Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (41 page)

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A disputed local election triggered student protests in more than a dozen cities in 1986. Demonstrators called for greater political freedoms, though their protests resulted in the accelerated removal of liberal Party chief Hu Yaobang.

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Hu Yaobang served for more than twenty years as first secretary of China’s Communist Youth League.

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For Zhao’s speech in his own defense, see Yang Jisheng, “Zhao Ziyang’s Speech in His Own Defense at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 13th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party,”
Chinese Law and Government
38, no. 3 (May–June 2005), pp. 51–68.

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The Gang of Four referred to an ultraleftist Communist Party faction that controlled key organs of power and culture during the Cultural Revolution.

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Also known as the “Anti–Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign.”

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One Country, Two Systems is the formulation that describes how Hong Kong and Macau can be loyal parts of China despite their vastly different social, economic, and political systems.

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The Two Whatevers was a leftist philosophy, first published in newspaper editorials in 1977, whose followers pledged to uphold whatever decisions Mao made and to follow whatever instructions Mao gave.

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Yan’an is a remote mountain town in Shaanxi Province where leaders of the Communist Party retreated in 1937 at the end of the Long March and remained until 1947. Though conditions were dire, it was also a period noted for the idealism, self-sacrifice, and discipline of Party members.

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A reference to the classical Chinese novel
Journey to the West
, about the Monkey King. His master controls him by reciting an incantation that tightens a golden hoop that he wears around his head, causing severe pain.

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“Differential quota elections” refers to internal Party elections in which voters were presented with more candidates than positions, effectively eliminating the least popular candidates. By Communist Party standards, it was a democratic breakthrough.

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Powerful provincial leaders were referred to as “dukes” because historically, local dukes of Chinese imperial dynasties often had greater actual power than the central government.

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River Elegy
was a controversial multipart TV documentary in China, first broadcast in 1988. It criticized traditional Chinese isolation and embraced Western openness. The Party later denounced the broadcast and blamed it for helping to inspire the 1989 demonstrations.

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One of his visitors, Zong Fengming, wrote down what Zhao had said immediately after he returned home after each visit (no note-taking was allowed in Zhao’s home); out of this secretarial activity has come Zong Fengming,
Zhao Ziyang ruanjinzhong de tanhua
(Zhao Ziyang: Captive Conversations) (Hong Kong: Open Books, 2007). See Andrew Nathan’s review in
China Perspectives
, no. 3 (2008), pp. 136–42.

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The author often shortens “Politburo Standing Committee” to “Standing Committee.”

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The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a period of great upheaval in China that lasted from 1966 to 1976. Launched by Chairman Mao Zedong, who was frustrated by the passive resistance of his own bureaucracy to his radical economic policies, the ultraleftist campaign led to the persecution of millions, including purges of hundreds of thousands of Communist Party officials.

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The May Fourth Movement is the name given to nationwide demonstrations staged in 1919 that were provoked by the Treaty of Versailles, which was perceived as unfair to China. The demonstrations marked the shifting of the modern Chinese intellectual movement away from Western liberalism, toward the ideals of the Russian Revolution. China’s Communist Party identifies the movement as its intellectual origin.

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Hu Qili, who had sided with Zhao in taking a soft line toward the student demonstrations, was also purged from the top ranks of the Party, losing his slot on the elite Politburo Standing Committee.

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Neo-authoritarianism was a theory put forward by liberal intellectuals who thought that the best way to modernize China’s economic and political systems was to have a strong leader, an “enlightened despot.” Many believed, incorrectly, that the theory’s proponents supported Zhao as the authority figure.