China’s former leader Jiang Zemin, who presided over years of economic expansion and paved the way for the country’s emergence as a global superpower and then, has died aged 96.
Jiang was president for a decade until 2003 and led the ruling Communist Party for 13 years until 2002.
The former chief of the ruling Communist Party and state president died of leukemia and associated multiple organ failure on Wednesday in Shanghai. He is survived by his wife, two sons and two grandchildren.
Chinese state media outlets, including the Global Times and the Xinhua news agency, turned their websites black and white in tribute.
An official statement posted on Xinhua read that “Comrade Jiang Zemin was an outstanding leader enjoying high prestige acknowledged by the whole Party”.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared him a “great proletarian revolutionary statesman, military strategist and diplomat, a long-tested communist fighter, and an outstanding leader of the great cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Jiang was also described as the core of the CCP’s third generation of central collective leadership and the principal founder of the Theory of Three Represents.
Jiang saw China through history-making changes including a revival of market-oriented reforms, the return of Hong Kong from British rule in 1997, and Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Jiang is often credited for successfully integrating China into the international community after the West shunned the nation following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Jiang was responsible for China “getting onto a global platform and rehabilitating itself after 1989,” said Kerry Brown, a Chinese politics expert at King’s College London. “He will be remembered as someone who made probably a pretty positive contribution.”