By Jonathan Mirsky
Prisoner of the State is the secretly recorded memoir of Zhao Ziyang, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party, who was thrown out of office just before the Tiananmen killings for sympathizing with the students and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. In it, he not only repudiates his mentor, Deng Xiaoping, but also makes what may be the first statement by a Chinese leader in favor of western-style parliamentary democracy.
