China’s status as ‘the factory to the world’ is credited to one man’s actions – Zhu Rongji, the fifth premier of the People’s Republic of China, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 97. He is widely regarded in and more notably outside China as a key architect of China’s economic reforms. In particular, it was during his time that China entered the World Trade Organisation (WTO), that paved the way for China to become of the world’s dominant manufacturing superpower that it is today.
As Dan Wang emphasised in his brilliant book, Breakneck that China was built and run by engineers, Rongji too was among a long line of Chinese policy makers with an engineering background. “He enjoyed a typically technocratic education, joined the Communist party in 1949, and graduated in electrical engineering from the elite Qinghua University in Beijing in 1951.
His career through the 50s and into the 70s was rocky. He worked largely in the state development and planning commission (in charge of national implementation of the various five year plans), as an engineer, dealing with the typical duties of resource allocation in a command economy.
But his criticism of what he saw as the inefficiency of Maoist policies during the infamous Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956-57, where intellectuals and officials were invited to offer their opinions on the party, led to his being branded a “rightist” and sent to the countryside to be a teacher.
His rehabilitation back into the central government in 1962 was short lived. Once branded with the stigma of being politically unreliable in Maoist China, suspects were never fully rehabilitated.
In 1969, in the depths of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao started to wage war against what he called “bureaucratism and capitalist tendencies” in the CCP, Zhu was once more sent to one of what were euphemistically called “7 May schools” named after the central decree that had set thousands of them up across the country. In effect, they were mini-concentration camps.
There he languished until 1975, when he was sent to Beijing for a third time to work at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as an economist. A spell from 1979 to 1982 in the state economic commission, at the start of what has come to be known as the reform and opening up period, led to him being appointed as a vice minister. This marked his full transition from engineering to economics. It was as an economist that he was to have the greatest impact on China in the years ahead.”
Rongji was called the ‘Gorbachev of China’ though he didn’t particularly like it and disagreed with Gorbachev’s policies which he believed led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
“In 1991, Zhu was summoned to Beijing, in the footsteps of the then president and party secretary Jiang Zemin, and in the aftermath of the 1989 uprisings in Beijing and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As vice premier in the state council, and governor of the People’s Bank of China (1993-95), Zhu was put in charge of China’s economy at a time of immense turbulence, with many fearing that the country would once more turn inward as it had under Mao Zedong.
Zhu implemented contentious and tough reforms to straighten out the highly inefficient state-owned sector, and to modernise China’s infrastructure. By the end of the decade, Zhu could rightly declare that the country had become “the factory of the world”, a status that in many ways it maintains.
A straight-talking and forceful figure, he was famously harsh on corruption, once sacking a governor of Heilongjiang province on the spot for failing to meet growth targets. This laid the foundation for his popularity within China generally, and the high regard with which he was held abroad. He seemed to come close to the ideal image of a Chinese leader possessed of moral dignity.
Alone among high-level politicians of his period, he attempted to reach out to the population at large, and speak to them as an equal. Nor was he willing to stand on ceremony. As he stated in 1998: “I have prepared 100 coffins here – 99 for corrupt officials and one for myself,” according to the party newspaper People’s Daily. This gained him the nickname of “the Boss”.”
China’s entry to the WTO under him “can be seen as a watershed moment in China’s attempts to modernise, and to internationalise its economy, with strong growth and a doubling of the Chinese economy over the next five years. Zhu retired after one term in power, in 2003, and was replaced by his protege, Wen Jiabao.
For all the successes of his time in power, these did not come as easy gifts. In the 1990s, the state sector, which comprised most of the key enterprises, was riddled with debt, inefficiency and poor management. To address this, the whole social welfare and public sector framework had to be changed. Up to 60 million workers were laid off, some of them never employed again. Unrest was a striking feature of this period, with one commentator calling it a period of “ferment”.”
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