The death of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin marks the end of the third generation of leaders who led China’s entry into the WTO, the economic takeoff of the Asian giant and who opened the doors of the Communist Party to private businessmen.
Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, who rose to the pinnacle of power after the Tiananmen protests in 1989, died this morning in the city of Shanghai at the age of 96. His death marks the end of the third generation of leaders of the Asian giant’s communist regime. Throughout his tenure, he had to direct the transition of a country traumatized by the Tiananmen Square massacre and get it on the globalization train, which materialized in 2001 with the entry of China into the World Trade Organization ( WTO). His imprint on the history of the Communist Party (CPC) was also fixed that year, when this organization opened its doors to private businessmen.
Jiang Zemin, born in August 1926 in Yangzhou, in the province of Jiangsu, neighboring Shanghai, joined the Party in 1947. He was part of the first generation of Communist Party members who, due to their age, did not play a relevant role in the civil war between communists and nationalists of the Kuomintang in the second half of the forties of the last century. Later, however, they played a fundamental role in the opening of the Asian giant.
An engineer by training, like many Chinese political leaders, he graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1947. After a brief stint in Moscow in 1955-56, where he worked in an automobile factory, he returned to the country’s economic capital. , where he would develop his entire political career until the decade of the eighties.
Gifted for languages (he spoke Russian and Romanian perfectly, as well as understanding English) he was appointed vice-minister in 1982 and the following year minister of electronic industry.
His journey through the ranks of the Party led him to become mayor of Shanghai in 1985, and when the riots broke out in the spring of 1989, Jiang was already the CCP’s top officer in that city.
The firmness with which he contained the student movement, avoiding a bloodbath, caught the attention of Deng Xiaoping. The little helmsman called him to Beijing in June 1989 to replace Zhao Ziyang, who had just been dismissed as secretary general of the communist organization for being considered too soft on the Tiananmen protests and trying to find a negotiated solution. It was the time when he received his nomination as a dolphin from Deng Xiaoping and the start of his rise to power. An escalation that would not culminate until 1993, when Jiang Zemin brought together the three positions that gave him all power in China: the general secretary of the PCCh, the presidency of the Republic and that of the all-powerful Central Military Commission.
His rise to the top of the communist organization was the triumph of a apparatchik, who was laughed at by his detractors for his efforts to copy Mao’s hairstyle and dress in the early 1990s. It was a time when Jiang Zemin moved with extreme caution, due to the lack of unanimity around his appointment, although he had the strong support of the Deng family. Especially from the eldest daughter of the little helmsman. Deng Nan, the one with the greatest political instinct.
In those years, Jiang wasted no time and displayed himself as a fine and ambitious political strategist, able to bridge the gap between reformists and CCP hardliners. He consolidated himself as the heir to the regime, without anyone shadowing him. He surrounded himself with his Shanghai stalwarts, eliminated his enemies and removed the military from the Standing Committee, then the true gray brains of the Party.
From this moment on, Jiang Zemin, faithful to the ideas of Deng Xiaoping and with the help of his right-hand man Zhu Rongji, launched the economic changes that were going to modernize China until it became the current second world power. A stage in which he supervised the peaceful return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 and successfully piloted the entry of the Asian country into the WTO in 2001, which was a decisive step for the economic takeoff of the Asian giant.
They were the “karaoke years”, as defined by the French writer, Caroline Puel in her work The thirty years that have changed China. A time when the great economic reforms were undertaken, the privatization of the gigantic public sector with its more than 80,000 companies, and the Chinese discovered leisure and vacations and that getting rich was glorious, as Deng said.
But the issue for which Jiang Zemin will go down in history is for having opened the door of the Communist Party to private businessmen. For this he chose the congress of July 2001, in which the 80th anniversary of the CCP was celebrated. And he did it by covering it through the so-called triple representation theory, which points out the need to adapt the role of the Party in Chinese society and in the process of modernization of the State.
Many analysts believe, however, that Jiang’s bet was basically pragmatic and self-serving. His stalwarts from the Shanghai clan needed to influence the decisions of the Party and, on the other hand, it was a way to recover numerous “brains” who had left the organization in the eighties. Some, disappointed by the Tiananmen episode. Others, to try their luck in the private sector.
Now, more than twenty years after that decision, a third of those in charge of the Chinese private sector are members of the Party. And from 65 million associates in 2001, it has grown to close to 98 million affiliates.
Jiang Zemin left the political scene in September 2004, when he handed over the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission to Hu Jintao. It was the last position that he remained in the power of him. Since then, his public appearances have been more and more spaced out, the last of which was in 2019. However, with the rise of social networks, he had become the target of many Internet users, who affectionately caricatured him with his characteristic glasses. shell and compared its appearance with that of a toad. His younger followers, who defined themselves as “toad worshippers”, have lost their idol.