. And it was Zhao who had to continually outflank powerful rivals who didn't want to see the system change.

The China that Zhao describes is very much alive now. The country's team of leaders continues to promote economic freedom yet intimidates or arrests anyone who dares to call for political change. At the end of last year, more than 300 Chinese activists, marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, jointly signed Charter 08, a document that calls on the party to reform its political system and allow freedom of expression. Beijing responded as it often does: it interrogated many of the signatories and arrested some, including prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was active during the Tiananmen protests.

At the end of his journal, Zhao concludes that China must become a parliamentary democracy to meet the challenges of the modern world — a remarkable observation from someone who spent his entire career in service to the Communist Party, and one that might well provoke a debate on China's Internet discussion boards and in its chat rooms. Zhao's ultimate aim was a strong economy, but he had become convinced that this goal was inextricably linked to the development of democracy. China's ability to avoid another tragedy like Tiananmen might depend on how quickly that comes about.

Ignatius is the editor of Harvard Business Review and one of the editors of Prisoner of the State.

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