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Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin (right) taps the arm of Chinese President Xi Jinping during the closing ceremony for the 19th Party Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, October 24, 2017
JIANG ZEMIN, the Chinese Communist Party general secretary from 1989-2002 and president of the country from 1993-2003, died today aged 96.
A statement issued by the party’s central committee paid tribute to Jiang as “a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat, a long-tested communist fighter.”
Jiang was the first Chinese communist leader not to have participated in the Long March of the 1930s, joining the party while a student in the 1940s during the Chinese civil war, and his period of official leadership marked the transition from de facto rule by the so-called “eight immortals” — a formally retired group of revolutionary veterans led by Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997 — to real authority becoming vested in the leading offices of party and state.
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
STEPHEN BELL reports from a delegation that traced the steps of China’s socialist revolution from its first modest meetings to the Red Army’s epic 9,000km battle to create the modern nation that today defies every capitalist assumption
From anonymous surveys claiming Chinese students are spying on each other to a meltdown about the size of China’s London embassy, the evidence is everywhere that Britain is embracing full spectrum Sinophobia as the war clouds gather, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ
