In the official statement on the occasion of the death of the party and state leader of China, Jiang Zemin, it is emphasized that he was a "great Marxist and proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat".
It added that Jiang formed the "core of the third generation of the party's collective leadership", was the main author of the "Three Representatives theory", and that he led the party's central collective leadership "firmly relying on the party, the army and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, protecting socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
This is how obituaries are generally written in China to deserving leaders of the country and the party. Perhaps the only new nuance is that "collective leadership in the party" is mentioned in several places, which is a term rarely encountered in public political discourse in recent years.
SON OF TWO FATHERS
Jiang Zemin's political career is not typical of Chinese revolutionaries. He never picked up a gun or a hammer, he was the first general secretary of the Communist Party of China from a family of intellectuals.
He was born on August 17, 1926 in the city of Yangzhou, in the eastern province of Jiangsu. His personal name - Cemin, which can also be translated as "welfare for the people" - comes from a Confucian saga. Jiang's family was far from politics, more attention was paid to education, music and calligraphy than politics.
Jiang went to good schools. He was brought up in his youth in the manner of generations before him. Chinese language and literacy, for example, were learned by memorizing poems from classical Chinese poetry. English was memorized by reciting speeches by Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. "It was the Confucian phase of my education," Jiang later said, showing a foreign leader a personal stamp on which he had written his name in calligraphy. Calligraphy had an important place in his school, as an art.
As a national leader, Jiang Zemin many decades later knew how to surprise his guests - domestic and foreign - by reciting poems from the Tang Dynasty, considered the pinnacle of China's rich heritage. He remembered well the monologues from "Hamlet", the poetry of Shelley, he recited them in English.
From an early age, he was engaged in music, studied literature and, of course, calligraphy, without which, as the people thought, it was impossible to find a good job. He was a talented musician: he sang beautifully and played well on the erhu, a type of violin that has two strings and is held on the knees. He also knew how to play music on the bamboo flute, and later on the piano. In fact, he knew how to use any instrument he could get his hands on. Enjoying music remained a constant pastime for him: the Chinese listened to him more than once and watched him sing with choirs on television.
In addition to his parents, Jiang was influenced by his uncles. One uncle, Jiang Shangqing, died as a communist and left behind a wife and two daughters, with no male heir. According to Chinese tradition, in such cases the adoption of a male heir was resorted to, preferably from within the family circle - this is an old Confucian tradition. In this case, the decision fell on Jiang Cemin, who was then in his final year of high school.
Everything was done in accordance with a thousand-year-old custom. At a large family gathering, Jiang Zemin knelt before his aunt and addressed her as "mother" in front of everyone. They fell into each other's arms and with that the adoption ceremony was concluded. Since his new, second "father" was a "communist martyr", Jiang Zemin also became the "son of a communist martyr". In some complex situations, much later, it will be of no little use to him.
STONES OF DISTANT MOUNTAINS
Jiang graduated from the Electrical Engineering College in Shanghai. He was admitted to the Communist Party in 1946. It was certainly not a careerist move, but a decision based on conviction. Back then, the communists carried their heads in bags, they were illegal, and the Kuomintang dealt with them fiercely.
Jiang got his first job in a Shanghai canned food factory. The owners were Americans, and a young engineer controlled the functioning of the electrical installations. In December 1949, he married his longtime student crush, Wang Yeping. She graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages. A year later, their first son was born, and two years later another one. He remained married to the same woman all his life, which is not typical for Chinese leaders.
In the party nomenclature, his name was from the very beginning under the letter "i" (both red and expert) - loyal to the party and the profession. Such were the most valued in China at the beginning of the fifties. Jiang was sent to northern China where the number one car factory was being built. He was in charge of energy supply, so he was sent to Moscow for training along with several dozen other compatriots. He was 28 years old and it was his first trip abroad. He worked in a car factory that bore Stalin's name, he was very proud of it, and he studied the Russian language hard. Four decades later, he will use this knowledge in meetings with Russian leaders Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and he will gladly sing them a Soviet song from that time.
