The death of Zhu Rongji, the former premier of China who spearheaded market-oriented economic reforms during the 1990s, was announced on Wednesday. The following obituary is by the economist Zhao Jian, an advocate of renewed marketisation and an admirer of Zhu’s forceful approach to driving through a series of state enterprise restructurings and market-oriented reforms. Judging by the article’s removal from WeChat a day after publication, it may have touched a nerve.
Nominally written as an obituary for Zhu, the piece is really his lament for a bygone era when Chinese society felt confident, people said what they really thought and there was an assurance, felt by Zhao while watching leaders speak on the television, “that someone was holding up the weight of this country, that someone was giving his all for us”.
Zhao is unabashedly nostalgic. In expressing the wish that he might awake from a present-day dream and find himself back in the world of Zhu’s premiership, his piece is reminis…