The former Chinese president Jiang Zemin died in Shanghai, aged 96. Jiang Zemin was ill with leukemia and suffered from multiple organ failure.
Jiang Zemin was the president of the People’s Republic of China for two terms, from 1993 to 2003. In his political career he held various important positions, including that of mayor of Shanghai (1985) and general secretary of the Communist Party of China (1989).
He is considered one of the main architects of the new assimilation of the capitalist economy in a communist systemas well as China’s top leader from the 1990s to the early 2000s. In fact, he is responsible for the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.
In his honor, Chinese public buildings, the main headquarters of the Communist Party and the government, will fly flags at half-mast. The directive, issued by the funeral organization committee, applies from today until the end of the funeral, the calendar of which has not yet been disclosed.
An official note from the Party reads that ”Comrade Jiang Zemin was an exceptional leader who enjoyed a high prestige recognized by the entire Party, the entire army and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat, a longtime communist fighter and a leader of the great cause of Chinese socialism”. He is therefore remembered as ” the fulcrum of the third generation of the CCP’s central collective leadership and the main founder of the Three Representative Theory ”.
In the years he led the country, Jiang Zemin set himself the goal of restore political stabilityseverely tested by the student and popular demonstrations and protests of 1989, and to lead China out of global isolation.
Was elected General secretary of the partyafter Zhao Ziyang, a few days after the Tiananmen Square events and a few months later it became the Chairman of the Party Military Commission. Two positions that paved the way for him as “leader of the “third generation” of the CCP (after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping). His first task was to reassure the international community of China’s peaceful intentions and willingness to continue with market reforms. A winning strategy given that he managed to obtain, in 2001, the assignment of 2008 Beijing Olympics and then the entrance in the same year in theWorld Trade Organization. He oversaw the return of the European colonies of Hong Kong and Macao to Chinese rule.
He elaborated the theory of the three representationsadopted by the XVI Congress of the CPC in its Statute, and which therefore became an integral part of the Chinese political constitution, but which was criticized as a symbol of Jiang’s personality cult.
According to him, the experience that should have been drawn from the history of the CCP was that the popular support for the party it was due to the fact that he represented the advanced productive forces of the countryL’orientation of advanced culture they fundamental interests of the vast majority of the Chinese people.
Jiang’s rule continued suppression of internal dissentJailed human rights and democracy activists and banned the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which was seen as a threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.
