Former Chinese number one Jiang Zemin died in Shanghai on Wednesday, November 30 at the age of 96, state agency New China said. He was not the best-known of the great political leaders of modern-day China, but the changes he oversaw in his country gave his decisions a historical dimension. He was the first to embody today’s face of the People’s Republic of China. That of a leading superpower.
When his time came, commentators branded him a Chinese Communist Party apparatchik on whom few would bet. Jiang Zemin broke through late, after his fifties, and the slowness of his rise could have prevented him from embodying a new generation at the head of his country. But the events of the great story ultimately decided otherwise.
In the early 1980s, the future leader of the People’s Republic of China, interested in business, was vice chairman of the Party’s foreign investment commission, a key issue. He later became deputy minister, then minister of electronics industry, another key issue, before becoming mayor of Shanghai in 1985. This was a turning point; two years later, in 1987, he joined the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee.
Jiang Zemin will finally be driven into the heart of the machinery. Almost seamlessly, he became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party again two years later, in 1989, in June, then in November he became chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Commission. A double hat that he would keep until the 2000s and that he would combine with that of the President of the Republic from 1993. So he has “the three crowns”.
This concentration of power in the hands of one man, which is relevant again today under Xi Jinping, was a first since Mao Zedong. How could this have happened? How did this engineer in the shadows, without much charisma, so suddenly become the face of an increasingly conquering China in globalization, which we will then continue to give immense influence in the mysteries of Beijing under the presidencies of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping until his death?
Jiang Zemin is greeted by his predecessor Deng Xiaoping (right) at the end of the 14th CCP Congress in October 1992 in Beijing. AFP PHOTO
The story of an unplanned rise
Where does Jiang Zemin get his legitimacy from? Tiananmen. It was indeed the tragic massacre of scores of pro-democracy students on June 4, 1989 opposite the Forbidden City, the capital’s most famous square, that disqualified all political rivals of this kid from the coastal province of Jiangsu. These events paved the way for him, transforming it into a consensus that would save the regime at that moment of upheaval at the height of power.
In 1989, at the time of repression, China was still in the hands of an old man, Deng Xiaoping, weakened since 1986 by the fall of his first dolphin, Hu Yaobang, who disappeared in 1989 – provoking the movement. Deng is a national monument: As Mao’s successor, he reoriented the regime towards economic reforms and gave the country a hybrid face between communism and capitalism. At dusk, around the “little helmsman,” one of the CCP’s rising figures was then named Zhao Ziyang. He is the general secretary of the party. Another is called Li Peng. He’s prime minister. The two ambitions will collide in favor of Jiang Zemin.
Conservative Li Peng takes a hard line and proposes repressive measures to Deng in the face of the Tiananmen movement. At a meeting with student representatives, broadcast live on television, he ignored their demands. Reformer Zhao Ziyang, on the other hand, supports negotiations. He will go so far as to go to Tiananmen Square to debate with the protesters and deliver a message of appeasement, again under the cameras.
One’s flexibility will cause his loss as Zhao Ziyang will be deposed and spend the rest of his days under house arrest – he died in 2005. The other’s grip will of course serve him to assert himself first; but by spearheading the suppression of the movement for Deng, Li Peng will condemn himself to a personal impasse. The pinnacle of Chinese power then, willy-nilly, goes in search of a third man, a fairly strong and consensual incarnation. The witness is quickly transferred to the discreet Jiang Zemin.
Former President Jiang Zemin, in Tiananmen Square, where it all began for him, with Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, on the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, September 3, 2015. AFP PHOTO / GREG BAKER
Jiang Zemin put his power to the test
Clever during the Tiananmen crisis, Jiang will have been able to remain united with the leader’s lineage even in the traumatic repression of the student movement, while preserving the virginity of a newly arrived man. It is becoming a balance point in a beleaguered CCP that seeks to assert its central place in Chinese life with long-term authority. This is what happens. Under the nudge of the newcomer, the consensus is enforced: no internal conflict within the Politburo shall ever again be filtered out.
