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'Dai Qing's ideal, as a public intellectual, can be summed up in her own words: ?Freedom of thought and independence of personality.' This might seem like a modest ambition, banal almost, but in China it is actually very hard to achieve ? ? from the Foreword by Ian BurumaThis memoir by Dai Qing, China's best-known investigative journalist, offers insight into the mental and physical tribulations that accompany imprisonment by an authoritarian government devoted to squeezing out ?confessions? of wrongdoing by its political opponents. Written in the early 1990s during her incarceration in Beijing's notorious Qingcheng prison, this is a mournful and courageous document about her struggle with the travails of imprisonment for unstated ?crimes? following the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Along with personal letters to her family and descriptions of her cell and the numbing routine of prison life, this book contains verbatim translations of Dai's forced ?confessions? to her jailers and the top political authorities in China. At times quite unflattering to the author, these documents show how difficult it was to stand up and explain away her actions during the hectic months from April to June 1989 when she and other intellectuals tried to stave off a confrontation between the government and the students occupying Tiananmen. Against the government's claim that a widespread ?conspiracy? existed to overthrow the regime, of which Dai was a purported central figure, her confessions are a marvelous example of just how difficult it is to exculpate oneself from a political apparatus that marshals enormous evidence that paints any person's actions as ?conspiratorial? and ?anti-Party.' Despite her obvious innocence, Dai gets caught in the web of accusations that all prosecutors bring to any person's actions that are under ?investigation?: She finds that escape is nearly impossible, and so begins to accept the government's view on certain matters, ending up fingering others in a manner that suggests previous collaborationist actions in China, the Soviet Union, and the West (the McCarthy hearings, for example) when an individual is isolated by political authorities bent on condemning its detractors.Prison Memoirs and Other Writings remains witty and filled with vivid descriptions of the absurdities of political imprisonment in any system. It is the final chapter in Dai Qing's transformation from a beneficiary of the regime to one of its victims.