Born in 1928 in Hunan Province, Zhu Rongji attended Tsinghua University and joined the Communist Party in college. Zhu joined a generation of technocrat-leaders, educated in the sciences and engineering at China’s top universities. Zhu was purged from the party for criticizing Mao’s economics during the Great Leap Forward, and purged again for reformist tendencies… Read more »
After missteps with Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, Deng settled on Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji as his chosen successors. Both products of Shanghai, Jiang would assume overall leadership of the party, with Zhu overseeing economic and domestic matters as Premier.
A new face of Chinese dissidence emerged in the mid 1980s in Beijing, an Astrophysics professor named Fang Lizhi. With his physics background, the Western press dubbed Fang, “China’s Sakharov.” At a speech at Beijing University in November 1985, Fang urged the students in the audience to: “…be open to different ways of thinking…and willing to… Read more »