Back then, times were turbulent across the People’s Republic of China, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, then the USSR, finally buried any hint of political reform, an important requirement of Tiananmen Square. Internally, Jiang Zemin initially relied on conservatives to establish his influence. “The Maoist tenet ‘You have to be red before you’re an expert’ is once again becoming a catchphrase in every company, government or university. The market economy is practically suppressed,” comment the authors of the documentary China, the new empire.
But just as adeptly, Jiang Zemin adopted Deng Xiaoping’s last political and economic desires, more flexible views, in the following years. He defended this line at the 14th Congress of the PCC in 1992. He then ratified the new one “Chinese Socialism” dear to his predecessor, between the party’s omnipotence and the imperative to pursue growth through the market economy in order to lift the country out of retreat and underdevelopment. And all while protecting the state industrial sector.
The protective figure Deng died in 1997. So it was Jiang Zemin who embodied the new consensus in China, his prime minister Zhu Rong-ji meanwhile, take on the responsibility of embodying the reformist line. Beijing embarks on a quest for productivity and profit in a rampant capitalism made up of privatizations, downsizing and bankruptcies. Social protection is dwindling, as are fundamental rights at work. The first migrant workers appear. Nowadays they are hundreds of millions.
China of the billionaires is working. Jiang will leave behind a doctrine first mentioned in February 2000 and set in stone in 2001 during the CCP’s 80th anniversary. “Our Party,” he said, “must always uphold the development demands of China’s advanced productive forces, represent the orientation of avant-garde culture, and uphold the fundamental interests of the majority of the country’s people.”
This is the “three representations” theory, which aims to integrate the business elites into the CCP apparatus. It will be included in the party statutes in 2002 and in the constitution in 2003.
The stream really seemed to run dry between Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin. ROBYN BECK / AFP
The first to embody China today
Under the rule of Jiang Zemin, the People’s Republic of China has vigorously affirmed itself in a changing world, especially with Delivery in Hong Kongand its powerful financial exchange, from the UK in 1997. Then with Entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. At the same time, the country is going from about 20 billion constant dollars in estimated military spending from 1989 to the present to more than 200 billion constant dollars at present. according to SIPRI numbers. And, of course, to keep his place on the UN Security Council.
Jiang Zemin and “his famous rectangular tortoiseshell glasses”, as described by RFI A few years ago, his “Shanghai men” were placed in positions of responsibility in civil and military institutions. He roams the world as a conquering leader that everyone wants to make deals with. He forges strong bonds along the way.
France then sells Airbuses to China. Jacques Chirac smiles at everything. But one evening in 1999, Jiang Zemin’s French audience will only remember his frenzied waltz with Bernadette, Chirac’s wife, to the strains of a corrèze accordion. Token of appreciation: The Chinese President visits the French President at his Bity Castle (Corrèze).
Ultimately, it is Jiang Zemin who enforces the ban on the renewal of party leaders’ mandates. His own retirement came in 2003. He retained his post as Chairman of the Military Commission until the following year, only to depart smoothly. But the real transition, the transfer of power, he will control no more than his predecessors could control theirs, or than his successors can thereafter. This is explained on the Asialyst news site, researcher Alex Payettespecialized in the Chinese party state and its elites.
For better or for worse, Hu Jintao will take over and revive the policies of the philosopher in power Confucian in the 2000s Then it will be the era of Xi Jinping, the hard man who gradually relegates Jiang Zemin to the role of decrepit schemer of the mysteries of shadows, the old dean to whom we leave all the shenanigans , and that’s what we’re trying to crush , while we show it great occasions. In the last years of his life, observers will record his gradual loss of influence, spurred on by Mr. Xi.
Ever since he came to power, when Xi Jinping spoke of tigers and flies, that is, powerful corrupt leaders and petty bureaucrats who allow corruption to thrive, we have become accustomed to thinking of Jiang Zemin as he embodied the figure of tiger in perfect completion. Despite gigantic suspicions against him, against his entire clan, his family, his allies, despite the fall of relatives too the fight against corruptionNevertheless, he will never have had personal worries about his powerful successor.
A sign that Jiang Zemin, even in old age, was at best respected within the party and at worst feared there. The veteran’s legacy is immense as China and its party-state, the world’s largest political grouping with tens of millions members in the world’s most populous nation, have changed in nature and magnitude since the discreet Jiang took the reins one day .