ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
The staggering pace of China's economic growth these past four decades has been historic. It could be argued that no other country in history has grown as quickly as China has in such a short period of time. Well, the chief architect of the financial reforms that made way for that growth died on Wednesday at age 97. His name is Zhu Rongji. He was the country's former premier. Here to talk about his legacy and his impact on the Chinese and global economy is Orville Schell, the vice president of the Asia Society and Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations. Welcome, Orville.
ORVILLE SCHELL: Pleasure to be with you.
SCHMITZ: So you were at the 1998 Beijing summit when President Bill Clinton visited China. Zhu was there in his role as premier or prime minister under President Jiang Zemin. He was effectively overseeing the economics portfolio. Set the scene here. What were you doing there? What was being discussed?
SCHELL: Well, I'd gone with President Clinton on his 1998 summit and sort of had seen the whole ceremonial welcome...
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SCHELL: ...And then the press conference.
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BILL CLINTON: As you can see, we are working together in many areas of cooperation.
SCHELL: And I think what was so striking about it - as I look back on it and having just been on the recent Trump summit to Beijing - was the degree to which President Clinton and Jiang Zemin - and I can only assume that he must have had some interaction, maybe behind the scenes, with Zhu Rongji - but how open they were to each other.
SCHMITZ: Things couldn't be more different today.
SCHELL: Things really couldn't. And another way, which was very striking, as I think back to Zhu Rongji - you remember what Deng Xiaoping did when he came into power in the late '70s and throughout the '80s? He really divided the government between the party and politics and the government and the economy.
SCHMITZ: That's right.
SCHELL: And he deputized the premier, the prime minister, to really run the government and be the architect for economic designs of economic development. Zhu Rongji was a really important figure who really controlled a lot of power.
SCHMITZ: So this era that you're talking about in the 1990s - I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan province in the interior of the country at that time, and I remember basically biking into a massive labor strike. What I could glean from what was happening is they were angry about benefits that were being taken away from them. This was the era of China's free market economy. Things were being privatized, and you were seeing this all over the country.
And I remember seeing men standing on corners not working, something that you would never see later on in China. I'm curious - all of the reforms that Zhu Rongji was the architect of at that time - how did average Chinese people react at that time and then later on?
SCHELL: Well, there were millions of workers who had what was known as, you will recall, iron rice bowls...
SCHMITZ: Right.
SCHELL: ...Which meant they had jobs, even if they didn't work or didn't work very hard, and they were in state-owned enterprises run by the state - that they didn't dare close because they didn't want to put people out of work and risk a lot of, you know, unruly dissident activity. But Zhu Rongji came in, and he saw that as an untenable situation. And he began to kind of correct and to try to control and, in many cases, close state-owned enterprises that really couldn't do much. But as I said, it only went so far, and...
SCHMITZ: That's right.
SCHELL: It was not calculated to overturn the system.
SCHMITZ: Yeah. And, you know, as you mentioned, now we have a party secretary, Xi Jinping, the leader of China, who is doing away with term limits. He's increasing state control over the markets. What do you think Zhu Rongji would have thought or did think of Xi Jinping's moves to gather more control?
SCHELL: Well, I've often pondered that question. I think he would have been very unsettled by what he saw because remember, his power derived from the fact that he and Jiang Zemin at the time, who was party general secretary, were almost co-equal leaders, and yet they got along. I think Xi Jinping would see someone like Zhu Rongji today as an immense threat.
SCHMITZ: It's interesting because you're showing us a picture of a Chinese leader who offered an alternative course for the future of China. I'm just curious, why didn't these leaders end up leading China today?
SCHELL: Well, when Deng Xiaoping came to power, one of the things that he was most adamant about was he didn't want any lifetime tyrants ruling. He'd suffered from it. And so he set a standard that party general secretaries and premiers or prime ministers should only have two terms of five years each, and then they should retire. And that did happen. So that was a kind of an unwritten but pretty hard and fast rule that Deng Xiaoping had laid down that Xi Jinping has abrogated, and now he's in his third term and heading towards his fourth. So he, in a certain sense, has arrogated to himself the right that Mao Zedong arrogated to himself, namely rule for life.
SCHMITZ: That was Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations. Thank you.
SCHELL: Great pleasure to be with you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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