From Radio Free Asia (link):
China’s late former Communist Party boss Zhao Ziyang, who died in 2005 after 15 years under house arrest in Beijing, wrote to Party leaders as early as 1997 asking for his freedom, so he wouldn’t have to “live out my remaining years in loneliness and confinement,” a hitherto unpublished letter reveals.
Premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1980-87 and general secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1987-89, Zhao was ousted after taking a conciliatory line with the students who led mass protests on Tiananmen Square in May and June 1989.
