1993 President, successor to Deng Xiaoping
Office
: Office of the President, Beijing, People's Republic of China
The 72-year-old Jiang Zemin currently holds the three top positions of power in China: He is currently president, general secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the party's Central Military Commission. During his time in office, Jiang has continued with Deng's privatization plan, and completed a successful trip to the U.S. at the end of 1997, in which he received full state honors.
For the past decade, when the world watched the slow motion of a once-Stalinistic nation marching on the edge of cliff towards capitalistic reforms -- openning stock-market, allowing in foreign banks, fostering massive privization, lowering tariffs to bid for WTO, struggling to improve human rights records, and practicing unprecedent "one country, two system" -- it can not help wondering who are behind these changes.
The answer is, of course, every single harding working Chinese people, whose productivities and creativities are unleashed and exploded.
But one is fooling himself if he thinks the government has nothing to do with these achievements. Despite countless China-bashing stories predicting the collapse of Chinese economy and government, the nation is again and again, steered out of economic and political troubles, which otherwise a closed or communist society will easily fall victom of, just as the China in the era of colonialism and Mao-style communism had gone through.
One of those CEOs, who help steered China out of troubles, is an engineer-turned chief executive, otherwise known as President Jiang Zemin.
In contrast to most senior Chinese leaders, Jiang Zeming is more academic than forceful. He started his career studying electrical engineering and spent 30 years in car manufacturing and machine building, including a one-year training stint at the Stalin Automobile Plant in Moscow.
Jiang Zemin speaks Russian, English and Romanian, enjoys classical music, art and literature. His contacts with Western culture date back to his childhood, when he is believed to attend an American missionary school in Shanghai and receive "a great deal of American history ... [and] can recite the Gettysburg Address," says an American embassy official.
Being China's most powerful man, Jiang told reporters that he is confident about China's future. However, he still conceded that he sometimes had problems sleeping at night, especially when a natural disaster occurred. "I owe a lot of special thanks to my wife [Ms. Wang Yepin]. She tends to persuade me that, after all, I have to eat and try to get some sleep because the next day I have to continue working."
