By Dr. William Hongsong Wang

Two markets. After Zhu Rongji’s death on 12 August, the author sets him against Zhao Ziyang. Zhu (premier 1998–2003) built markets under a strong party-state—SOE cuts, housing, central taxes, WTO. Zhao, after 1989 house arrest, tied markets to property, law, courts, and political reform (Prisoner of the State).

Zhu’s toolkit. Lardy: ~34 million urban state jobs gone in four years. “Grasp the large, let go of the small” kept strategic giants; 1994 tax-sharing rebuilt Beijing’s take. Zhao’s 1988 talk with Friedman already wanted market prices; Friedman still rejected “managing the market.”

Genes, not gadgets. Chenggang Xu: “regionally decentralized authoritarianism”—central personnel, local economics. Author: Zhu changed mechanisms, not CCP grip on finance, assets, and courts. Zhao’s late line: rights that last only while leaders like markets are not secure rights.

The death of former mainland Chinese premier Zhu Rongji on August 12 has renewed discussion of his economic legacy. Zhu—who served as premier from 1998 to 2003 after previously overseeing much of mainland China’s economic policy as vice premier—was one of the principal architects of the market-oriented reforms of the 1990s. He restructured state-owned enterprises, strengthened the central government’s fiscal capacity, promoted housing reform, and used mainland China’s accession to the World Trade Organization as a means of exposing domestic firms to greater competition.

Yet remembering Zhu as a market reformer raises a more interesting question: What did he actually understand a market economy to be?

A useful comparison is Zhao Ziyang. Zhao served as premier from 1980 to 1987 and then as CCP general secretary until 1989. He was a central figure in the first decade of post-Mao economic reform, particularly the expansion of enterprise autonomy, the dual-track transition away from administered prices, and the growing role of markets. After opposing the use of force against the Tiananmen protesters, Zhao was removed from power in 1989 and remained under house arrest until his death in 2005.

Both Zhao and Zhu understood that Maoist central planning had failed. But they eventually arrived at different understandings of........

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