E Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, who drove economic reforms & led China into the WTO, dies at 97
Zhu is credited with supplying the tenacity to push through changes such as China’s WTO membership, which helped transform China into the world’s biggest exporter
Zhu is credited with supplying the tenacity to push through changes such as China’s WTO membership, which helped transform China into the world’s biggest exporter BEIJING: Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, the impatient, sharp-tongued reformer who helped ignite China's explosive economic boom by forcing wrenching change on state industry in the 1990s and leading the country into the World Trade Organization, has died of illness, state media reported Wednesday. He was 97.Zhu died in Beijing at around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, the official news agency Xinhua reported.Once sent into rural exile to do manual labor for praising reforms in other communist countries, Zhu pushed through a dizzying array of changes as premier, China's top economic post, from 1998 to 2003 under former President Jiang Zemin.Zhu clashed with Communist Party conservatives and state industry bosses as he pushed state-owned companies to become efficient and profitable. That cost millions of layoffs, but helped propel China to overtake Japan as the second-largest economy behind the United States in 2010.Building on former leader Deng Xiaoping's 1979 reforms, Zhu is credited with supplying the resourcefulness and tenacity to push through history-making changes such as China's WTO membership, which helped to transform China into the world's biggest exporter.Those changes helped to keep economic growth above 8% a year from 2000 to 2010, peaking at 14.2% in 2007.A spiky personality who fought corruption and conservativesNamed premier in 1998 at age 69, Zhu became a popular figure by criticizing official bungling and graft and accepting blame when the government fell short.
His demanding style earned him the nicknames Boss and Zhu Fengzi, or Madman Zhu."I have prepared 100 coffins here - 99 for corrupt officials and one for myself," Zhu said in 1998, according to the party newspaper People's Daily.Zhu ranked No. 3 in the party hierarchy behind Jiang and Li Peng, chairman of the ceremonial legislature, the People's Congress. But he was a technician without his own power base. Zhu complained that allowed officials to ignore his orders.Zhu made his name as a deputy premier in the 1990s by crushing inflation. He enforced price controls and cut off loans to money-losing state companies, rebuffing resistance by local leaders - a pattern Zhu would repeat as he fought conservatives over the pace of reform.Zhu led efforts to secure WTO membership following marathon negotiations that began in the 1980s. That status would enshrine free trade as a national commitment, giving Zhu a tool to force local officials to stop protecting favored companies.Zhu's campaign was nearly derailed when he went to Washington in 1999 with market-opening concessions to win U.S. endorsement of the WTO bid. The Clinton administration rejected the offer as inadequate, while his political enemies at home accused him of offering too much, but Zhu survived and China went on to join the body in December 2001.Zhu launched China's home ownership boom in 1998 with an initiative to sell apartments owned by state companies. Families rushed to buy, and within a decade the majority of urban housing was privately owned.Still, Zhu was less an advocate of free enterprise than a skilled bureaucrat who carried out party orders to whip state industry into shape.Zhu showed no interest in privatizing the economy.
The BriefWire