Then-Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji arrives at Hong Kong's international airport on Nov. 18, 2002, for the opening of the World Congress of Accountants.
K.Y. Cheng/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
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Then-Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji arrives at Hong Kong's international airport on Nov. 18, 2002, for the opening of the World Congress of Accountants.
Zhu Rongji, former premier of China, has died at age 97. The cause of death was given as illness, according to state media.
Zhu, an acerbic technocrat and a trained engineer, was renowned for far-reaching economic reforms throughout the 1990s that sought to transition China from the chaos of its post-Maoist years to a more global market-oriented financial system, without completely ceding the Communist Party's control over the economy.
Despite staying almost completely out of the public eye after retiring from the premiership in 2003, he remains both loved and reviled in the country indelibly shaped by him. His reform legacy remains contested in China; in freeing up the country's enormous labor and financial resources, he helped to create vast amounts of wealth over the next three decades while also seeding institutions with future vulnerabilities.
"From the point of view of a policymaker, [he] embraced the notion of a China whose economic system was more compatible with that of the West. And by compatible, I mean vastly reformed, more open, less state-dominated, very limited state intervention," said Charlene Barshefsky, a lawyer and former U.S. trade representative who sat across the negotiating table from Zhu over years-long talks to let China enter the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In order to join the WTO, China first needed to get preferential trading status with the United States — which in turn demanded hard concessions and that it open up its closed economy to American companies. Zhu was under huge pressure to find compromise, and he let his views be known.
Zhu Rongji (left) answers reporters' questions during a joint news conference with then-President Bill Clinton on April 8, 1999, in Washington, D.C.
Joyce Naltchayan/AFP via Getty Images
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Zhu Rongji (left) answers reporters' questions during a joint news conference with then-President Bill Clinton on April 8, 1999, in Washington, D.C.
In 2000, the U.S. Senate voted to give China that preferential trading status, and the following year, China joined the WTO. The agreement was a windfall for the nascent Chinese economy. The country became an export powerhouse, and foreign businesses rushed to China to establish a foothold.
The 6 1/2-year process let Zhu show off his flinty personality, though he struck U.S. officials as inquisitive and flexible. "This was not talking points. It was a lot of give and take," said Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert who was a national security adviser for then-President Bill Clinton. He met Zhu multiple times during the negotiations.
Zhu was born in 1928 in the city of Changsha, in China's Hunan province. He graduated from Beijing's Tsinghua University, where he was also chosen as president of the student union, with a degree in electrical engineering, the winter before the Communist Party won control over China. In October 1949, when the new Communist-led republic was founded, Zhu officially joined the Chinese Communist Party.
Zhu's father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was 9 years old. Being an orphan, the need to survive helped shape his strong personality: thick-skinned and extremely direct.
"My defining characteristic is independent thought," he told bureaucrats in 1987, right before becoming mayor of Shanghai. "I say what I think."
When Chinese troops fatally fired on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, Zhu did not issue the standard propaganda line denying the tragedy. "The event that occurred recently in Beijing is a historical fact, and historical facts cannot be covered up by anybody. The truth will always come out," he wrote in an essay published in a Shanghai newspaper.
