JIANG ZEMIN

born Aug. 17, 1926, Yang-chou, Kiangsu province, China Wade-Giles Chiang Tse-min Chinese official who became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1989 and president in 1993. Jiang joined the CCP in 1946 and graduated from Chaio-t'ung University in Shanghai the following year with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked in several factories as an engineer before receiving further technical training in the Soviet Union about 1955. He subsequently headed technological research institutes in various parts of China. In 1980 Jiang became vice-minister of the state commission on imports and exports. Two years later he became vice-minister of the electronics industry and from 1983 to 1985 was its minister. He had meanwhile become a member of the Central Committee of the CCP in 1982. Named mayor of Shanghai in 1985, he joined the Political Bureau in 1987. Jiang's support of the government's forcible suppression of massive pro-democracy student demonstrations in the summer of 1989 won him the favour of China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, and of the premier, Li Peng. When the Chinese leadership was reshuffled following the suppression of the democracy movement, Jiang succeeded Zhao Ziyang as general secretary of the CCP. He was a compromise choice who combined a commitment to continued free-market economic reforms with a determination to preserve the CCP's monopoly on political power. In 1989 he succeeded Deng as chairman of the party's Central Military Commission and in 1993 became president of the National People's Congress (ceremonial head of state). With Deng's death in 1997, Jiang became paramount leader and consolidated his power. He began to reduce the state's ownership and control of some of China's 300,000 industries, beginning with a privatization plan in 1997. During the late 1990s Jiang attempted to improve the country's uneasy relationship with the United States. In 1997 he participated in the first U.S.-China summit in almost a decade and at a follow-up meeting in 1998 openly discussed his human rights record, which had been criticized by the West.