How China Remembers Zhu Rongji, the Premier Who Spoke His Mind

Zhu Rongji, China’s former premier, is often remembered for opening the country to the global economy. But among Chinese people, his death has also prompted nostalgia for his blunt words and pugnacious outbursts, a contrast with the political rigidity of the present.

Xi Jinping, China’s autocratic leader, exercises tight control over political expression, and the public mourning of leaders is meticulously scripted. Major state-run news outlets carried the Communist Party’s official obituary of Mr. Zhu, who died aged 97 on Wednesday. Mr. Xi and other leaders are expected to attend a formal funeral and memorial service in the coming days, though no details have been announced.

The party’s obituary in the People’s Daily emphasized how Mr. Zhu pulled back some state controls of the economy and propelled China’s entry into global commerce from 1993 to 2003, first as vice premier and then as premier, the equivalent of a prime minister. It also said Mr. Zhu “dared to speak the truth and did not fear offending others.”

Some in China celebrated Mr. Zhu’s legacy and his frankness in bolder terms.

The deaths of senior leaders have become occasions for people to point indirectly to what they see as a more dynamic and hopeful past. On Chinese social media sites, many recalled with affection Mr. Zhu’s sometimes ebullient, sometimes combative style.

“They faced up to the opportunities of reform, they managed the pace of reform, they were the pillars of China’s economic reforms,” Rao Yi, the president of Capital Medical University in Beijing wrote in a tribute on Thursday to Mr. Zhu’s generation on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform. Dr. Rao did not mention Mr. Zhu by name.

Online commenters remembered Mr. Zhu’s gladiatorial news conferences and peppery phrases, a pointed reminder that these days, even senior Chinese officials often do little more than echo the words of Mr. Xi.

Some cited Mr. Zhu’s warning against corrupt officials, where he suggested the lengths he would go to attack the problem. “I’ve prepared 100 coffins,” Mr. Zhu said at a meeting in 1998. “Nine-nine of them are for corrupt officials, and I’m leaving one for myself.”

Others quoted Mr. Zhu’s description of poorly built flood barriers that broke under a deluge on the Yangtze River in 1998. “Tofu dregs construction, turtle eggs construction,” he said. (“Turtle eggs” has a more block implication in Chinese than it does in English.)

The official memorializing of Mr. Zhu will likely follow the party’s scripted formula. The party’s obituary was roughly the same length and given similar prominence as the one for the former premier Li Keqiang in 2023, and for the another former premier, Li Peng, in 2019.

The deaths of former leaders can be politically sensitive in China. When Li Keqiang died unexpectedly in 2023 at age 68, there was widespread mourning online and in his hometown in Anhui Province. Experts saw the outpouring as an expression of public sympathy for an official who had been pushed aside by Mr. Xi.

A similar, highly visible mourning seems less likely for Mr. Zhu. He belonged to an older political generation, and had long receded from public life. Controls on expression in China have also tightened since 2023.

Some tributes to Mr. Zhu in China were tempered with recognition that he was not an unabashed economic liberalizer, nor did his promises always come to fruition, including his vows to clean out corruption and ease burdens on farmers.

“Zhu Rongji loudly declared that ‘the burden on farmers is too heavy,’ but whether through emotional appeals or rational arguments, the problem was never really solved,” said one essay that was shared on WeChat about Mr. Zhu’s legacy as premier.

Mr. Zhu focused on courting global business and not enough on the countryside, said Yasheng Huang, a professor at M.I.T. who has written extensively about China’s economic transformation.

He squeezed financial flows for rural factories that had mushroomed in the previous decade, forcing many of them to go out of business and taking the momentum out of rural development, Professor Huang said.

“We need to incorporate into our ***essment what happened in rural China, which after all was 70 to 80 percent of the Chinese population,” Professor Huang wrote in emailed comments. “Zhu was a reformer but he was one in a way far more complex than often portrayed.”

Mr. Zhu is widely remembered abroad for negotiating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. But in China he is also remembered for giving the central government in Beijing much greater control over revenues. That shift paved the way for the big-spending projects of later leaders, including Mr. Xi. Local governments, on the other hand, are often cash starved.

“Zhu Rongji was a leader who reflected the paradoxes of reform-era China: the pursuit of rapid economic growth paired with enduring political control,” said Julian Gewirtz, a China historian at Columbia University who is writing a book on U.S.-China relations after the Cold War. “Zhu himself bristled at Western efforts to fit him into familiar liberalizing archetypes.”

Ruoxin Zhang in Beijing and Amy Chang Chien in Taipei contributed research and reporting.