Jiang Zemin
Jiang Zemin led China from 1989 to 2002, taking over weeks after the Tiananmen crackdown and presiding over the period of fastest economic growth in its history. Born in Yangzhou in 1926, he studied electrical engineering at Jiaotong University in Shanghai and joined the party as a student under Japanese occupation. He was adopted posthumously into the family of his uncle, a communist martyr, which helped his career. He trained at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in the 1950s and spent decades in industrial ministries, becoming minister of the electronics industry and then mayor and party secretary of Shanghai. In 1989 he handled student protests in Shanghai without bloodshed, closing a liberal newspaper and talking to demonstrators. After Zhao Ziyang was removed for sympathising with the Beijing protesters, Deng Xiaoping picked Jiang as a compromise, and he became general secretary in June 1989. He was widely dismissed as a transitional figure and outlasted that judgement. Following Deng's southern tour in 1992 he pushed market reform hard: the socialist market economy was written into party doctrine, tens of thousands of state enterprises were restructured or sold with tens of millions of layoffs, housing was privatised, and China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Growth ran near ten per cent a year. Hong Kong returned in 1997 and Macau in 1999. His Three Represents doctrine admitted private entrepreneurs to the party. He suppressed the Falun Gong movement from 1999 and permitted no political liberalisation. He handed over to Hu Jintao in 2002 but kept the military commission until 2004. He died in 2022.
- Lived: 1926 CE – 2022 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: General Secretary of the CCP (1989–2002), President of China (1993–2003)
