Jiang Zemin Dead at 96: Former Chinese President Dies After Cancer Battle

Jiang Zemin, China's powerful post-Tiananmen leader, has died at the age of 96, state media outlets said on Wednesday.

His death at 12:13 p.m. local time was attributed to "leukemia and multiple organ failure" on November 30, the country's official news service Xinhua said. He died in the eastern port city of Shanghai, not far from his birthplace in Yangzhou.

Jiang held the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) top post between 1989 and 2002. He was installed with little factional influence after his predecessor, Zhao Ziyang, was ousted in June 1989 for supporting student-led protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and elsewhere rallying for political reforms.

In more than a decade in power, Jiang, who was known for his charismatic improvisation in front of the press, oversaw a continuation of China's market reforms, including its eventual accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Although historical records suggest Jiang's rise to CCP general secretary came with minimal practical authority, he eventually consolidated his base to become China's next paramount leader, a status symbolized by his role as party chief, chair of its Central Military Commission, and the presidency.

His faction, known as the "Shanghai Gang," was named for where he previously served as mayor and party secretary.

Among his many tasks were maintaining domestic stability and leading a recovery of Beijing's image in the wake of the party's crackdown in Tiananmen Square, an incident that triggered Western sanctions and threatened China with pariah status. By his second term as party leader, Jiang's China was already on a path of rapid economic rise.

Jiang sped up the opening of the Chinese market at the behest of his reformist predecessor Deng Xiaoping, and in 1992 introduced the concept of a "socialist market economy," a state-led capitalist system that retained the Marxist-Leninist hallmarks of public ownership.

Jiang delivered Deng's eulogy in 1997 and oversaw the handover of Hong Kong from the U.K. later the same year. It was also during his tenure that Macau was returned from Portugal in 1999.

Also in 1997, Jiang became the first Chinese head of state to visit the U.S. in 12 years at the invitation of then-President Bill Clinton.

Having maintained the CCP's typically tight control over Chinese society, Jiang dismissed continual scrutiny of his human rights record, which was deplored by many for its repression of activists and its nationwide campaign against the Falun Gong religious sect before the turn of the century.

As he slowly relinquished his power in the early 2000s, his time in office was also criticized for failing to address systemic problems such as institutional corruption, which would be inherited by his successors Hu Jintao and later Xi Jinping.

For political scientists studying the world's largest and most powerful one-party state, however, Jiang's relatively stable period as leader, and especially the way it ended, had additional significance for the modern Chinese political model.

When Jiang stepped down as party chief in 2002 after two terms, "it was the first time that any ruler of a communist nation had left office without dying or being deposed by a coup," Susan Shirk, a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, observed in a 2018 paper.

A decade later, Hu's voluntary retirement from China's top leadership positions, and Xi's subsequent rise, led many to conclude that the CCP had successfully institutionalized the peaceful transfer of power within its ranks. It was a mark of what Columbia University professor Andrew Nathan termed "authoritarian resilience" in 2003.

But that model proved to be short-lived as Xi secured a widely expected third term as leader in October at a major political event where Hu was also symbolically ejected from the proceedings.

Announcing Jiang's death, the CCP praised him as an "exceptional leader of high repute," who unwaveringly stuck to the party line as he steered the country through "very complication situations at home and abroad."

"Comrade Jiang Zemin's passing is an incalculable loss to our party, our military, and our people of all ethnic groups," the statement said.

Jiang was the longest-living paramount leader in the history of the People's Republic of China.