Jiang Zemin, 1926-2022

With his portly build, high-waisted pants, and square-rimmed glasses, the late Jiang Zemin effected a grandfatherly bearing. Behind his trademark spectacles, however, was a calculating politician — one who would safeguard the Chinese Communist Party's control of China and change the course of history.

The signature achievement of Jiang, who died last week in Shanghai at 96, was securing China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, near the end of his decade in office. The move unleashed the creative and productive potential of the Chinese people. Before long, China would become the world's factory, with Chinese citizens growing prosperous and with global implications that continue to play out.

Those economic advances came at a time of relative openness in China, with just enough toleration of public activism to allow an unfree populace to let off steam without threatening the regime. Jiang knew well that the Tiananmen Square protests and related CCP leadership splits caused his predecessor's downfall. That would not be his fate.

Indeed, Jiang's legacy lay not just in his economic achievements but in leaving the late 1980s' heady optimism about political reform in the dust. A patriotic education campaign launched in the wake of Tiananmen, for example, sought to instill China's youth with both pride in their country and with loyalty to the CCP. That campaign has echoes in patriotic education's introduction in Hong Kong following current leader Xi Jinping's subjugation of that restive Chinese city.

In 1999, Jiang launched a crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement after 10,000 members showed up outside the Chinese leadership compound peacefully seeking official recognition. The result, as Freedom House's Sarah Cook put it: “widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, horrific torture, and extrajudicial killing.” There have been credible reports of organ harvesting from detained Falun Gong practitioners.

Fast-forward to Xi Jinping's rule, and Muslims face similar persecution, but at a much larger scale. More than 1 million Muslim minorities, mostly Uyghurs, have passed through concentration camps, where they have faced torture, sexual violence, forced medication, and — again — possible organ harvesting.

It was Jiang's deft usage of the Sept. 11 terror attacks that arguably put China on a path to violent repression in Xinjiang, the Uyghur homeland. In 2002, the George W. Bush administration agreed to put the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a nebulous organization in Xinjiang, on the U.S. terrorism list. As scholar Tim Grose told Politico last year, “The ‘Global War on Terror' provided the Chinese Communist Party with a vocabulary and a framework for its leaders to criminalize Uyghur ethnicity in the name of ‘counter-terrorism' and ‘de-extremification.'”

For Jiang, the Sept. 11 attacks presented an opportunity to reset the relationship in a way that gave China space to pursue its ambitions without inviting American countermoves. Jiang immediately sent condolences to Bush, who visited Shanghai the next month. Bush praised Jiang and described Beijing as an important partner in the nascent war on terror.

Even as Jiang pursued an ambitious military modernization campaign, he ensured that Washington viewed relations with China through the prism of partnership rather than rivalry.

The honeymoon would not last. America began to wake to the looming China challenge toward the end of the Hu Jintao era. Xi Jinping's leadership has made that challenge impossible to ignore — not because he marks a fundamental break from his predecessors, but because Jiang's most troubling actions reverberate in Xi's policies today.

On Jiang's watch, China seized Mischief Reef from the Philippines; under Xi, China has exerted control over the entire South China Sea. In 1996, Jiang bracketed Taiwan with missiles in response to developments in Taiwan and Washington; this past summer, Xi sent a missile directly over Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei. In 1999, Jiang supported Serbia, a Russian client, as it mounted a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; today, Beijing maintains a “no limits” relationship with Moscow as Russia wages a horrific war on Ukraine.

Even in death, Jiang has shown that history rhymes. In 1989, the death of Hu Yaobang, a former leader, provided the spark for the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, which led to tumult in the Politburo, the downfall of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, and Jiang's rise to power. How ironic, then, that Jiang has passed from the scene at the time of the most widespread protests in China since 1989. As Xi grapples with domestic tumult, will there be one final echo?

Michael Mazza is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.