Former Chinese president, who guided China’s rise, dies
BEIJING: Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, who led China after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and was the first Chinese head of state to visit India, passed away in Shanghai on Wednesday, Chinese state media announced. He was 96.
“Our beloved comrade Jiang Zemin died at 12:13 on November 30, 2022 in Shanghai at the age of 96 due to leukaemia and multiple organ failure,” the Communist Party of China (CPC) central committee said in a written statement addressed to all the party organs and published by state media on Wednesday.
Jiang served as CPC general-secretary from 1989 to 2002; chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission – which oversees the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) -from 1989 to 2004; and president between 1993 and 2003.
Jiang was from relative obscurity plucked by the CPC leadership to head China’s ruling party after the bloody Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989, reports said.
He was credited with bringing China back into the diplomatic mainstream after the international isolation which followed the Tiananmen massacre.
Jiang, in 1996, became the first Chinese head of state to visit India since the CPC came to power in China in 1949.
His visit was seen as a big step towards normalising Sino-India bilateral ties. It was during his visit that the two countries reached a consensus on building a “constructive and cooperative partnership for the 21st century”.
The Chinese leader and then Indian Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda signed a set of “confidence building measures” (CBM) which included the article “not to attack each other” or cross the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the de facto border between the two countries.
During his visit, Jiang also met his Indian counterpart at the time, president Shankar Dayal Sharma, and discussed reduction of border troops.