Jiang got his break to be party leader in the aftermath of the chaos of the student-led protests centered on Tiananmen Square in 1989. China was a pariah. Jiang was tasked with restoring stability within a divided Communist Party — and rehabilitating the image of a government that had ordered the military to fire on its own citizens.
In a 2000 interview, CBS journalist Mike Wallace called Jiang "a dictator, an authoritarian." And Jiang objected.
"Very frankly speaking, I don't agree with your point," the Chinese leader said in English. "Your way of describing what things are like in China is as absurd as what the Arabian Nights may sound like."
Born on Aug. 17, 1926, in southern Jiangsu province to a prosperous family, Jiang joined an underground Communist cell in 1946. After the Communist Party won control of China, he was assigned to build relations with the Soviet Union and worked in the Stalin Automobile Factory in Moscow, where he learned to speak Russian.
But he remains most closely associated with the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, where he was mayor before being plucked away to become overall head of the Communist Party. In Shanghai, he championed foreign investment and built up a network of proteges and associates he later helped promote up the ranks of party leadership — a power base analysts of Chinese elite politics termed "the Shanghai gang." Those connections later let Jiang retain significant influence long after he had officially left the top echelons of power.
He wanted to allow entrepreneurs and capitalists to join the party, and his theory underpinned the ideological somersaults necessary to permit it.
"This has been instrumental in ensuring that the party remains relevant. But of course the nature of the party has changed tremendously," says Willy Lam, a senior fellow at U.S. think tank the Jamestown Foundation and one of the first people to write a biography of Jiang.
The move was controversial, but it ultimately ensured the party's continued grip on power by co-opting a rising class of self-made entrepreneurs and China's middle class. "It is no longer the party of the workers and peasants," Lam says. "What we have seen is a new aristocracy has risen up the ranks. It is now the party of the rich and powerful."
感觉NPR这篇也是存稿很久，随时准备好拿出来用的。
要给他盖棺定论在六四开枪决定者和既得利益者上了。