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Remembering an almost unique face of China
In my work over the decades I have interviewed many political figures
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n my work over the decades I have interviewed many political figures. But of course I have not interviewed everyone under the sun. Some VIPs just don't want to be interviewed by me; others definitely just don't want to be interviewed by anyone.
Zhu Rongji, China's premier from 1998 to 2002, would be at the top of my list but falls into the latter category. I have little hope.
The fact is that most powerful Chinese figures are the opposite of the typical media-thirsty American politician.
Exceptions are few, though in my career I have had the special honor of one-on-one interviews with Qian Qichen, for years China's widely respected foreign minister, and the late Wang Daohan, backstage policy overlord of relations with Taipei who was also president Jiang Zemin's political rabbi.
But I might even give up for adoption one of my three terribly spoiled pedigree cats (if my wife were looking the other way'¦) in return for quality time with Zhu. To me he represents the most intelligent face of the new China I have seen since starting my columns on Asia in 1995.
This is just a feeling of mine, not the outline of a Princeton PhD thesis. Yes, China is not just emerging, it is emergent; right, it is no longer weak, and its diplomacy is starting to flex as muscularly as the well-photographed exercises of the People's Liberation Army.
And, no question, even with the economy cooling, it is already a powerhouse, whether it now grosses out at number one or (for all anyone really knows) number two. We get this.
But at the same time you have the sense of an absent dimension and you glance back in time for something or someone to fill in the void. No, it's not Mao, last thing you'd long for is a neo-Maoist figure; Deng Xiaoping, he was the New Man, but that's not it. And the current Xi Jinping has been providing strong direction and making tough decisions ' generally getting good marks from international as well as domestic observers.
Something is still missing ' a top-level political personality who carefully listens, with a sense of subtlety and placid self-confidence; even the ability to take a blow or two on the jaw and not get instantly psyched up for a world war; some supreme serenity, with a brain born for geopolitics.
Let me quote this to you:
'What we want to do is to work for the people's welfare and build China into a strong and prosperous country ['¦] with the rule of law. We absolutely won't engage in hegemony or power politics as some other countries do, as we've suffered enough from these. What good can come from bullying and oppressing others? We can become rich and strong through our own efforts, and we don't bully others.'
This was said by Zhu in June 2001 ' the same man who in 1980 refused to unleash troops onto Shanghai's streets to smash demonstrations, as had been done in that other metropolis up north; who wasn't afraid to meet with students; who guided China into the great globalized unknown of the World Trade Organization (WTO), despite a million doubts back home; and who managed to calm his fellow Politburo colleagues after the 'accidental' US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 ' just one month after his White House humiliation by Bill Clinton, cravenly promise-reneging over WTO.
But through all this Zhu Rongji, then the fifth premier of the People's Republic of China, now in retirement, today 86, kept his China cool simply by keeping his own; by averting his eyes from the inevitable setback, no matter how bitter, and affixing them to where China needed to be ten years,20, three decades down the road ' yes, he was then (and now) exactly what was (and is) needed: the visionary with the kind of foresight and eyesight that can see beyond its nose.
Some countries are grand but not great, others are great but not grand; the rare ones are both great and grand. The late Noel Annan, Cambridge don, was famously insistent on the overriding truth of the legendary thinker Isaiah Berlin's career-long emphasis on the deep impact of leaders on history, Annan once skewered academics who thought otherwise this way: 'Social scientists have depersonalized acres of human experience so that history resembles a ranch on which herds move, driven they know not why by impersonal forces, munching their way across the prairie.'
Real life takes place on no such barren ranch but on vast windy steppes of difficult historical realities. The exceptional leader can prove a huge value-added force.
As authors Orville Schell and John Delury put it in their deeply illuminating book Wealth and Power, 'Zhu ensured that China would enter the 21st century poised to advance ever more rapidly'¦.'
China faces great historic challenges and decision-crossroads now. If only its complex political personality contained a visible dimension of the special Zhu Rongji touch.
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The writer, a former editor of the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times and founder of Asia Media International, is Loyola Marymount University's distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies and author of the forthcoming book The Fine Art of the Political Interview.
