Farm and uninhibited, the former Chinese president will have completed his country to the market economy by bringing it to the WTO.
by Brice Pedroletti
Chinese president from 1993 to 2003, Jiang Zemin is the man that Deng Xiaoping placed in charge after the events of Place Tiananmen in 1989. Against all expectations, the Shanghai apparatchik, died November 30 in his city , at the age of 96, appointed secretary general of the Communist Party (PCC) in June of the same year, will consolidate his power and in turn become a gray eminence of Chinese politics.
In recent years, the shadow of Jiang Zemin has continued to hover on the Arcana of Beijing, as if his “retirement” had always been incomplete. The “Shanghain” was first suspected of intriguing to place his men with his successor, Hu Jintao (2003-2013), of which he hinders the first two years of power by staying at the head of the army – more precisely from the Central Military Commission, or CMC.
Given for death by the international press in 2011 following persistent rumors about his state of health, he will reinvest himself widely in the behind the scenes the following year, from the Bo Xilai affair, this scandal Combining corruption, murder and ruthless political struggles which deeply shaken the party and disturbed the transition to the top of 2012. Bo Xilai is part of the clan of the “son of Prince”, that is to say the descendants of the heroes of the Revolution , of which Jiang Zemin has always been one of the natural sponsors in the face of the faction of the youth league embodied by Hu Jintao and, today, Li Keqiang, Prime Minister at the end of the mandate.
Cosmopolitan president
Since the arrival at the presidency of Xi Jinping, also “Son of Prince”, in 2013, the alleged influence of Jiang Zemin, or that of his affidues, continued to be speculation – Not to arouse barely veiled criticism in the party’s official press organs in 2015. The former secretary general, then octogenarian, excels in carefully staged appearances, and never trivial in an opaque Chinese political world. He met, for example, Henri Kissinger in 2013 and Vladimir Putin in 2014, during their passages to Shanghai.
But, unlike the smooth and imperial image that Xi Jinping is trying to project, Jiang Zemin also left the memory of a cosmopolitan president, much more spontaneous and uninhibited than his two successors. This one nourishes on the blogosphere a current of nostalgic, the “fans of the toad” -one of the nicknames of Jiang -which cherish the eccentricities of the former secretary general. This great singing lover – by Love Me Tender, of Elvis, sung in the Philippines in 1996, in the air of opera – is known for having bathed without complex in the Black Sea in front of the photographers, or to indulge in front of The press has grandiloquent outings sprinkled with tirades in English. In 2000 he gave an interview to Mike Wallace for “60 minutes”, the program of the American channel CBS – an exercise to which no secretary general dared to indulge after him.
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