From The Sydney Morning Herald:
China’s Communist Party has finally cremated its purged leader, Zhao Ziyang, with a condemnation of his “serious mistakes” over the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. But Mr Zhao has left an explosive political testament that may haunt his hardline successors.
In a record of an interview in the middle of last year now being circulated in intellectual circles, Mr Zhao likens the current system of rigid one-party rule combined with an increasingly free market economy to the last years of the Qing dynasty.
Pointing to the way in which the Dowager Empress Ci Xi resisted reform until it was too late, Mr Zhao said present-day China would be equally vulnerable to social unrest.