Death of Jiang Zemin: Former President Jiang Zemin, who led China out of isolation after crushing Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989 and championed economic reforms that led to a decade of explosive growth, died on Wednesday. He was 96 years old.
Jiang died of leukemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai, where he was a former mayor and secretary of the Communist Party, state TV and the official Xinhua news agency reported.
A surprise choice to lead a divided Communist Party after the upheaval of 1989, Jiang led China through historic changes including a revival of market-oriented reforms, the return of Hong Kong from British rule in 1997, and Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 1997. looked through. 2001.
As China opened to the outside, Jiang’s government stamped out dissent. It jailed human rights, labor and pro-democracy activists and banned the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which the ruling party saw as a threat to its monopoly on power.
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Jiang gave up his last official title in 2004, but remained a force behind the scenes in the wrangling that led to the rise of current President Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012. Domination of state industry.
Rumors that Jiang may be in declining health spread after he missed a ruling party congress in October, at which Xi, China’s most powerful man since at least the 1980s, broke with tradition and installed himself as leader. Provided a third term of five years.
Jiang was on the verge of retirement as Shanghai party leader in 1989 when he was drafted by then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to bring the party and the nation closer together. He replaced Zhao Jiang, who was dismissed by Deng because of his sympathy for the student-led Tiananmen Square protesters and placed under house arrest until his 2005 death.
In 13 years as party general secretary, China’s most powerful post, Jiang guided the country’s rise to economic power by welcoming capitalists into the ruling party and drawing foreign investment after China joined the World Trade Organization. China overtook Germany and then Japan to become the second largest economy after the United States.
Jiang captured a political prize when Beijing was chosen as the site of the 2008 Summer Olympics, having failed in an earlier bid. A former soap factory manager, Jiang began his career with the first orderly succession of the Communist era, handing over his position as party leader in 2002 to Hu Jintao, who also assumed the formal title of president the following year.
Jiang tried to maintain influence by staying on as chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the party’s military wing, the 2 million-member People’s Liberation Army. He left that post in 2004 after complaints about splitting the government. Even after leaving office, Jiang had influence over promotions through his network of proteges.
He was said to have been disappointed that Deng had chosen Hu as the next leader, preventing Jiang from installing his successor. But when Xi became leader in 2012, Jiang was considered successful in elevating allies to the party’s seven-member Standing Committee, China’s inner circle of power.
Portrait and owl-like in oversize glasses, Jiang was an enthusiastic man who played the piano and enjoyed singing, in contrast to his more reserved successors, Hu and Shi. He spoke enthusiastically, barring no English, and recited the Gettysburg Address to foreign visitors. On a visit to Britain, he tried to persuade Queen Elizabeth II to sing karaoke.
Jiang had disappeared from public view and was last seen in public with current and former leaders at a 2019 military parade at Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate celebrating the party’s 70th anniversary in power.
Jiang was born on August 17, 1926 in the prosperous eastern city of Yangzhou. Official biographies downplay his family’s middle-class background, instead emphasizing his uncle and adoptive father, Jiang Shangqing, an early revolutionary who was killed in battle in 1939. After graduating from the Department of Electrical Machinery of Jiaotong University in Shanghai in 1947, Jiang advanced through the ranks of state-controlled industries, working in a food factory, then a soap maker, and China’s largest automobile plant.
Like many technical executives, Jiang spent part of the ultra-radical 1966–76 Cultural Revolution as an agricultural laborer. His career resumed, and in 1983 he was named minister of the electronics industry, then an important but backward sector that the government hoped to revive by inviting foreign investment.
As mayor of Shanghai in 1985–89, Jiang impressed foreign visitors as representative of a new breed of outward-looking Chinese leaders. A tough political fighter, Jiang dismissed predictions that his tenure as leader would be short. He consolidated power by promoting members of his “Shanghai faction” and giving the military a double-digit annual increase in spending.
After the crackdown, foreign leaders and CEOs who had shied away from Beijing were persuaded to return. When Deng emerged from retirement in 1992, pushing to revive market-style reform in the face of conservative opposition following the Tiananmen crackdown, Jiang followed suit. He supported the party’s No. 3 leader, Premier Zhu Rongji, who forced painful changes that slashed 40 million jobs from state industry in the late 1990s.
Zhu introduced the privatization of urban housing, igniting a building boom that turned Chinese cities into jungles of skyscrapers and spurred economic growth.
After 12 years of negotiations and a flight to Washington by Zhu to lobby the Clinton administration for support, China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, cementing its position as a magnet for foreign investment. Despite a friendly public image, Jiang challenged the authority of the ruling party.
His highest profile target was Falun Gong, a meditation group founded in the early 90s. Chinese leaders were horrified by its ability to attract thousands of followers, including military officers. Activists who tried to form an opposition China Democracy Party permitted by Chinese law were sentenced to up to 12 years in prison on charges of subversion.
“Stability above all else,” Jiang ordered, a phrase his successors have used to justify intense social control.
It fell to Jiang, standing next to Britain’s Prince Charles, to preside over Hong Kong’s return on July 1, 1997, marking the end of 150 years of European colonialism. In 1999 the Portuguese territory near Macao was returned to China. Hong Kong was promised autonomy and became a springboard for mainland companies to move overseas. Meanwhile, Jiang began sparring with Taiwan, the self-governing island Beijing says is part of its territory.
During Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, Jiang’s government tried to intimidate voters by firing missiles at nearby shipping lanes. The United States responded by sending warships to the area in a show of support. At the same time, trade between the mainland and Taiwan grew to billions of dollars a year.
China’s economic boom divided society into winners and losers as waves of rural residents moved to cities for factory jobs, boosting the economy sevenfold and urban incomes nearly as much.
Protests, once rare, spread as millions lost state jobs and farmers complained of rising taxes and fees. The divorce rate went up. Corruption flourished. One of Jiang’s sons, Jiang Mianheng, courted controversy in the late 1990s as a telecommunications baron and later chairman of phone company China Netcom Co.
Critics accused her of abusing her father’s position to promote her career, a common complaint against the children of party leaders. Jiang Mianheng, who has a Ph.D. from Drexel University, went on to hold prominent academic positions, including president of Shanghai Tech University, his father’s old power base. Jiang is survived by his two sons and his wife, Wang Yeping, who served as a government bureaucrat in charge of state industries.