Jiang Zemin

Biography

Jiang Zemin was born in Yangzhou, Jiangsu, in 1926 and grew up under Japanese occupation. He studied electrical engineering at National Central University in Nanjing and then at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai, graduating in 1947; he joined the Chinese Communist Party as a student. After 1949 he worked in industry, training at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in the 1950s, working at the First Automobile Works in Changchun and spending 1970–72 in Romania with a team setting up machinery plants.

In the early 1980s he helped oversee the new special economic zones and became Minister of Electronics Industry. He was made mayor of Shanghai in 1985 and the city's party secretary in 1987, joining the Politburo. During the 1989 protests he took control of the outspoken World Economic Herald, and after Zhao Ziyang was ousted he was chosen as general secretary of the party and soon also succeeded Deng Xiaoping as chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Jiang became president in 1993. His leadership embraced the "socialist market economy", privatised many state firms, launched education programmes such as Project 211 and Project 985, and saw rapid economic growth. Hong Kong returned to China in 1997 and Macau in 1999, and China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. In 1999 he began the campaign to suppress Falun Gong, and his "Three Represents" theory, which opened the party to private business owners, was written into its constitution in 2002.

He handed over the party leadership to Hu Jintao in 2002, the presidency in 2003 and the military commission by 2005, though his faction stayed influential. He died in Shanghai in 2022 and was given a state funeral.