Even in death his timing was impeccable.
Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president who was vaulted to the top of the Communist Party thanks to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, died Wednesday at the age of 96 — just as a wave of political protest sweeps the country once more.
For current leader Xi Jinping, the historical echoes could not be more ominous. In April 1989, mass mourning over the sudden death of former Party supremo Hu Yaobang triggered nationwide protests that were eventually crushed by the People’s Liberation Army in June.
Now, as then, it is impossible for the Party to ban mourning or memorial activities for a former paramount leader. But acts of remembrance in the coming days and weeks will provide untold opportunities to express dissent and dissatisfaction over the current state of Chinese politics.
Known for his relaxed, sometimes comical, performances on the world stage, Jiang was not particularly popular while in office. But as China has become more repressive and authoritarian over the last decade under Xi, Jiang’s image has been rehabilitated.
Many now look fondly at the period from 1989 until 2004, when Jiang relinquished his role as head of the Chinese military, as a time of openness and reform – when China was growing rapidly and looking to the West for inspiration and friendship.
That contrasts starkly with Xi’s ethno-nationalist imperial vision of a “great rejuvenation,” in which “all under heaven” bends to the will of Xi and his Party and China asserts itself as an expansionist military power in the world.
A decade of worsening repression and centralization of power have been exacerbated by nearly three years of harsh COVID lockdowns and a stuttering economy.
Over the past week, large protests calling for political reform and the end of Party rule have broken out across multiple cities and on scores of university campuses in a wave of generalized popular dissent not seen in the country since 1989.
Jiang’s death is especially dangerous for Xi because of their vastly different personalities and public personas. Xi is always stiff and scripted in public and his encounters with foreign dignitaries are subtly (and not so subtly) designed to portray them as supplicants and him in the role of a traditional, semi-divine Chinese emperor. The risk is that a new generation of malcontents will latch on to Jiang as a symbol of opposition to Xi’s more repressive rule.
Repressive rule
In the face of muted opposition from within the ruling Party, Xi has just granted himself a norm-busting third term as paramount leader of China.
With no obvious successor, it appears he intends to rule for life.
In contrast, Jiang relinquished all his formal titles at the age of 78 in the first peaceful transition of power in the history of the Chinese Communist Party.
He was a music lover known for regaling foreign dignitaries with renditions of Elvis Presley or O Sole Mio and reciting from memory the Gettysburg Address.
While he sometimes cut a clownish figure on the world stage, in recent years Jiang has become an inspiration for a host of internet memes and young people, who refer to themselves as “toad worshippers” in reference to the former president’s amphibian features.
The depiction of the former president as a toad in countless viral memes was popularized in Hong Kong during the 2014 “umbrella revolution” democracy protests and has morphed from a form of derision to one of endearment.
Displaying toad imagery and describing oneself as a toad worshipper has become a subversive way to display opposition to Xi, whose resemblance to Winnie the Pooh prompted Chinese censors to ban the beloved children’s character from the country.
Ironic icon
The use of his image as symbol of sedition is ironic given Jiang’s indispensable role in Xi’s rise to the pinnacle of Chinese power.
When Jiang stepped down as General Party Secretary of the Communist Party in 2002, he remained Commander-in-Chief of the military for another two years.
That allowed him to retain influence and protect his political faction, known as the “Shanghai Gang” from any overreach by the “Communist Youth League” faction of his successor, Hu Jintao.
He continued to wield great sway after handing control of the military to Hu in 2004 and when Hu wanted a protégé from his faction to join the top Party ranks as his anointed successor in 2008, Jiang effectively vetoed the move.
After some jostling, the two factions agreed on a compromise candidate to take the reins.
Xi was the son of Party royalty but with an undistinguished political career and no obvious factional base. Both the Youth League and the Shanghai Gang thought they could control and manipulate this nondescript Party man to serve their own interests.
They were sorely mistaken. He kept his head down for four years as vice-president and successor-in-waiting but Xi’s first move on taking office in 2012 was to purge both factions in a brutal “anti-corruption” campaign that continues to claim victims today.
Some of the closest allies of both Jiang and Hu were quickly placed under investigation and many wound up dead or serving long prison sentences.
The literal removal of Hu Jintao from the stage at October’s 20th Party Congress was a final public humiliation that symbolized how far China has come from the collective rule and “intra-party democracy” of Jiang’s tenure.
While he is viewed in retrospect as a much more cuddly autocrat, Jiang was responsible for extensive human rights abuses too. He personally ordered the vicious crackdown on adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and his administration was quick to put down worker’s protests resulting from widespread privatization of state enterprises in the 1990s.
His signature policy, known as the “important thought of the three represents”, was a tortured exercise in Marxist dogma to legitimize capitalists joining the Communist Party.
But along with his deft negotiations to allow China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, this policy is credited with laying the ground for the country’s extraordinary economic boom this century.
From tractors to Tiananmen
An electrical engineer who did not play a role in China’s 1949 revolution, Jiang was trained at the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow in the 1950s and worked in a tractor factory in frigid Manchuria during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.
When paramount leader and revolutionary icon Deng Xiaoping removed then-Party boss Hu Yaobang from power in 1987, following a wave of student protests, Jiang was serving as Party boss in the city of Shanghai.
As the mourning for Hu Yaobang morphed into huge pro-democracy protests in April and May 1989 and the leadership in Beijing dithered, Jiang shut down newspapers and squashed budding street protests in China’s most populous city.
After ordering the PLA to quell the rebellion and slaughter unarmed protestors in Beijing and elsewhere, Deng removed then-Party chief Zhao Ziyang for being too soft and for sympathizing with calls for democracy.
Jiang was plucked from relative obscurity and placed atop the Communist Party in what most assumed would be a temporary caretaker role.
Zhao remained under house arrest until his death in 2005.
Without an elder statesman pulling strings from behind the curtain and with formal power consolidated in his hands, Xi is in a less precarious position than his predecessors.
But there are other historical parallels that must give him pause.
The removal of the “Gang of Four” led by Mao’s widow was carried out following Mao’s death in 1976 in a bloodless coup orchestrated by a group of top Party and military officials.
Perhaps the most worrying parallel of all for Xi is the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, when he cleverly rode a wave of pro-democracy protests to sideline then-paramount leader Hua Guofeng and usher in a period of “reform and opening.”
No doubt there are some disgruntled members of the Youth League and Shanghai Gang who see the current unrest and timing of their patron’s death as a historic opportunity to seize power.
At the very least, Party censors and secret police will be working overtime to discern when an act of mourning crosses over into an act of sedition.
Let the battle of Toad King and Pooh Bear commence!
