On the night of June 3, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire. A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted, and was happening after all.' This is how the late Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang recalled one of the darkest nights in the history of contemporary China in secretly taped memoirs published this month. Zhao had been under house arrest since that bloody crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square.
The sound of gunshots and the screams of people cut through Changan Dajie (the Avenue of Eternal Peace), in the heart of Beijing, and marked the end of the student-led pro-democracy movement that had unfolded in mid-April 1989 - and the beginning of a new chapter in Chinese history.
Shocked by the outburst of people power and obsessively fearful of what they saw as a western plot to topple the Communist regime in China and the socialist bloc, the ruling party tightened its political grip on dissent.
The party leadership's handling of the political turmoil cast a long shadow over the economic reforms and open-door policy launched by late patriarch Deng Xiaoping in 1978.
Conservative ideologues attributed the political unrest in 1989 to the proliferation of 'bourgeois liberal thoughts' that had corroded communist ideals since the door was opened. As images of the brutality in Beijing were broadcast, western governments condemned and penalised China. Economic sanctions were imposed, complicating relationships with foreign governments already strained by the crackdown.
Amid fears about a reversal of market-oriented reforms, and the vulnerability of a ruling power that fails to deliver (witness the demise of the Soviet Union), Deng flew the banner of economic reform anew during a trip to Guangdong province in January 1992. That effort to ensure market-oriented changes would prevail was to be his last before he died in early 1997.
Eight years later, Zhao himself died - after 16 years under house arrest - leaving a host of unanswered questions about his role and the political struggle behind the walls of Zhongnanhai in the summer of 1989. Finally, this month, some of those questions were answered in his memoirs, Prisoner of the State, published on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the crackdown.
