Secret Tiananmen Square memoirs of Chinese party leader to be published

The secretly recorded memoirs of the Chinese Communist party leader who was ousted for sympathising with the students during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square have been released four years after his death. In tapes secretly recorded during his 16 years under house arrest, Zhao Ziyang, the former head of the Communist party, denounced the killing of protesters as a "tragedy", and challenged the party's subsequent rejection of democratic reforms. The tapes were smuggled out of China and will be published in English and Chinese this month – as Prisoner of the State: The secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang – days before the 20th anniversary of the massacre. In them, he praised western-style democracy and insisted that the activists were not attempting to overthrow the system, according to extracts obtained by Reuters. "On the night of June 3rd [1989], while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire," wrote Zhao, according to Reuters. "A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted." He added: "I had said at the time that most people were only asking us to correct our flaws, not attempting to overthrow our political system."