(Adnkronos) – Former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji has died in Beijing at the age of 97, due to an illness. This was announced by the official Chinese news agency Xinhua. His reforms during his term as prime minister, from 1998 to 2003, under the presidency of Jiang Zemin, had contributed to the country’s economic growth.
Zhu Rongji, born on October 23, 1928, in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, in southern China in 1947, passed the rigorous entrance examination to the prestigious Tsinghua University, where he studied electrical engineering. He joined the Communist Party in 1949, the year it won the Chinese Civil War. Zhu, the ‘New York Times’ recalls, “played a fundamental role in guiding his country towards a market-based economy in the 1990s” and subsequently in bringing China into the World Trade Organization.
In the 1950s, the US newspaper recalls, Zhu was a rising star of the Communist Party, but he was expelled from the party during one of Mao Zedong’s “ideological purification” campaigns. He spent 20 years in obscurity, including five years as an agricultural laborer. Politically rehabilitated after Mao’s death in 1976, he quickly rose through the ranks of government. It was Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader from the late 1970s until his death in 1997, who chose Zhu in 1991, when he was mayor of Shanghai, to bring him to Beijing and entrust him with the supervision of the country’s economic modernization. Zhu opened China to the market, initially as vice premier in 1991. Promoted to prime minister seven years later, he oversaw the privatization of thousands of state-owned enterprises and subsequently led China’s entry into the WTO in 2001.
