Jiang Zemin: In the Final Analysis

Jiang Zemin, former president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party during the 1990s and on into the early years of the 21st century, died on November 30, 2022. He was 96.

Jiang’s leadership, for the first seven years firmly under the auspices of then-de facto leader Deng Xiaoping, brought changes and upheavals that were exhilarating and full of tremulous optimism, yet were at the same time risky and wrought with potential failure. A sense of possibility combined with an edgy gnawing feeling that it could all go wrong created the perfect pioneering moment.

Simply speaking, the Chinese people had been given their first real chance in modern times to go out and meet the world on terms of their own making. The world – the whole world – was ready and willing to meet China more than halfway. Enticed by the largest untapped market on Earth, companies large and small, including the mighty titans of the Global Fortune 500, raced to join the queue for their share of the spoils. During it all, Jiang Zemin was there, cheering the process on, surprising his throngs of foreign visitors with an outsized personality not normally associated with the ranks of the “inscrutable” Chinese leadership.

Before Jiang, the Chinese people were caught in a conundrum. There was much that they wanted to do, and much they dreamed of doing, but there was no way to do it. On the material side of things, for the average Chinese there was no way to start a business, own a car, buy an apartment, or travel outside of China. From a perspective of individual fulfillment, there was no way to discover one’s own talents, take the risks required to do that, or determine one’s own future.

The state did all that for the Chinese people. Couples often lived apart, having been assigned jobs in different cities, according to their education and abilities. Living quarters were owned by the state and allotted to state-owned enterprises and government organs for use by their employees and their families. (Paradoxically, it was this system that eventually gave way to ordinary citizens having a path to property ownership and the accumulation of capital, a previously unacceptable concept.)

A great deal of that changed during Jiang’s tenure as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of China. That is not to say that it changed entirely because of him. Much of the credit goes to then “paramount” leader Deng Xiaoping, the oft-purged elder statesman who was the power driving the direction and destination of Chinese politics – despite not holding the lofty titles.

Jiang also had his foil. China’s economic transformation would not have taken wing under Jiang alone. Jiang’s premier, Zhu Rongji, was not only willing to use capitalist tools to rebuild the Chinese economy, but he had the knowledge and understanding of Western economics with which to do it. Loved by diplomats and the international media, Zhu represented a level of modern economic thought and practice that seemed compatible with international standards. And Zhu, too, had Deng’s support, vital for his longevity and safety in power.

Although it is said that Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji had an often confrontational relationship, it was Deng who chose Jiang to be the front man, perhaps an incongruous choice for someone who was only meant to be a placeholder. It’s possible that Deng did not realize the force of personality that Jiang possessed, or that Jiang had not yet demonstrated that force to its fullest degree.

Indeed, the numbers – even if they have been massaged by Chinese statisticians to enhance the truth, as is oft claimed – speak for themselves. If Jiang’s record were to be judged just by empirical economic statistics alone, the results would be staggeringly in his favor.

Jiang became general secretary of the Communist Party of China in 1989, just after the tragedy of Tiananmen Square and the forced fall of the party's previous general secretary, Zhao Ziyang. When Jiang took over the position, China’s economy, which had been functionally closed for over 500 years, was just creaking open its door to the outside world. Exports were beginning to make their mark on China’s overall development plan.

In 1990, Jiang’s first full year as head of the CCP, China’s GDP was $360.9 billion. By 2000, it was $1.211 trillion. Per capita income over the same period went from $980 in PPP terms in 1990 to $2,880 PPP in 2000. Tripling the value of these two key economic indicators over the period of a decade is an achievement of which most world leaders can only dream.

As Yao Yang pointed out in an article in 2019 for the Brookings Institution, “when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded, the average Chinese adult lived on an income barely above one-fifth the world average… Today, the same person is able to enjoy the standard of living of the average world citizen.” Much of that progress occurred under Jiang Zemin.

Jiang himself cited the building of a socialist market economy as one of his top three achievements. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a clumsy translation of the Chinese term for the changes to China’s economic foundation which Jiang ushered in, saw classic Marxist economic principles give way to the practices and policies of neoclassical growth theory. In plain speaking, Jiang threw out the basic tenets of a communist economy in favor of support for an economic theory that looked suspiciously like raw and roaring capitalism.

The acceptance and popularity of this deft move saw the Chinese people not so much change who they were as expose themselves for what they had been all along: raving capitalists. On the ground during those years, there was little to no pushback from Chinese citizens who had been raised to love the Communist Party, as it was now that very same party that offered them an opening to dramatically improve the standard of their lives. And if further justification for wiping out the primacy of Marx was needed, the economic model that Jiang allowed to prevail ultimately underpinned China’s overarching goal to transform into a developmental powerhouse that would never again leave the country vulnerable to foreign forces, either military or economic.

To say that Jiang was responsible for this transformational process oversimplifies the case. But it is certainly true that he presided over the most dramatic period of change. By the end of the millennium, Jiang was able to codify his achievements into an ideological format that made it into the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.

That philosophy, known in English as the “Three Represents” (yet another awkward translation of a phrase that sounds much better in Chinese), recognized and validated the fundamental changes in Communist Party principles that came as a result of China’s unprecedented growth during the 1990s. Functionally, these principles allowed Jiang to influence the very character of the Communist Party as one that welcomed any system promoting the interests of the Chinese people, a very broad mandate far beyond the original idea of revolution.

But Jiang Zemin went beyond mere semantics in his effort to protect and promote Communist Party interests. In fierce and violent terms, Jiang initiated a crackdown on followers of Falun Gong in 1999. Falun Gong, an offshoot of other Chinese spiritual traditions, had enraptured up to 100 million Chinese citizens by the time Jiang criminalized its practice. Thousands who refused to give up the practice were rounded up, abused, tortured, and held in detention camps, according to reports of practitioners in exile today, as well as of numerous human rights groups around the world. Thousands are reported to have died. Little to no legal process was said to have been used to either pursue or prosecute cases. The persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China continues to this day.

Jiang, very much like the man who holds the top job now, was a true believer in the necessity of the existence of the Chinese Communist Party. Despite presiding over profound structural changes in both the practice and ideology of the CCP, changes that very much looked and acted like unfettered capitalism, those reforms were acceptable as long as they stayed within the boundaries and control of the CCP itself.

Falun Gong was a completely different challenge. It neither sprung from nor was controlled by the party. In the 1990s, it had quickly taken on a life of its own. CCP members themselves were counted among its practitioners, and this fact in and of itself was a tipping point that led to Jiang’s decision to shut Falun Gong down completely and ruthlessly if need be.

In the end, Jiang’s final legacy is far more the persecution of his own citizens than it is the economic transformation of their lives for which he took credit. China’s economic “miracle” owes most of its credit to the Chinese people who were willing to work for it. Jiang – as well as Zhu and Deng – only gave them room to do that. In the final analysis, the violence wrought upon Chinese citizens for benign spiritual practices speaks far more to the character of Jiang Zemin, and of the system that produced him.