When he returned to China in 1955, thanks to his profession, he avoided all major political trials, including the tragic Cultural Revolution. You could say that he was an opportunist by force of opportunity, it was the only way to ensure a head on his shoulders. He was still marked as a man from the other side of the barricade, he was left without a job for several years, but he used it to improve his English and Russian language.
Then came a sudden jump in his career: in 1970, as a party member, he became an official in the Ministry of Trade, then he was sent to Romania to organize Chinese economic aid to this country. Just half a year before that, he was unemployed and unnoticed in Wuhan, and now he was the main Chinese economic representative in Romania. What does he have to thank for such progress? Probably the most – luck.
Jiang used his stay in Romania to learn the Romanian language, and he also had the opportunity to "jump" to Yugoslavia, which was the best organized socialist country in those years, free and open. In fact, Jiang came from Timişoara most often only to Vršac, where the Chinese were supplied with food and other items that were not available in Romania. He also learned several dozens of Serbian words, which he later used with pleasure in meetings with politicians from Yugoslavia.
After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, his political rise began. Deng Xiaoping insisted on younger cadres. He noticed the optimistic Jiang and sent him to the first free economic zone, Shenzhen, in southern China, and then to travel the world to see how other countries did it.
Ireland, until then the most underdeveloped country in Europe, left the biggest impression on Django. He wrote a report to Deng in Confucian style: "Let's use stones from distant mountains to polish our jade." Deng circled Jiang's name.
His further political path is known. At the party congress in 1982, he was elected to the Central Committee, and three years later he was elected mayor of Shanghai.
RITUAL TEA IN THE Whirlwind of HISTORY
At the end of May 1989, at the time of the great student protests that shook China, he received an urgent message from Beijing: an invitation to come to tea. He immediately knew who was calling him, but not why - the only thing that was clear was that it was not about tea.
He was 62 years old, he was the party secretary of the Shanghai City Committee and, since two years ago, a member of the party's Politburo. In Shanghai, he was the first, but in the Politburo, where, formally, all members are equal, he was not among the first. Some were more "equal" than others, in fact, it was known where whose place was. Others knew it too: it was enough to observe the order in which members of the Politburo entered a gathering, a hall or where they sat at the table: Jiang was among the last to enter banquets.
China Two Eras AnalysisTHE GREAT MENTOR: With Deng Xiaoping
However, neither the head of the party, nor the president of the republic, nor any member of the Politburo had real power and the greatest influence. Deng Xiaoping, a politician without a state or party position, but with a nominal military function - was the president of the Central Military Commission. He left the party Central Committee and Politburo in 1987, hoping that other revolutionaries of the old generation would follow in his footsteps.
For the reception with Deng, because it was his invitation "to tea", Jiang Zemin was given one day off. Beijing was a bustling city in those weeks: a major student uprising was nearing its climax. Tiananmen was the center of student resistance. When Jiang arrived in Beijing, 3.000 students were on hunger strike at Tiananmen Square. He went straight to the square from the airport. He put on a doctor's white coat, put on a baseball cap from an American university and mingled with the students.
Jiang, himself critical of the student protests, was among the first to welcome martial law in Beijing. But in Shanghai, he still negotiated with students and urged them to return to classrooms. On the one hand, determined to defend the party's policy, he made it possible for students to express their views.
Premier Li Peng in Beijing refused dialogue with students. This was one of the reasons for the radicalization of the protests and the emergence of tanks at Tiananmen Square. There were no tanks in Shanghai, but Jiang recruited workers' militia with wooden clubs. There were smashed heads, but no dead people in the streets. Perhaps this was also the reason why Deng Xiaoping invited him to Beijing and briefly told him that he should take over the post of general secretary of the party, in which factional fights were raging.
Jiang was the ideal fit: far enough from Beijing not to be embroiled in direct conflict, he represented a figure of compromise. Of course, he also had another important trait: he was loyal, very loyal, to Deng himself. On the twenty-fourth of June 1989, in a dark Mao blouse, surrounded by his closest associates, the new general secretary finally appeared in public. Only 32 days have passed since the invitation to tea at Deng's.
