Jiang Zemin (1926-2022)

Former Chinese president, party boss and the second longest serving head of the armed forces, Jiang Zemin, died November 30, 2022, at the age of 96.

Jiang joined the CCP in 1946, at the age of 20, and primarily worked as a party cadre and engineer in Shanghai factories. In 1956 he moved to Beijing to head a Machine-Building Industry Ministry bureau. After assignments back in Shanghai and later Wuhan, he returned to Beijing in 1980 to work on foreign trade and investment. In 1982 hes was named Minister of Electronics Industries and then Mayor (1985-87) and party secretary (1987-89) of Shanghai. The latter post gave him a seat on the politburo.

In June 1989, Jiang was elevated to Party General Secretary following the purge of Zhao Ziyang amid the Tiananmen political upheaval. His promotion was wholly unexpected and he was widely viewed as an interim place holder, until the elders could agree on someone more experienced. He remained in the post until 2002.

Jiang’s predecessors, Hu Yaobang (the highest ranking CCP member in 1981-87) and Zhao Ziyang (1987-89) did not also chair the party Military Affairs Commission (MAC), as had Hua Guofeng (1976-81) and Mao Zedong (1936-76). Jiang took the reins of the armed forces, in November 1989, and assumed the state presidency in March 1993, becoming the first leader to consolidate the three top posts – Party, Army, and State.

In 2002, Jiang became the first leader to routinely hand over power to a successor, in the person of Hu Jintao. Hu became state president the following year, but did not take over the MAC until after his first full term as party boss, in 2007. Jiang’s nearly 15 years as head of the MAC was second only to Mao’s 40 year run (1936-76).

During and after Jiang’s formal time in power, he cultivated a powerful political faction that came to dominate Chinese politics from the mid-1990s to the purges of 2012 and later. The Shanghai Faction (or Clique) shared power with Hu Jintao’s Communist Youth League Faction and various unaffiliated but powerful members of the armed forces. That cooperation, albeit largely under Jiang’s oversight, was thought by many observers to be the long-term future model for China: contending and cooperating factions trading power decade by decade.

Xi Jinping had other ideas.