Jiang's engineering of a nation endures

Centenaries invite the long view. They ask, looking backward, what changed because that person lived and led. Aug 17 marks the 100th anniversary of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's birth, and my answer is both historical and personal. The reforms he consolidated and the scientific ambition he envisioned have come to full fruition in President Xi Jinping's new era. At a gathering commemorating Jiang's birth centenary on Monday, Xi called for learning from Jiang's extraordinary courage and vision, his dedication to and profound love for the people.

I should declare a personal interest. I spent several years writing Jiang's biography. When I woke up to the news of his death on Nov 30, 2022, I felt as though I had lost a member of my own family — the occupational hazard of biography, and also its privilege.

When historians explain how China moved from the margins of the world economy to its center — the ascent that defines the new era under Xi — part of the explanation will run through the 13 years in which an electrical engineer from Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, led a country he was called upon to lead.

Xi's "new era" has its own historical circumstances, priorities and methods. Yet it rests on foundations consolidated during Jiang's leadership. Deng Xiaoping launched reform and opening-up in 1978 and revived its momentum through his southern tour in 1992. Jiang's indispensable achievement was to preserve, institutionalize and extend that course when domestic uncertainty and international pressures placed China's future direction in doubt. He and his successor Hu Jintao helped make reform and opening-up the irreversible operating system of the country.

The turn did not come easily. When Jiang said "I now understand that the market economy is critical for China" that admission was revelatory. He possessed an engineer's respect for results and an intellectual's ability to revise his understanding. Under his leadership, the socialist market economy became established doctrine. State-owned enterprises were restructured under the then premier Zhu Rongji. Zhu passed away on Aug 12.

During that era, fiscal, banking and regulatory institutions were rebuilt; foreign investment expanded; and China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, the act that welded China's productive capacity to global demand. Ideologically, Jiang's Theory of Three Represents brought entrepreneurs and other emerging groups into the Party framework, modernizing the Party and enabling it to lead a diversifying economy.

Jiang's most deeply held strategic conviction, however, concerned science and technology. As an engineer and minister of the electronics industry, he believed national strength ultimately depended on scientific capacity, education, industrial upgrading, and mastery of advanced technology. "Rejuvenating the nation through science and education" became State strategy. He called for Chinese universities to be world-class and helped cultivate the institutions and talent from which China's contemporary technological capabilities have blossomed.

Nowhere was the conviction bolder than in space. In 1992, when China's GDP per capita was under $400 , Jiang approved China's human spaceflight program and its patient three-step design: spacecraft, then orbital laboratory, then space station. Jiang named the spacecraft himself — Shenzhou, or "divine vessel". On Nov 30, 2022, Shenzhou-15 docked with the Tiangong space station, and for the first time six Chinese astronauts were in orbit together, completing the handover that finished the station's construction. Jiang passed away that afternoon. Thirty years from the vision to its fulfillment.

It is this inheritance that Xi's new era has carried to fruition, and well beyond. The economy Jiang bound to world trade is now, by purchasing power parity, the largest on earth, and China is the foremost trading nation, producing roughly 30 percent of global manufacturing value added. The industrial-scientific ecosystem, begun under Jiang, strengthened by Hu and championed by Xi, now supports leadership in electric vehicles, batteries, renewable energy, high-speed rail, and is a formidable competitor in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotech. And the military modernization Jiang began has accelerated under Xi into forces of another order, with a large navy and reaching into cyberspace. The country that once absorbed modern technology from abroad increasingly seeks to shape humanity's technological frontier.

The continuity is structural and institutional. In Jiang's era, China sought entry into the international system, while in the new era, China is helping to shape it and contributing to global governance. The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China fused science, education, talent, development, and security into a unified program of Chinese modernization; Xi's "new quality productive forces" and the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) call for advanced manufacturing, green transition, and technological self-reliance. China has become a comprehensive power whose decisions affect every country on earth.

A centenary tribute should not become hagiography. The Jiang era's rapid growth was not without cost, and China's arrival at the center has drawn friction as well as admiration. A serious accounting holds both sides in superposition. The enduring logic is adaptation: learning from experience, correcting what fails, safeguarding stability without allowing it to become stagnation, and opening to the world while strengthening indigenous capability.

Jiang deserves to be remembered whole. He loved languages — serviceable English, Russian and Romanian, fragments of others — and delighted in using them in diplomatic exchanges. At one private dinner he decreed that only English be spoken, teasingly instructing the interpreter not to translate for a minister who had neglected to learn it, and chiding another who kept his excellent English quiet for fear of embarrassing his leader. "You wouldn't embarrass me," Jiang told him. "You would help me improve." Then he confided that he had been secretly studying Spanish for a year, to prepare for a trip to South America.

I chose to write Jiang's biography because I was convinced that his life offered a singular way to tell China's story across eight historic decades of transformation. The book's Chinese edition became one of China's bestselling books of 2005. When Jiang passed away in 2022, the biography briefly returned to number one. History, I wrote then, will be kind to Jiang Zemin.

History is not kind because it forgets imperfections. It is kind when distance permits perspective — when personality is separated from caricature, consequences from slogans, and durable achievement from transient fashion. Jiang did not initiate reform and opening-up, but he made them irreversible. He did not invent China's technological ambition, but he made science, education and human spaceflight pillars of national strategy. Xi's new era has brought those long investments to their fullest fruition, moving China decisively toward the center stage of the world. On Jiang's centenary, I remember the leader, the engineer, the insatiably curious man — and I remain confident that history will be kind to him.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the author of The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (2005), and the creator and host of Closer To Truth on science and philosophy. He received the China Reform Friendship Medal in 2018.

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