Jiang Zemin, who isolated China 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, who was president for a decade until 2003 and led the ruling Communist Party for 13 years until 2002, died of leukemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai, state media reported.
His death came as the party faced its most widespread public protests in decades after crowds called for leader Xi Jinping to resign during a weekend protest against anti-virus controls that have forced millions of people to leave their homes. are limiting.
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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.
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 Xi, who took power in 2012. Xi tightened political control, crushed the slightest Chinese dissent, and re-established the state’s dominance of industry. ,
Chinese state TV devoted an extended 48-minute news broadcast of the evening to Jiang’s death. He was shown interacting with farmers, visiting factories and meeting foreign leaders.
The party declared him a “great proletarian revolutionary” and a “long-tested communist fighter”.
Kerry Brown, a Chinese politics expert at King’s College London, said Jiang was responsible for China “getting on a global stage and reinventing itself after 1989”. “He will be remembered as someone who made possibly a very positive contribution.”
Rumors that Jiang may be in poor health spread after he did not attend a ruling party congress in October, at which Xi, China’s most powerful man since at least the 1980s, broke with tradition and resigned himself. Gave a third term of five years as leader.
Jiang was on the verge of retirement as party secretary for Shanghai in 1989 when he was drafted by then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to bring the party and the nation closer together. He replaced Zhao Xiang, who was dismissed by Deng because of his sympathy for the student-led Tiananmen protesters.
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 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.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Jiang “a steadfast advocate for international engagement” and recalled his “personal warmth and openness”. The United Nations Security Council observed a minute’s silence on his death.
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 Jintao 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.
A former soap factory manager, Jiang capped off his career with the first succession of orders of the communist era, handing over his position as party leader in 2002 to Hu, who also assumed the formal title of president the following year.
Nevertheless, he is said to have been disappointed that Deng chose Hu, preventing Jiang from installing his successor. Jiang tried to maintain influence by staying on as chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the two million-strong People’s Liberation Army. He left that post in 2004 after complaints about splitting the government.
After leaving office, Jiang influenced promotions through his network of protégés. When Xi became leader in 2012, he was considered successful in elevating allies in the party’s seven-member Standing Committee, China’s inner circle of power.
Jiang disappeared from sight 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 do not emphasize 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 Jiaotong University’s Department of Electrical Machinery in Shanghai in 1947, Jiang advanced through the ranks of state-controlled industries, working in a food factory, then soap making 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 revived thereafter and in 1983 he was named minister of the electronics industry, at the time an important but backward sector that the government hoped to revive by inviting foreign investment.
As mayor of Shanghai between 1985 and 1989, 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 annual percentage increases in spending in the double digits.
Foreign leaders and CEOs who had been away from Beijing after the Tiananmen crackdown were persuaded to return.
When Deng emerged from retirement in 1992 to press for reviving market-style reform, Jiang also took the lead.
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.
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 about rising taxes and fees. Divorce rates went up. Corruption flourished.
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 1990s. 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 looking to do business 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.
One of Jiang’s sons, Jiang Mianheng, courted controversy as a telecommunications baron in the late 1990s, when critics accused him of abusing his father’s position to promote his career, which A common complaint was against the children of party leaders.
Jiang is survived by his two sons and his wife, Wang Yeping, who served as a government bureaucrat in charge of state industries.