Tiger on the Brink China's new elite

Tiger on the Brink China's new elite
CHAPTER ONE
Tiger on the Brink
Jiang Zemin and China's New Elite

By BRUCE GILLEY
University of California Press
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PART I

"Son" of a Martyr, 1926-1970



Leaving Yangzhou



1

The streets were dark and silent except for the occasional squawk from a Liberation-brand truck roaring through Beijing's suburbs bound for the provinces. It was less than two weeks since the lunar new year celebrations of early February 1997. The cold, somber atmosphere of the capital had yet to be enlivened by the rush of migrant workers seeking jobs in the city after the holiday. Inside a second-floor room at a hospital in the western suburbs, Jiang Zemin, China's highest leader, had convened an emergency meeting of the country's most powerful ruling body, the Politburo standing committee. One floor above the gathering lay the withered corpse of a man whose very presence had seemed to hold this vast country of 1.2 billion people together for the preceding two decades. Deng Xiaoping, a little man from distant Sichuan province and grand designer of the country's successful economic reform program of the 1980s, was dead.

Sitting on the fringes of the grim conclave, Deng's widow, Zhuo Lin, sobbed quietly, while his five children looked on impassively. Following a script laid down many months before, Jiang declared the order and timing of the week-long mourning activities for Deng that would follow. No one dissented. A few hours after midnight, Deng's long-anticipated death was announced to the world.

It was an inauspicious way for Jiang Zemin to begin his unfettered reign as the "core" of China's new leadership. Chinese tradition dictated that nothing unlucky should happen in the two weeks after the lunar new year, until the lantern festival at the appearance of the first full moon. But then again, Deng's death may have been the luckiest possible way for Jiang to ring in the new year. A panda bear of a man, with big round black glasses and a love for the traditional two-stringed Chinese violin, or erhu, Jiang had ruled as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since being thrust into the role following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. It was already an unexpectedly long stint at the top for someone often compared to Hua Guofeng, the chosen successor of Communist China's founder, Mao Zedong, who had lasted just five years as head of the party.

By the time of Deng's death, Jiang had already achieved the goal of restoring political stability and economic growth to China following the Tiananmen protests. Foreign investors were on track to pour an astounding U.S. $250 billion in direct investment into the country in the 1990s, compared to just U.S. $15 billion in the 1980s. Beijing's voice in new international organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, and soon in the World Trade Organization, was loud and influential. Jiang had also by this time established his own authority over the party, over the government that answered to it, and over the military, which kept a keen but distant watch over the whole country. With Deng gone, Jiang could begin to outline his own vision of China's future.

That future was anything but certain. When Jiang began to rule China without the abiding spiritual presence of Deng in February 1997, he was inheriting a country that one Chinese scholar described as a tree-like structure. The roots were China's traditions; the trunk was the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist thought of the first decades after the 1949 Communist takeover; the branches consisted of the economic reforms pioneered by Deng and their attendant social changes; and the leaves were foreign influences. Yet this hybrid variety needed to evolve into a new species that could withstand the test of time.

Jiang favored a gradual transition. He also tended to borrow useful and successful reforms from others and apply them nationwide. He was not, like Mao and, to a lesser extent, Deng, a man with a clear vision of China's future, but by 1997, anyone claiming such a vision would be dismissed as a fraud or an outright danger. Something of an outcome could be guessed at, though. The resulting "tree" would be liberal in some respects (its market economy and growing individualism), but clearly authoritarian in others (its single-party state and media controls). In many ways, it would resemble other Asian "developmental dictatorships" like Singapore and South Korea. Although it was a less wrenching and spectacular historical change that Jiang was about to preside over, it might be far more important to the great sweep of Chinese history than those overseen by Mao and Deng. China was on the verge of modernization.

Jiang was not the sort of leader disposed to self-glorification, though, even on that frosty evening in a hospital meeting room in western Beijing. As the second eldest son of an intellectual's family from the rich cradle of Chinese tradition along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, his natural arrogance was tempered by a habitual self-effacement. He had reached his position through a combination of political savvy and public modesty. Like those of his generation who were the first to miss fighting in the civil war that established Communist China, he was pragmatic when it came to the communist creed and more inclined to build consensus than rout enemies. Mourners would stream to Deng's birthplace in Sichuan province following the announcement of the patriarch's death, but the simple gray-brick abode where Jiang grew up in the old part of the city of Yangzhou would remain inhabited by others and unremarked upon by visitors. Jiang, it was said, preferred it that way.



