Jiang Zemin, late president and key figure in China’s economic boom.

Jiang Zemina key figure in China after Tiananmen, led the Asian country’s economic “boom” in the 1990s but left stains on his track record such as rising inequality and corruption, alleged abuses in the Tibetan region, or his controversial fight against the Falun Gong organization.

Born on August 17, 1926 in Yangzhou, a city in the Yangtze River Delta, Jiang took the reins of a regime torn apart by divisions and international criticism in 1989 and liberated them almost 15 years later with a country that was already seen as an economic country. power and blessing to organize the 2008 Olympic Games.

Pragmatic and moderate like few others, leading his critics to give him caustic nicknames such as “El Florero” or “La Veleta”. he was one of the few communist leaders who spoke fluent English a few years later, in which China he wanted to break into the world tough, but generally kind.

Some cartoonishness contributed to his popularity, because his peculiar appearance, unmistakable dark-rimmed glasses, was combined with a curious love of singing and dancing at official events, sometimes in front of heads of state and government, for example, he remembered waltzes with Americans Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

Jiang he was able to unexpectedly break the usual gray hierarchy of the communist leaders to the point that he took out a comb from his pocket and preened himself in front of the public, as he did during an official visit to Spain in 1996, next to the then king Juan Carlos I.

From Tiananmen Square to China, which grew by 10%

Member of the Communist Party Mr. China (CCP) Jiang trained as an electrical engineer in Shanghai from a young age and came to work at the Stalin Moscow Automobile Plant in the 1950s.

Shanghai was not only his alma mater, but also the bastion from which he rose to power, first as mayor and then as general secretary of the CCP in the city, a position he cherished when the plaza protest movement broke out in 1989. Tiananmen.

This crisis led to a purge of many of the reformist leaders of the time who showed sympathy for the students, but it helped Jiang rise with the knowledge that he knew better how to deal with the protesters who were also in Shanghai.

While thousands of people were subjected to bloody reprisals by the army in Beijing, protests were few and far between in the eastern city, and they subsided without bringing tanks.

This helped Jiang, hitherto largely unknown, to be appointed by Deng Xiaoping as CCP general secretary at the end of June 1989, replacing the purged Zhao Ziyang, a position he held until November 2002.

In the early years, he was seen as an interim leader and in Dan’s shadow. Jiang created the image of a solvent leader who benefited China needs recognition and stability.

Appointed president in 1993, he eventually managed to create a powerful network of influence that covered all segments of the country’s structure, from the economy to the army.

His political assets include culminating in the retrocession of Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999, and joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. China it astounded the world with annual growth close to 10 percent.

However, his tenure also revealed serious imbalances caused by the model, with rising social inequalities and high levels of corruption, which current Chinese President Xi Jinping believes were undermining the CCP from within.

Xi, with his flagship anti-corruption campaign, after he took power in 2013, took advantage of it to cut off support bases Jiang in the economic, administrative, financial and technological apparatus of the PKCh to such an extent that, according to some analysts, little remains of the faction that led the country for more than a decade.

Falun Gong Prohibition and Abuse in Tibet

Among other criticisms of management Jiang highlights the controversial 1999 decision to ban the religious organization Falun Gong, which at the time had tens of millions of followers in China- shortly after some of its members held a demonstration in downtown Beijing calling for more recognition.

The ban gave way to a campaign of arrests, torture and executions that the organization has condemned for years.

Falun Gong has drawn particular attention to its complaints in the Spanish courts, to which one should add another, also admitted to Tibetan organizations in connection with the persecution of the communist regime in the Tibetan region.

This led to the unusual situation when the Spanish justice approached Interpol in 2013 with a request for an arrest. Jiang and other former Chinese presidents, creating an awkward diplomatic situation that sparked bilateral friction and was “turned off” by Spain’s controversial reform of the Universal Justice Law in 2014.

As for international politics, Jiang He will be remembered for his relatively cordial relationship with the US, a country he made a historic visit to in 1997 but with which he had to deal with several crises, most notably the 1999 NATO bombing of the Asian country’s embassy in Belgrade.

The former president made his last public appearance in October 2019 on the occasion of National Day and the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. (EFE)