CAPITALISM BUILDS SOCIALISM
The news caused a great surprise. Even many Chinese asked themselves: Jiang? Which Jiang? And foreign commentators hastened to declare him only a temporary figure. Wrong: Jiang remained in power for 14 years.
In his first year at the head of China, Jiang could count on the support of Deng, who gradually but inexorably withdrew from politics and appeared less and less in public. As the years progressed, until Deng's death in 1997 and beyond, Jiang increasingly took the lead on his own. He built bridges on both the left and the right of the political bank: he himself preferred to stay in the center. Soon it became a recognizable style of his rule. The Chinese are used to his face - always smiling, with big glasses.
Although Jiang essentially followed the same political line as Deng, he began to address a number of issues that his great predecessor did not even get to put on the agenda. Jiang interpreted the very concept of common property differently: he said that state property can take different forms, and even be shareholder-owned. The new interpretation of ownership opened the door to the transformation of state ownership into shareholder ownership, which is a specific type of privatization that began under Jiang in the Chinese economy.
Jiang's merits in the new Chinese foreign policy are characterized by pragmatism, independence and the absence of ideological goals, as well as the personal charm he imposed in meetings with world statesmen. It also had the effect of looking at China with different eyes. Jiang is one of the world's most widely traveled statesmen. He was the first Chinese president, after Mao's visit in 1957, to pay an official visit to Moscow. He was the first Chinese leader to visit Washington in 12 years.
His foreign policy was free of ideologically flavored spices. Money and foreign investments had no smell. During his 14 years at the helm, China developed the fastest in its history. He allowed private entrepreneurs and capitalists to become members of the Communist Party.
There should be no doubt that Jiang came out of Deng's overcoat. From a foreman in a cannery, he rose to unimagined heights in his country and in the world. Jiang's career was not the result of his personal struggle for positions, which is often the case in political life: Jiang was carried by the very wind of change in his country.
The well-known TV journalist Barbara Walters later described him as a statesman with an "irresistible smile but cold eyes". She could have added: and with the cool head of a professional politician.
Four years after the events at Tiananmen Square, the Chinese and American presidents met for the first time. The meeting started after midnight and everyone was tired. President Clinton spoke a few words of welcome at the beginning, and then Jiang wiped his thick-glassed glasses and began to read the prepared text. After twenty minutes, Clinton fidgeted in his chair and tried to interrupt Jiang: "Mr. President, we have come to talk, not to listen to a lecture."
The Chinese president did not allow anyone to interrupt him. He continued reading and when he finished, he folded his papers slowly and put them in his pocket. Clinton joked: "If I had known, I would have brought a saxophone to practice a little." Jiang accepted the joke: "Great, I play the urha." So when you come to Beijing, let's have fun together."
Jiang knew and liked to take the microphone in his hands at official dinners and sing a song or an opera aria. During the visit of the world's most famous tenor Pavarotti in Beijing, he sang "O sole mio" with him. His adrenaline grew unstoppably when he noticed journalists and photojournalists around him.
Jiang Cemin met with Slobodan Milosevic in Beijing during the wars in Yugoslavia. Before the meeting, in the presence of journalists, Jiang unexpectedly spoke in Serbian. It was quite difficult to understand, but we still understood: "A hard nut is a strange fruit, don't break it but it will break your teeth". It was a political message to Milošević, who was apparently not in the mood: "What are the journalists going to do, let's go outside".
Kostunica arranged a festive dinner and brought an orchestra. He was in a great mood, took the microphone and sang "Oj, Moravo" in Serbian. Then he invited Koštunica to join him, but the latter looked somehow blank. To cheer him up, Jiang sang "Bella ciao" in his ear in Italian. But Kostunica was still staring implacably into space. Minister of Foreign Affairs Goran Svilanović tried to correct Blamaža, but he was deaf and had no voice.
Eh, if only Ivica Dacic had happened there!
