Zhu Rongji, Architect of China's 1990s Reforms, Dies at 97
The former Chinese premier, who overhauled state banks and enterprises and helped bring China into the WTO, died of illness, state media said.
Zhu Rongji, the former premier of China who drove sweeping economic reforms in the 1990s, has died at age 97. State media reported the cause of death as illness.
Zhu, an acerbic technocrat and trained engineer, was known for reforms that sought to move China from the chaos of its post-Maoist years toward a more global, market-oriented financial system while preserving the Communist Party's control over the economy.
He remained a polarizing figure even after retiring from the premiership in 2003 and largely withdrawing from public life. His policies helped generate vast wealth over the following decades but also left institutions with lasting vulnerabilities, observers say.
Zhu played a central role in negotiations that led to China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, after the U.S. Senate granted China preferential trading status the year before. Charlene Barshefsky, a former U.S. trade representative who negotiated with Zhu, said he "embraced the notion of a China whose economic system was more compatible with that of the West." Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert and former national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, recalled the talks as genuine give-and-take rather than scripted exchanges.
Born in 1928 in Changsha, Hunan province, Zhu graduated from Tsinghua University with a degree in electrical engineering and joined the Communist Party in 1949. Known for blunt, independent views, he was labeled a political "rightist" in 1958 for criticizing Mao Zedong's economic policies and was purged again during the Cultural Revolution, spending five years in manual labor. He was rehabilitated after Mao's death in 1976.
As central bank governor, Zhu tamed runaway inflation, and as vice premier he centralized China's tax system. After becoming premier in 1998, he vowed to reform indebted state banks within two years and inefficient state enterprises within three, a pledge that made him both admired and reviled.
His restructuring of state-owned enterprises, which left an estimated 30 million workers jobless, remains his most controversial legacy. Zhu created a basic social welfare system, still in place today, to offset some of the fallout, though regions reliant on state jobs, particularly in China's northeast, suffered lasting damage.
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