Jiang Zemin, standard-bearer of China's strong economic growth era, dies

Jiang Zemin, president of the People's Republic of China between 1993 and 2003, died at the age of 96 in Shanghai, according to official Chinese media. The Chinese giant thus loses a key figure in the great national economic boom of the nineties of the last century, which took place just after the controversy generated by the Tiananmen Square massacre, which occurred after the protests staged in 1989 in this area of Beijing by Chinese students who denounced the prevailing corruption and oppression and who were displeased by the radical economic reforms that led to high inflation and rising unemployment. These demonstrations led to a brutal crackdown by the Chinese authorities that resulted in hundreds of deaths, according to various estimates.  

The Chinese leadership ordered numerous arrests of those responsible for the protests, expelled the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events by the domestic press. All this led to strong international condemnation of the Chinese government's actions.  

After this black episode, Jiang Zemin became a key figure in post-Tiananmen China, and a key player in China's strong economic growth in the 1990s. However, dark episodes continued to persist in his career, such as the persistence of social inequalities that had increased as a result of economic reforms, repression in the Tibet region and the struggle against the Falun Gong organisation, branded as sectarian by the Chinese authorities.   

Tibet enjoyed de facto independence for almost 40 years, but the coming to power of communism in China in 1949 put an end to this period in the Himalayan region. More than 70 years ago, thousands of troops sent by leader Mao Zedong entered Tibet, rounded up its authorities and finally seized the border town of Chamdo on 19 October. Under pressure from China, the Dalai Lama signed the controversial 17-Point Agreement after eight months of occupation by the Chinese army, a document that formalised the annexation of the territory. 

The Falun Gong entity, on the other hand, is an ancient Chinese spiritual practice related to meditation, which was initially widely accepted. However, from the 1990s onwards, persecution began by the Chinese Communist Party, which saw the organisation as a danger due to the dimension it had taken on, its independence from power and the spiritual teachings it carried out, which did not fit in with the ideological precepts projected by the Chinese government.  

It was against this backdrop that Jiang Zemin, born in Yangzhou in 1926, became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1989 in a difficult period marked by international criticism and social protests, marking a turning point that was characterised above all by the country's economic growth. Zemin joined the Chinese Communist Party at a very young age and trained as an engineer in Shanghai, which led him to develop his professional career in China and Moscow in the automotive sector. It was in Moscow that he came into close contact with officials of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 

Jiang Zemin's personality was important because he offered a friendlier and more accommodating face, especially to the outside world, becoming very popular and changing China's image considerably. His political stance was less aggressive than that of another of his successors, the current President Xi Jinping, who is pursuing more expansionist and threatening policies, especially in the Indo-Pacific area.  

Zemin had a pragmatic and moderate character that helped in his political relations and was seen as affable by other international leaders. He even made anecdotes of singing, dancing and joking at public events with other political leaders, a far cry from the more serious and cooler images offered by Chinese Communist leaders throughout history.

It was in Shanghai where he developed an important political career, becoming mayor and secretary general of the Communist Party in that city, and succeeded in becoming President of the People's Republic of China in 1993 after the Tiananmen events due to the purge within the Communist Party to eliminate those who had tried to sympathise with the demonstrators opposed to the regime's policies. In this scenario, Deng Xiaoping, who wielded de facto power, and other veterans of communist power chose Jiang Zemin as his successor so as not to fall into an open-minded reformism like the one Mikhail Gorbachev was leading in the USSR, but to continue with the economic liberalism that was going to allow the country to take off financially. His election was also influenced by the fact that he managed to quell and break up the protests in Shanghai without going as far as the violence deployed by the police and army in Beijing in 1989. 

Thus, in June 1989 he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, replacing the purged Zhao Ziyang, and then President of China in 1993, succeeding Deng Xiaoping as China's absolute leader.  

Seen in the early years as a transitional leader subordinate to Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin developed his own image as a statesman and established himself as a national political leader. Once as president, he established an important network of influence that reached into the economic and even military establishment.  

His mandate was marked mainly by the national economic boom that led the nation to grow at annual rates of around 10%, which led to China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001. All represented by a political-economic model marked by the iron rule of the Chinese Communist Party, linked to an economic liberalism far from the orthodoxy that failed in other nations of the communist orbit. A system that made the country take off economically, but which deepened social inequalities between rich and poor and led to criticism of alleged corruption and money misappropriation.  

In 2003, Jiang Zemin was succeeded by Hu Jintao, who was supposedly removed after the last Congress of the Communist Party of China, which this year definitively enthroned the current president Xi Jinping with full powers, who has always spoken out against corruption within the party and who has also wanted to break with all traces of the past and remove collaborators linked to Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao himself. 

So now comes the farewell to Jiang Zemin, who took over the reins of a China marked by protests and international criticism to transform it into a world economic power and a country with a friendlier face, which was even able to organise the Olympic Games in 2008.