Dead Man Talking

Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang finally got to tell his side of the June 4 story on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the student movement that began with student protests clamoring for reform and ended violently and tragically with tanks rolling into the Forbidden City in 1989. Twenty years after June 4, and four years after his death, on May 19, a book called "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang" based on the audio transcript of Zhao's secret memoir will be published by Simon & Schuster.

The New York Times has the story, together with excerpts of the transcript in both English and in Chinese (pdf) as well as the some of the actual audio. Read and hear it yourself.

UPDATE:
The book is available in print but not in Kindle, sorry e-book readers, from Amazon now.
The Washington Post also has the story as noted from one of the book's reviewers, Ian Kaplan on Amazon. Perhaps because of the original Chinese material and the likely intense interest from the non-English speaking Chinese populace, the article has a Chinese version as well.