His pragmatic style has earned Zhu the moniker, “China’s Gorbachev”, but in fact he’s anything but. Acquaintances describe the 64-year-old technocrat as impatient, slightly abrasive and not afraid to make decisions. Most important, Zhu shows little interest in the kind of political reform that spelled the demise of the former Soviet Union. “He defends China’s human-rights record totally,” says one Western diplomat who meets Zhu frequently. “He’s a hard-bitten party man.” Zhu is certain to continue pressing China’s bid for the Summer Olympic Games in the year 2000 (despite the U.S. House of Representatives’ clear opposition), and he probably aims to host them himself. While mayor of Shanghai from 1988 to 1991 Zhu made the wise move of spending the Chinese New Year with Deng and family. “If he succeeds,” says a Beijing official, “he’ll be so powerful by the time the octogenarians leave, no one will be able to touch him.”
As a strong candidate to succeed the ailing Deng, Zhu has plenty of enemies. His task of taming China’s runaway economic growth (14 percent this year, and climbing) will mean alienating everyone from private businessmen to powerful politicians in the coastal provinces where the boom is biggest. Last month Zhu fired the chief of the Central Bank, who had allowed local banks to make billions of dollars of bad loans, and took over the post himself. Tighter credit is already raising hackles across China, but that’s the only way to control inflation, which could be Zhu’s biggest political danger of all. The current annual rate of 17.4 percent in the cities is inching toward the levels of 1989, on the eve of the Tiananmen protests. Rising prices probably brought out more demonstrators than the abstract notion of democracy. Says Andrew Zhang, a former editor at the China Daily newspaper, “Zhu is in a very dangerous position.”
Can he succeed? In the long term, Zhu will have to extricate China from its dangerous pattern of boom and bust. In the past when the economy has overheated every few years, Deng has typically ceded economic leadership to conservatives who want to bring back socialist state planning. (Prime Minister Li Peng has been known to scold bank officials that they should not, as good Communists, make bad loans.) With Li sidelined because of ill health, Zhu has taken over day-to-day control of the government. His task there will be to recentralize decision making without killing reform. A new 16-point plan to cut spending and revamp the corrupt bureaucracy may help. But local officials have come to expect that a period of economic laxity will be followed by a squeeze–and that makes them more determined than ever to get rich fast. The cycle gets shorter and fiercer every time. Zhu must smooth it out or risk an explosion that would have worried even Gorbachev.
