Zhu Rongji

Biography

Zhu Rongji was born in Changsha, Hunan, in 1928. He joined the Communist Party in 1949, graduated in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University in 1951 and then worked at the State Planning Commission. His criticism of economic planning during the Hundred Flowers period led to his being branded a rightist and expelled from the party in 1958, and he spent much of the next two decades in demoted posts, including years at a cadre school during the Cultural Revolution.

Rehabilitated in 1978, he rose through the economic bureaucracy, becoming vice minister of the State Economic Commission and founding dean of Tsinghua's School of Economics and Management. As mayor of Shanghai from 1988 and the city's party secretary from 1989, he gained a reputation as a reformer and ended the 1989 protests there with little bloodshed.

As vice premier from 1991 and governor of the People's Bank of China from 1993 to 1995, he led the 1994 tax-sharing reform and efforts to cool an overheated economy. As premier from 1998 to 2003 he held the yuan steady through the Asian financial crisis, restructured state-owned enterprises at the cost of tens of millions of jobs, halved the central bureaucracy and oversaw China's entry into the World Trade Organization. He retired in 2003 and died in Beijing in 2026.