Thread by @LeniDiamond

Colorful & publicly unrestrained for such a high-level #CCP leader, #JiangZemin played a key role not just in the demise of #ZhaoZiyang's reformers, immediately after the #Tiananmen disaster, but in their resurgence. 1/n

https://twitter.com/tomgrundy/status/1597874286173491201

In May 1989, as Shanghai's mayor, Jiang shut down the liberal (pro-Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang)"World Economic Herald," which Party conservatives accused of having colluded with foreign forces against the CCP and socialism. 2/n

As the new CCP Gen Secy in June 1989, Jiang, like Deng Xiaoping, opposed the conservative push to elevate state planning over market forces. His compromise: declare "patriotism" to be the mission of PRC intellectuals while continuing economic reforms. 3/n

In 1991, #JiangZemin convened conferences that posed reformist questions, including: "Why has the capitalist system showed renewed vitality instead of collapsing?" "What are the reasons for the dissolution of socialism in the USSR & E Europe"? 4/n

The answer, which Jiang delivered at the 14PC in Oct 1992, was that an economy reliant on planning would inevitable fail. The key to rapid modernization was to give "full play to market forces" ("socialist market economy"). 5/n

But to ensure that CCP leaders didn't meet the fate of Ceaucescu or Gorbachev, to ensure that the Tiananmen disaster didn't recur, the #CCP would have to build new nat'l cohesion on the basis of (aggrieved) nationalism. 6/n

In that respect, #JiangZemin was both a reformer & an architect of an emerging (post) #fascism.

Totalistic, mystical, hypernationalist, oriented toward redressing past humiliations.

The CCP's 1994 "Outline on the Implementation of Patriotism in Education" summed it up: 7/n

By the time #XiJinping took over as Gen Secy in 2012, #China had become an economic powerhouse, and was well on its way to becoming a major military power as well. Growing CCP confidence paved the way for the return of a leadership cult, something which Jiang never endorsed. 8/8