Reddit reviews Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang

Honestly, I can't say I have any special insight on the future of political liberalization in China. I'm hardly a futurist and predictions are so unreliable that I try not to make any strong claims. I'm just someone who's really interested in human rights and China.

That said, official corruption is an issue that's on a lot of peoples' minds. This could (emphasis on could) develop into a desire for better representation in higher levels of government and develop into some form of democracy. Anti-corruption initiatives are headline news in China and soak up a lot of public attention. Unfortunately, a lot of these initiatives are used to purge political rivals.

Maybe if there is a reformer inside the CCP - I don't know of any, but it is a big party - there is a chance that he or she could harness this popular sentiment for good. He or she could also be purged from the party as Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang were in the 1980s. Hu Yaobang was expelled from the CCP after party elders accused him of being behind other pro-democracy protests in 1986, Zhao Ziyang was placed under house arrest until he died because of his opposition to the 1989 Tiananmen Crackdown. During his house arrest, Zhao secretly recorded a series of tapes that were smuggled out after his death and published.

I agree with /u/hubeijames when he says that political revolution in China is unthinkable right now (and everything else he's said in this thread, too). The CCP is genuinely popular with the majority of the people because of the myth that it is the sole driver of China's economic prosperity. Despite this, people do not see it as flawless and some will talk privately about how it could be improved.

I do strongly disagree with the notion that there's something "in Chinese culture" that makes democracy an impossibility. China is more than capable of functioning democratically. There was a widespread desire for democratic reform in the 1980s and although I see people in this thread say that they're irrelevant today, I disagree. To begin with, they demonstrate how far the CCP is willing to go to suppress what it views as a threat, correctly or otherwise. Second, they demonstrate that under the right conditions, a popular movement for democratic reforms is possible in China. Third, their families and some of the wounded are still alive today - they deserve to be acknowledged.

Furthermore, rhetorical support from the West as not as meaningless as those in the current administration think. Knowing that there is outside support from much of the world is something that heartens some of the democracy activists that I have spoken to. Abandoning the notion that human rights are worth talking about hurts their ability to rally people to the cause.

I wouldn't ascribe it to something as nebulous as culture. The lesson the CCP "learned" after Tiananmen was that signs of weakness or bending from top party leadership and the security forces encouraged the protestors to get out of hand and "forced" them to eventually take "regrettable measures" to restore order. In their eyes they won't make that mistake again by ceding or showing public disunity. Zhao Zhiyang, the premier at the time of Tiananmen who ended up in house arrest for the rest of his life, spoke about it in his secretly taped memoirs

Zhao ZiYangs autobiography type book about those times is amazing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439149399/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_xYsnzb15GXSXD