Chinese officials keen to censure Zhao’s memoirs

MEMOIRS of purged Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang are sure to encounter silence and censorship from the Communist Party, afraid of rekindling memories of the bloodshed around Tiananmen Square that accompanied his 1989 downfall.

Zhao, who died in 2005 after years under house arrest, secretly recorded memories of his time at the apex of party power and ousting by hardliners in 1989.

Their publication would whip up a frenzy of public interest in many countries but in China the reformist Zhao is a taboo subject.

The Chinese-language version will be published in Hong Kong, but not on the mainland.

“People may be interested, but it would be impossible for them to be published [domestically],” said Yang Jisheng, deputy president of a Beijing history magazine that got into hot water last year for obliquely commemorating Zhao.

Even as it has plunged into capitalism, China’s Communist Party leadership maintains strict, though increasingly erratic, control of what its citizens can read.

That censorship will be especially stringent before the sensitive 20th anniversary of June 4, when troops crushed pro- democracy protests centred on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, a step Zhao opposed as he was pushed from power.

For many ordinary Chinese, especially young people, events of 20 years ago are a blur as the country hurtles forward into prosperity, shielded from its past by censors.

Zhao and his memoirs will mean little to ordinary people, said Bo Zhiyue, a Chinese politics expert at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. “I don’t think they can have any dramatic influence on what is going on in China,” Bo said. “This is more of a historical issue.”

Du Guang, a veteran Communist Party scholar said that despite censors, Zhao’s memoirs were sure to slip into the mainland and then be copied.