Zhu Rongji
Zhu Rongji was the premier who took China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 on terms harsher than the country's negotiators wanted, because he wanted the outside pressure to break the state enterprises and the banks that the party would not break itself; he had been purged as a rightist at thirty, spent twenty years in disgrace, and governed the world's fastest-growing economy for five with a temper and a candour the party had not seen since Zhou Enlai. He was born in Changsha in 1928, orphaned young, read electrical engineering at Tsinghua, and was a planner in the State Planning Commission when the anti-rightist campaign of 1957 caught him for saying what he thought. He was expelled from the party, sent to a pig farm in the Cultural Revolution, and not rehabilitated until 1978. He rose fast after that, was mayor of Shanghai from 1988, where he handled the demonstrations of 1989 without troops and built Pudong, and was brought to Beijing by Deng in 1991 as the man who understood money. As vice-premier he ran the economy through the overheating of 1993, cut credit against every provincial governor's objection, and brought inflation from twenty-four per cent to under three without a recession, which nobody had done. He became premier in March 1998 and told the press he would go ahead regardless of the minefields and the abyss ahead. The programme was the hardest of the reform era. Forty million workers laid off from state enterprises, the banks' bad loans moved into asset companies, the army ordered out of business, the housing of the cities sold to its occupants, the provinces' taxes taken by the centre. Then the WTO deal, which he personally closed with the American trade representative in Beijing in November 1999 after Clinton had turned an earlier offer down. Accession came in December 2001 and the export decade followed. He retired in 2003, refused a memoir, published his speeches, and has been the standard against which his successors are measured by people who cannot say so.
- Lived: 1928 CE – ?
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: premier, politician
