Obituary | An unlikely strongman Jiang Zemin oversaw a wave of economic change, but not much political reform China's party leader from 1989 to 2002 died on November 30th, aged 96 Nov 30th 2022 Share T alking to Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" in 2000, wagging his finger—and with his ever-mobile face fixed, briefly, in a stare—Jiang Zemin quoted from the Gettysburg address. He had committed it to memory as a student activist, before the Communist Party came to power in 1949. "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," he said. His English was not great, but it brimmed with the confidence of a man who was delivering "for the people" all right: material progress on a scale and at a speed that history had not seen before. And it had started on his watch. His own rise had been remarkable, too. In 1949 he was just an engineer in a food factory in Shanghai that had once produced one of China's most popular b...