Jiang Zemin, who was China’s leader in the 1990s and early 2000s and who remained enormously influential in Chinese politics until a few years ago, has passed away. He was 96 years old and had leukemia, wrote the Chinese state agency Xinhua.
Jiang Zemin served as general secretary of the Communist Party of China, the country’s highest post, between 1989 and 2002, and as president of China between 1993 and 2003. Even when he relinquished most formal posts in favor of his successor Hu Jintao, after 2003, however, remained extremely influential.
Jiang had been named as the leader in the weeks immediately following the Tiananmen Square massacre, when thousands of students and protesters demanding freedom and democracy were killed by the Chinese army. His first, exceptionally difficult task was to stabilize the country, at a time when civil society was shaken by protests and massacres and when the entire international community had isolated China in reaction to the violence.
Jiang continued with that line of hardness, and maintained a policy of strict closure inside the country, in which minorities and non-aligned organizations were repressed, such as the religious cult of Falun Gong and the protests in Tibet.
However, China’s international isolation did not last long: under Jiang, the country was transformed into the leading manufacturing power in the world, and into what was later called “the factory of the world”, i.e. the place where most of the consumer goods used in West and the rest of the world was produced. During Jiang Zemin’s leadership, China experienced a period of exceptional economic growth and expansion, with GDP growth practically always in double digits.
The growing opening of the Chinese economy to the market and the adoption of an increasingly capitalist system also contributed to the growth: one of the major results of Jiang’s presidency was, in 2001, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which allowed the country to integrate closely with the economies of the United States and Europe.
Jiang Zemin and then US President Bill Clinton in Beijing in 1998 (ANSA / Stephen SHAVER)
That was the period in which the West was still convinced that by integrating China into the international trade system and supporting the improvement of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of Chinese it would then have been possible to also favor the introduction of more democratic systems of government in the country.
Also for this reason, diplomatic and personal relations between Jiang and international leaders were always very good. This was aided by Jiang’s somewhat over the top personality, who loved to sing songs in English, had a fondness for Hollywood movies, and did interviews with Western media, something that would hardly happen again under later leaders. The most famous was made with 60 Minutesa well-known American television program, during which he recited a speech by Abraham Lincoln from memory, among other things.
