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Last democratic words: Zhao Ziyang speaks through a megaphone to striking students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 just weeks before the government used force to put down the protests.

We must establish that [the] final goal of political reform is the realization of this advanced political system. If we don't move towards this goal, it will be impossible to resolve the abnormal conditions in China's market economy." 

One of the most sincere advocates for an "advanced political system" in China -- a system that included an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and the right of citizens to organize (in a word, democracy) -- was not a disenchanted dissident or an armchair academic. Writing at the most unlikely of times, the man was Zhao Ziyang, secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Zhao was toppled in 1989 after trying to peacefully negotiate with student demonstrators -- like myself -- in Tiananmen Square. His fall paved the way for hard-liners, under the leadership of CCP official Deng Xiaoping, to crush the demonstrations with soldiers and tanks on the morning of June 4, 1989. In one bold, violent stroke, the one-party regime, teetering on the verge of collapse, found reprieve. Zhao's vision of a more moderate democratic future, one meticulously documented in his recently released memoirs, vanished from the scene, its author put under house arrest.

There could hardly be a better time for Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang to be published, as the memoirs will be in both English and Chinese this week. Early June marks the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square -- a memory that will certainly remind China of the democratic ideals left behind in tragedy. Reading Zhao's account, I -- and no doubt other readers -- cannot help but imagine what China would be like today if Zhao had prevailed in June 1989. What if the dissenters who stood firmly before the government in Tiananmen Square had gained Zhao has a powerful ally to their cause? Would China have devolved into political chaos? Or would it be a robust democracy, steeped in cultural freedoms, social justice, and economic vibrancy? In seeking to answer that question about the past, we can learn much about the present: a China that in terms of its political system and tendency toward authoritarianism has evolved little since 1989, and yet has become both the United States' second-largest trading partner and its most significant competitor.

Looking back at the crucial moment in 1989, it is first important to keep in mind how easily things might have turned in a different direction. China's movement toward democracy in 1989 was not as far-fetched as it might seem today. In fact, support for the democratic movement was so great that it caused an unprecedented split within the CCP leadership. A quarter or even a third of the officials in Beijing joined the protesters. Most of the rest were sympathetic toward the students. The degree of dissatisfaction within the party was very high, and many agreed with the protesters that the CCP had lost any pretense of being a "people's" party and had become a self-serving elite.

That disillusionment came from a series of market-oriented reforms begun a decade earlier, in 1978. Although the changes produced rapid economic growth, they also led to contradictions: opening the economy negated the moral authority of the Communist revolution and unleashed unbridled corruption in its place. The 1989 democracy movement had two slogans. One was "Freedom and democracy," and the other was "No official business dealings, no corruption." After Tiananmen Square protesters were quashed and their government sympathizers, like Zhao, sidelined, corruption blossomed just as much as China's GDP (the fastest-growing among developed states over the last 25 years) has.

It didn't have to be this way. If the democracy movement had succeeded, the CCP would likely still be the ruling party. But its policies and goals would have evolved more democratically under Zhao's leadership. In the last chapter of his memoirs, the former general-secretary of CCP praises the Western system of parliamentary democracy and says it is the only way for China to address corruption and inequality. He would no doubt have led the country down this path.

Zhao's reforms, one might imagine, would have proceeded at a purposeful but amenable pace, beginning with an opening of partial freedoms of assembly and demonstration. Student organizations would have become lawful, eventually precipitating a lift on the ban on political parties. The press would likewise feel a weight lifted, and the country's National People's Congress would have become more than a rubber-stamp assembly. Public participation would have followed, with public debate emerging on difficult questions from ethnic relations, to foreign affairs, to government corruption, to HIV/AIDS and the environment. In other words, China would have embarked on a peaceful transition to democracy. A democratic China -- one that followed Zhao's model -- would have prospered economically, too.