Even after Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader, Jiang Zemin would boast of the political battles he had won, the Western countries he had visited, and how he had “seen it all”. Only at the age of 90 did “the elder” become a political has-been
Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” in 2000, wagging his finger—and with his ever-mobile face fixed, briefly, in a stare—Jiang Zemin quoted from the Gettysburg address. He had committed it to memory as a student activist, before the Communist Party came to power in 1949. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he said.
So it surprised him as much as anyone when he was appointed party leader in 1989, after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests. He was then an ordinary Politburo member, not a member of the innermost core. His selection looked like a compromise between the then-warring hardliners and reformists. He had shut down a liberal journal in Shanghai well before martial law was imposed in Beijing, so he was no soft touch on dissent.
For a while it became a free-for-all, with even government departments and the armed forces going into business. By 1994, with inflation soaring, Mr Jiang began hitting the brakes to stop the economy running out of control. But reform surged on. Tens of thousands of state-owned enterprises were closed down or sold, and millions of workers lost their jobs. In the late 1990s sweeping housing privatisation led to a huge transfer of wealth to urban households and the birth of a middle class.
He was still a strongman when Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012. He would boast of the political battles he had won, the Western countries he had visited, the foreign languages he spoke and how he had “seen it all”. His men still filled the Politburo. Under the pretext of waging war on corruption, Mr Xi attacked some of his closest allies, and in 2016 was declared the new core. At the age of 90, “the elder” became a political has-been.
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