People’s Daily is more explicit. On Tuesday, it urged the party to rally around Xi Jinping, mourn Jiang Zemin and “take up the mission of national rejuvenation”.
Outside the city hall, police sirens blared throughout the city, stock trading was suspended, online video games were blocked, and thousands of people laid flowers in front of Jiang Yangzhou’s former residence.
In Beijing, residents were told that a negative COVID test would no longer be required to enter many public places. Beijing followed Shanghai and Shenzhen after a week of protests not seen since 1989, when Jiang Zemin was picked as the mild-mannered compromise candidate to lead China after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Chinese President Xi Jinping leads other officials in bowing at the official memorial service of the late former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.Credit:Associated Press
Tiananmen itself is empty, and Beijing’s sprawling security apparatus ensures that no more outpourings of grief turn into political resistance.
“We are sad about China’s future,” a protester told Reuters last week before the leader of the protest movement was hauled away.
In 2002, Harvard Business Review noted that Jiang Zemin was a “caretaker, not a reformer,” but his comparison to Xi Jinping transformed his reputation over the next two decades. By last week, China was awash with anecdotes of him playing the ukulele in Hawaii, reciting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and protesting Chinese journalists asking questions that were “too simple and naive”.
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“He was a very unusual and extraordinary person,” said Dr Hu Wei, who heard Jiang speak at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
This is a different time. China has become rich and powerful, but 100 million people still live in poverty. Jiang Zemin proposed the 28-character policy to continue his predecessor Deng Xiaoping’s maxim that “China does not take the lead and does not raise the flag.”
Jiang Zemin said: “Observe calmly, hold your ground, take your time, hide your strengths and bide your time, hide your strengths and bide your time, and never seek hegemony.”
The strategy continued until 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power and overturned decades of policy orthodoxy, demanding a new, stronger China take hold on the world stage.
“We will not accept sanctimonious preaching from those who think they have the right to preach,” Mr. Xi said last year.
“We will never allow any foreign forces to bully, oppress, or conquer us. Anyone who tries to do so will find themselves colliding with the Great Wall of Steel forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese.”
Xi Jinping’s ambitions herald new forms of repression at home, limiting public speech and crushing challenges to the Communist Party’s authority.
Jiang Zemin, a candidate for compromise, died, and he himself became a symbol of compromise.
“Rest in peace, you and this era,” one protester said last week.
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