Historical events tend to appear inevitable in retrospect. Our period tends to take for granted the China of the contemporary era, which is the second largest economy in the world, a major participant in international affairs, and whose policies are central components of international order. It is a tribute to the creativity of the generation that governed China in the Nineties that we can now take for granted what was then a vision.
When Zhu Rongji ascended to the top ranks of China’s national leadership in the early 1990s, China found itself in a period of political and economic uncertainty. The economic reforms promulgated by Deng Xiaoping had been envisioned but only partially implemented. A nascent private sector coexisted with unreformed state-owned enterprises. Links to the world trade system were tentative and partial. China’s financial institutions were inchoate, and its economy was entering a period of dangerously escalating inflation, approaching 25 percent in 1993. At the same time, China’s relations with the Western world — vital for the success of its economic reforms —were still fragile. The impact of Tiananmen lingered. Both sides had committed themselves to cooperative relations, but common projects were in short supply.
It is a mark of Zhu and his colleagues’ determination and creativity that a decade begun in an atmosphere of such uncertainty turned into a period of such remarkable accomplishment. By the time Zhu retired, as Premier, in 2003, China had tamed its inflation, withstood the Asian financial crisis of 1997—1998, joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), tendered a successful bid for the 2008 Olympics, and improved its relations, in some cases dramatically, with countries across the Western and non-Western worlds. All this took place against the backdrop of growth rates no lower than 7 percent per year (and often in the double digits), and an increase in per-capita GDP that ranks as one of the most sustained and powerful in history.
The interviews in this book offer a rich record of Zhu’s work during a period in which he served as both a leading economic official in China’s domestic reforms and, in effect, as a diplomat charged with explaining and building support for China’s policies abroad. On both counts these interviews portray an official of rare skill: witty, urbane, exceptionally intelligent, tough in the face of challenge, and at times disarmingly frank.
I had the honor of becoming acquainted with Zhu during this period. He visited the United States during a difficult period for a Chinese then Vice Premier. I presided at some meetings where the audience was sometimes almost embarrassingly hostile. Zhu conducted himself with defiant optimism. He launched himself into conferences and dialogues with determination and good will. He was an unapologetic defender of China’s political institutions without seeking to impose them on societies with different political convictions. When he was asked whether he aspired to be China’s Gorbachev, he replied, “No, I am China’s Zhu Rongji.”
In the West such sentiments sometimes earned Zhu criticism from those who deemed him insufficiently committed to fostering political reform in China along liberal democratic lines. It was sometimes not appreciated — and, indeed, when asked Zhu consistently declined to discuss — that Zhu’s own political and economic convictions had been tested in two periods of significant personal trial. In 1958, during China’s nationwide “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” Zhu was stripped of his Communist Party membership for twenty years. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhu was “sent down” to the countryside for five years. When asked about his periods of hardship by journalists in this book, Zhu declines to dwell on them, answering simply that “That experience was a profound education for me, but it was also a very unhappy one.” Yet no appreciation of Zhu’s career or understanding of his policies would be complete without a recognition that his route to national office included periods of significant adversity far beyond the context of ordinary Western politics, in which he ultimately vindicated his pragmatist convictions.
Over the course of the decade documented in this book, I saw Zhu Rongji frequently and learned much from his analytical skill, geopolitical grasp, and economic vision. Not all readers will agree unreservedly with the views Zhu expresses in these pages or the policies he advocated. But all will come away with an appreciation of the skill with which Zhu and his colleagues navigated their challenges during a reform period that Zhu himself described to one journalist as an “unprecedented process of exploration.” And readers will gain insight into the process by which China altered its role from being a recipient of foreign, often Western, economic policy prescriptions to becoming an independent proponent of its own solutions — particularly in the Asian financial crisis, during which Beijing’s policies served in many ways to redefine China’s relations with neighboring economies.
These pages also offer a rich resource for students of US-China relations and of a period in which China, its neighbors, and the West were engaged in a process of mutual rediscovery. In this sense, this book offers an important record for readers and policymakers in the present day, when the various parties again find themselves searching for solutions to a range of seemingly intractable problems and struggling to divine each other’s intentions.
During Zhu’s tenure in high office, relations between China and the major Western countries underwent significant challenges. China and the United States in particular confronted tensions over human rights (including an American attempt to link reform of China’s domestic governance to its most favored nation trading status), a crisis in the Taiwan Straits, arduous negotiations over China’s bid for WTO membership, the 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, and accusations of strategic ill intent on both sides. By the end of the decade however, due in no small part to Zhu’s efforts, the two sides had reached a new degree of understanding and mutual respect.
The process was not without its strains or uncertainties, as these pages underscore. Not all Chinese observers relished the project of engaging with a Western world perceived as dismissive of Chinese realities; not all Western observers approved of the effort to engage with a China falling short of Western political expectations. Zhu launched himself into this gap in expectations with aplomb and good humor.
The recasting of China’s world role in the twenty-first century will pose new challenges requiring vision and statesmanship. Those committed to the success of relations between China and the West, and to the notion that the reemergence of China as a modern great power does not foreordain conflict, can take heart from the example of Zhu Rongji, a self-described “ordinary Chinese citizen who [was] also Chin’s Premier.” Zhu’s career — in addition to its formidable accomplishments in the economic field — demonstrates that a tenacious defense of Chinese values and interests can coexist with a deep commitment to China’s membership in a broader international system. And these interviews confirm that efforts to bridge gaps in perception and expectations between China and the West can take place on terms compatible with the dignity and historic accomplishments of both sides.
Henry A. Kissinger
January 29, 2011
From Zhu Rongji Meets The Press
