Retired and dead Chinese Communist Party leaders who join the official pantheon are usually feted with the publication of their collected works. Generally, the fat volumes of speeches and writings are rarely read by anyone except the occasional scholar and party members ordered to study them. But that honor has been denied to Zhao Ziyang, the party leader ousted in 1989, when Deng Xiaoping, his powerful elder, sided with conservatives who blamed Mr. Zhao for letting student protesters get out of control. Mr. Zhao died in 2005, still an official pariah under house arrest, and even now his name is rarely mentioned in the party-run news media, and his speeches and writings are hard to track down in China, where their circulation was banned after his fall. Read more
