Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin has died at the age of 96. This was announced by state television CCTV. Jiang was considered a transitional leader, because he managed to lead China out of global isolation after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989.
He was a leader during China’s rise as a global, urbanized economic power in the 1990s and oversaw the return of the European colonies of Hong Kong and Macau to Chinese rule and Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Jiang’s government continued its repression of internal dissent: it imprisoned human rights and democracy activists, banned the Falun Gong spiritual movement, considered a threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly of power, and forcibly repressed all protests for the independence of Tibet.
Flags will be flown at half-mast on Chinese public buildings, the main headquarters of the Communist Party and government, following the death of the former president. The directive, issued by the funeral organization committee, applies from today until the end of the funeral, the calendar of which has not yet been disclosed.
Former Chinese leader Jiang led China through the transformative era from the late 1980s to the new millennium including returning Hong Kong from London to Beijing’s sovereignty, died Wednesday in Shanghai at the age of 96, struck down by leukemia. Jiang seized power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, rebuilding ties with the US and the Western world, eventually leading the world‘s most populous nation towards a rise that made the Middle Empire the world‘s second largest power . “Our comrade Jiang Zemin died of leukemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai at 12:13 on November 30, 2022, at the age of 96,” said a lengthy CCTV announcement, recalling how “the Comrade Jiang Zemin is recognized by our Party, our army and the people of all nationalities as an outstanding leader of high prestige, a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist, diplomat and a longtime communist fighter. An outstanding leader of the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the core of the party’s third-generation central leadership collective, and the main founder of the “Three Representatives” important thought. When Jiang replaced Deng Xiaoping as leader in 1989, China was still in the early stages of economic modernization, and when he retired in 2003, the Dragon was a member of the World Trade Organization, had secured the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the country was well on its way to becoming a superpower, looking optimistically towards the outside world. Jiang and his faction, the so-called “Shanghai Gang”, gave centrality to a city and an avant-garde area of the policies then applied in the country, continuing to exert influence on communist politics even after leaving the top. Absent from the 20th CPC Congress in October, with rumors that he was struggling with an illness, Jiang leaves behind his wife Wang Yeping and two children.