China Has Much to Learn from Zhao

The publication of the secretly recorded memoirs of former Chinese party leader Zhao Ziyang, who spent the last 16 years of his life under house arrest for opposing the crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, provides a rare glimpse into how high-level politics works in China.

The memoirs show that, as widely suspected, Deng Xiaoping was the one who decided to call in the troops even though he was formally not the head of state, of the party or even of the government. But he was the country's supreme leader, which reflected the abnormal state that the country was in at the time.