China Power | Politics | East Asia

Xi Jinping’s Jiang Zemin: Rewriting the ‘Reform Era’ to Serve the ‘New Era’

Xi’s commemoration of Jiang was ultimately less an exercise in historical remembrance than an attempt to impose continuity on the CCP’s post-Mao history. 

The state funeral for former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China Jiang Zemin, Beijing, China, Dec. 6, 2022.

On August 17, Xi Jinping delivered a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who passed away in 2022. The speech unsurprisingly was laudatory. Jiang, Xi stated, was “a great Marxist,” “a great proletarian revolutionary, politician, military strategist, diplomat,” and “the core of the party’s third generation central leadership collective.” 

Yet the speech was more than a mere commemoration. Rather, it exhibited a long-noted tendency of the CCP to “make the past serve the present” through the instrumentalization of historical narratives about itself and its leaders. In the speech Xi constructed a version of Jiang’s legacy that effectively sought to incorporate it as the antecedent to his “new era for socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which was proclaimed at the 19th Party Congress in October 2017. 

Xi’s Jiang, then, in contrast to most assessments of the Jiang era, emerges as neither representative of an alternative path to the “new era” nor as a vestige of a bygone period of “liberalization” but as providing the historical foundations for Xi’s “new era.”

The speech constructed this version of Jiang’s legacy in four major ways. 

First, it established that Jiang’s tenure was an indispensable link in the development of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” from Mao to the present. This is reflected in the narration of Jiang’s political life from joining the CCP in 1946 to becoming general secretary in June 1989 and his subsequent direction of “a new situation of comprehensive reform and opening up.” In this narrative, Jiang’s capacity to lead is firmly connected to his commitment to remaining “true to our original aspiration” and upholding of the “party’s basic theory, basic line, and basic strategy.” Jiang is thus portrayed as a loyal servant and protector of the CCP’s political and ideological patrimony. 

Second, and arguably the fundamental lesson of Jiang’s career that the speech sought to convey, is that Jiang was a staunch defender and believer in the supremacy of the party. Not only does Xi describe Jiang as having “unwavering political faith” in Marxism, communism, and “socialism with Chinese characteristics” but also a firm belief in the necessity of the CCP’s leadership. This is illustrated by Jiang’s handling of the “major tests” in both domestic and international politics of the “late 1980s and early 1990s” (i.e. June 1989 and the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1995-96). Jiang in facing these challenges “unwaveringly” upheld the “Four Cardinal Principles,” “carried out governance and rectification,” “engaged in diplomatic struggles,” and “resolutely safeguarded the country’s independence, dignity, security, and stability.” 

Crucially, in Xi’s telling, the lesson Jiang drew from this experience was that to govern the country one “must first govern the party, and that governance must be strict” and the “more reform, opening up, and economic development there is, the more........

© The Diplomat