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Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of profiles of Chinese leaders on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Well-known among foreign journalists for his quirky comments in English and his propensity to break into musical performance, former Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin gained distinction under supreme leader Deng Xiaoping when he clamped down on student protests while serving as party chief in Shanghai in the 1980s.

Yet the smiling demeanor Jiang presented on the international stage was at odds with his status as a strongly authoritarian leader who would eventually pick Xi Jinping as the next president.

Back in 1989, as thousands of students were taking to the streets to demand a more accountable government, Jiang’s shuttering of the pro-student Shanghai-based 21st Century Economic Herald and his tough approach to meetings with student leaders in the city earned him the trust of his boss, Deng.

Jiang’s big promotion came after the fall of ousted premier Zhao Ziyang, who was blamed for not being tough enough on the weeks-long protests on Tiananmen Square. 

He continued the political clampdown that followed the June 4, 1989, massacre while promoting highly able technocrats to manage the economy and promote its membership in the World Trade Organization.

Jiang effectively institutionalized the precedent set by Deng of boosting economic development but cracking down mercilessly on any form of political dissent or public protest.

Following mass protests by members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in 1999, Jiang launched a brutal crackdown on the movement, which was outlawed as an “evil cult,” setting up secretive and extralegal offices to hunt, imprison and torture practitioners in a nationwide operation that continues today, rights groups and U.S. officials say.

He also tightened up population controls begun under Deng as the “one-child policy,” launching a wave of forced abortions, sterilizations and other forms of state-backed violence on families deemed to have “excess births” outside of local quotas.

Not in ‘traditional mold’

Yet much of Jiang’s political power stemmed from his ability to correctly judge which way the wind was blowing at any given time, rather than from a strongly-held sense of ideology, political commentators said.

“He wasn’t a leader in the traditional Chinese mold,” political commentator Heng He told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “He had a strong desire to perform.”

During the student protests of 1986, while Jiang was party secretary in Shanghai, he gave a strongly worded speech shaming the students for protesting.

“All of the provincial and municipal leaders were still watching to see what happened, and hadn’t yet gone either way,” Heng He, who has watched video footage of Jiang’s speech at the time, told Radio Free Asia. “[Jiang] was the only one who stood up and spoke out against these relatively liberal ideas, and anything related to the student protests.”

Jiang’s status as a second-generation scion of a revolutionary family — his father died fighting the Japanese during World War II — also helped.

Drawing investment

Yet after taking power, Jiang also managed to displease Deng, who still ruled from behind the scenes.

His conservative approach to the economy in the earlier years of his rule prompted Deng to take action of his own in the form of his 1992 “southern tour” kickstarting a slew of investment-friendly reforms.

“A return to the old, left-wing line [of late supreme leader Mao Zedong] was totally unacceptable to Deng Xiaoping,” U.S.-based current affairs commentator Cai Shengkun told RFA Mandarin. “So he launched his tour to the south of China, bringing in the cavalry to assist his reform and opening up policies.”

“That was a great deterrent to [any future moves from] Jiang Zemin.”

Realizing his error, Jiang once more went with the prevailing political winds, and expressed his firm support for Deng’s reform program.

U.S.-based current affairs commentator Heng He said that was entirely in keeping with Jiang’s nature as a technocrat.

“His whole rise to power was also the rise of the technocrats,” Heng said. “He wasn’t a politician. Technocrats are politically opportunistic.”

Jiang, a Moscow-trained electrical engineer, then teamed up with economist Premier Zhu Rongji to ramp up economic reforms in the late 1990s, pushing through politically difficult market-opening reforms that helped China join the World Trade Organization in 2001, drawing vast foreign investment into its increasingly attractive economy.

World limelight

Jiang seemed to thrive in the international limelight and rubbed shoulders with world leaders from U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the upcoming Russian leader Vladimir Putin, as well as maintaining ties with traditional Communist allies like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

In the West, Jiang is largely credited with breaking China out of the isolation imposed by democratic nations in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, as well as a successful bid for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Inside China, he is credited with hiring an extremely able premier in Zhu Rongji, who launched nationwide reforms of ailing and inefficient state-owned enterprises, as well as an open-minded attitude to private wealth, with members of a newly emergent class of billionaires admitted to the ranks of the ruling party for the first time.

The result, according to a July 24 commentary by U.S.-based economist He Qinglian, was greater state control over “valuable assets, namely, oligopolistic state-owned enterprises in key sectors of the national economy, like energy, public utilities and foodstuffs.”

Changing regulations

Changes to urban land regulations that opened up large swathes of farmland around major cities paved the way for intensive industrial development and mass forced evictions, including ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Yet protests by evictees and the hundreds of millions of workers laid off from state-owned companies met with violent suppression and arbitrary detention in “black jails” or labor camp, in cases documented across two decades by Radio Free Asia.

Under Jiang, the beneficiaries of the booming economy were mostly officials and state-backed monopolies, which transferred wealth among themselves, while also benefiting a club of favored private sector collaborators, according to Cai Shengkun.

“They formed this complex, closed-circle model,” with “reforms” largely benefiting the wealthy, rather than trickling down to the general public, he said.

Falun Gong

Politically, Jiang was no more liberal than any of his predecessors, Cai said.

“Human rights and the rule of law were basically destroyed when Jiang Zemin started cracking down on the Falun Gong,” he said. “It was something Jiang worried about constantly, and couldn’t let go of.”

For Jiang, the 100-million-strong Buddhist-inspired meditation movement, which numbered some high-ranking officials and army officers among its ranks before it was outlawed on July 20, 1999, represented a threat to party rule because it offered ordinary people something they might want more than party ideology.

The crackdown, sparked by a sudden, silent protest of thousands of practitioners sitting outside party headquarters in Zhongnanhai in April 1999, was Jiang’s own brainchild, according to Heng He.

“There are plenty of documents proving that everything that happened between April 25 and July 20 [1999] was instigated by him alone,” Heng said. “Nobody in the Politburo Standing Committee supported him at the time — it was his decision alone.”

“He saw [the Falun Gong] as competing with the Chinese Communist Party for the [loyalty of the] masses,” he said.

Over time, Jiang’s anti-Falun Gong campaign was to create more casualties than Deng’s Tiananmen massacre, and continues today, according to Cai Shengkun, who cited the treatment of disappeared former Falun Gong defense attorney Gao Zhisheng.

“What kind of rule of law can there be when we see what has happened to Gao Zhisheng since,” Cai said. “He took a Falun Gong case, and wrote an open letter to China’s leaders about it, and now, nobody knows if he’s dead or alive.”

The crackdown led a federal judge in Argentina to find senior Chinese officials guilty of “genocide and crimes against humanity” in a landmark lawsuit filed by Falun Gong practitioners overseas.

Positive image

Yet Jiang’s image remained largely positive among Western media outlets, given his low-key diplomatic policy and hands-off treatment of Hong Kong and Macau in the early years following their return to Chinese rule.

“Western countries weren’t wary of China back then,” Cai said. “And I don’t think Jiang Zemin had any ambition to rule the world, or lead it in a certain direction.”

By the end of his allotted two terms, Jiang was reluctant to quit politics, and, like Deng, remained a powerful figure behind the scenes during the Hu Jintao administration.

“Hu and [then premier] Wen [Jiabao] wanted to reform the political system, but couldn’t, because the tentacles of Jiang’s influence were everywhere,” Cai said. “That restricted what Hu and Wen were able to accomplish.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kitty Wang for RFA Mandarin.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.