Documents from reformist icon Zhao Ziyang give rare insight into China at crossroads
New collection gathers hundreds of speeches and internal Communist Party discussions by the former leader who was purged after June 4
A Hong Kong publisher will release hundreds of documents about Zhao Ziyang, the late reformist icon of the Communist Party, shedding new light on China’s stillborn democratic movement of the 1980s.
Most of the documents have never been made public, according to Chinese University Press, which is publishing the four-volume Collected Works of Zhao Ziyang, 1980 – 1989 on Wednesday. The books gather more than 2,000 pages of his internal speeches and letters.
Zhao, who became premier in 1980 and the party’s general secretary in 1987, was considered the mastermind behind an ambitious blueprint for democratic reform that called for separating the party and the state.
He was purged from the party after the failed 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and spent the rest of his life under virtual house arrest. He died in 2005.
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Zhao was in 1986 tasked with implementing the political reforms of late leader Deng Xiaoping.