BEIJING: Former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, whose market reforms helped drive China’s extraordinary economic rise, has died from illness at the age of 97, state media reported on Wednesday (Aug 12).
Zhu graduated from Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University, joining the Communist Party in 1949, the same year Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China.
Sent to the countryside during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, he gradually worked his way up through the ranks after being politically rehabilitated, and was appointed Shanghai mayor in 1987, overseeing its first steps into becoming the global financial hub it is today.
Moving to Beijing in 1991 to work for the central government, he helped push the reforms that transformed China from a beleaguered hold-out against the collapse of Soviet-style Communism in the early 1990s to an emerging superpower with economic growth rates envied by other governments.
Zhu dragged back the Chinese economy from overheating in the early 1990s, and then as premier pushed through reforms that shut or privatised many state-owned firms and laid off workers, wrenched tax power from local officials to the central government, and launched housing ownership reforms that gave birth to a feverish real-estate boom.
Above all, he coaxed and cajoled China’s way into the World Trade Organization in 2002 through gruelling negotiations.
At the time, many Chinese officials feared he had made so many concessions to gain entry that China’s economy would be hobbled.
By no means did all Chinese observers think Zhu’s tenure was an unalloyed success. Some said missteps in grains policy, tax distribution and state factory shutdowns left messes that his successors had to clean up in quieter ways.
Zhou Ruijin, a former senior editor of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, suggested in a 2011 interview that the leaders likely to succeed then-President Hu Jintao and then-Premier Wen Jiabao had much to learn from Zhu.
“The Zhu Rongji era was one of promoting big reforms, and it nurtured a group of brave risk-takers who were at the forefront of pioneering sa market economy,” Zhou, a cheerleader for rapid market reforms in the 1990s, said in an interview with South Breeze Window, a historically pro-reform magazine published in south China.
“Today … there is still potential for big steps in reform.”