Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang by Zhao Ziyang, translated and edited by Bao Pu, Renee Chang, and Adi Ignatius

(Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $26)

Zhao Ziyang had tears in his eyes the last time he was seen in public. Speaking through a bullhorn in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the former Chinese premier urged throngs of student demonstrators gathered there to end their hunger strike. That plea, delivered on May 19, 1989, proved just as unsuccessful as his earlier attempts to convince key fellow members of the Politburo to open a dialogue with the protesters rather than order soldiers in. Zhao was powerless on June 4, when the troops opened fire on the dissidents, killing hundreds. He was soon purged from the Communist Party, then held under house arrest for the remaining 15 years of his life. Eventually, he began surreptitiously recording his memoirs, arranging for visitors to smuggle them out, cassette by cassette.

Zhao’s account of the Tiananmen massacre,­ published worldwide on the 20th anniver­sary of his speech to the students, “is more than a history lesson,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Readers in China immediately began sharing Internet excerpts last week, and millions will eventually see the criticisms that Zhao directed at one-party rule and the men with whom he once shared power. By Western standards, Prisoner of the State is tame stuff, said Barbara Demick in the Los Angeles Times. But “tell-all memoirs by Chinese Communist Party chieftains are unheard of.” What’s more, Zhao reveals that, in his final years, he concluded that the growing Chinese economy he had helped create could not succeed in the long term absent the establishment of true democracy.

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Don’t hold your breath waiting for this one book to topple China’s oligarchy, said Perry Link in The Washington Post. The allies and heirs of the Tiananmen-era leaders constitute a new Politburo as adept as its predecessors at riding out periods of upheaval, “like a seal on a rolling ball.” The fascination of this document is in seeing such men at work. The group had “dictatorial power,” but was “rife with insecurity.” It controlled all communication, but was “oddly out of touch” with facts on the street. Even Zhao seems to have underestimated the degree to which the nationwide protests of 1989 stemmed from a “deep-seated revulsion” against the corruption and unfairness of the Communist system.