2

The date is 20 October 1996. A torrent of bicycles sweeps past my resolutely planted feet as I stand in the middle of a narrow street called Dongquanmen in the center of old Yangzhou, a sleepy city not far up the Yangtze River from Shanghai. Dongquanmen, the city's former street of notables, still has the yamen, or government office, at its western end--now housing the local party committee. But in contrast to the unruffled existence enjoyed by the dozen or so bankers, merchants, and intellectuals who inhabited its large, gray-brick homes in the early part of the century, the street has now been transformed by the clamor of 125 working-class households and several hundred more living in the alleys feeding into it.

Gazing up at the peeling Chinese characters painted in baby blue on a tile signboard, I struggle to read the "Brief description of Dongquanmen." My eyes scan the faint writing with growing intensity. Bells and hoots from cyclists rushing home for lunch seek to dislodge me from the street. Finally, the promised line: "Party General Secretary [unclear] [unclear] Jiang Zemin once lived at Number 16." Nothing more.

I stop two chuckling students mounting their bicycles as they leave the Yangzhou government canteen, on whose wall the sign is affixed. "What are these two characters?" I ask, pointing to the indistinct pair. The track-suited youths dismount and arch their backs to read the entire line. "Tong-zhi [Comrade]," says one, answering my question. "Jiang Zemin once lived here?" asks the other, startled by the discovery. "Really!" They climb back into their saddles and move back into the lava flow of wheels. "Sure," says the other. "Don't you know? He's a Yangzhou person."



3

The drooping willows and lazy canals of Yangzhou are a welcome respite from the pollution, traffic jams, and stark urban development of much of modern China today. For over a thousand years, they have nurtured an unlikely array of painters, scholars, and philosophers. Walls were first erected here around habitations on the Yangtze River alluvial deposits in the fifth century B.C. The city became one of China's wealthiest at the beginning of the Tang dynasty in the early seventh century A.D. after the completion of the Grand Canal north to Henan province. Historical decline after that was kinder to Yangzhou than to the country as a whole. The salt and iron trades disappeared, and commerce moved to the coast, but more than a thousand years after its initial glory, Yangzhou's beauty remains, its prosperity maintained by its key position at the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yangtze River.

For the young son of a well-off family in the early 1939s, Yangzhou might have been the equivalent of Bath in England or New Haven in the United States. It was a quiet and cultured refuge from the gathering clouds of war and increasing outbreaks of domestic violence: invasion from Japan and attacks on the burgeoning Chinese Communist Party by the insecure Nationalist (Kuomintang or Guomindang) government based upriver at Nanjing.

Jiang Zemin was born in Yangzhou on 17 August 1926 in a book-cluttered house on Tianjia Lane in the old city. His name, Zemin, or "Benefit the People," was taken from the writings of the revered Chinese sage Confucius, who lived in the fifth century B.C. It echoed the name of a young communist, Mao Zedong, or "Benefit the East." At 32, Mao was at this time already teaching peasants in Guangzhou about the Chinese communist movement, which both men would eventually lead.

The swaddled boy was the third of five children and the second son of a prolific writer and part-time electrician, Jiang Shijun, and his peasant wife, Wu Yueqing. We know little about Wu Yueqing. Elders in Changwei, where she is also remembered by the name Wu Xiaoqing, say she died a broken woman in Yangzhou in the 1980s. But they insist that her younger sister, Wu Yuezhen, who was only ten years older than Jiang, played a greater part in his upbringing than she did.

In the Chinese zodiac, Jiang was born in the year of the tiger. King of the wild animals, the tiger symbolized all that was male in Chinese philosophy--brave enough to drive away demons and strong enough to command the obedience of others. It was a common astrological sign for leaders of men.

The Jiang family was respectable, even honored, in Yangzhou. Jiang's grandfather, Jiang Shixi, was 56 in this year and known throughout the old town for his skills in traditional Chinese medicine. The airy medicine shop near Tianjia Lane where he sent his patients to collect their paper-wrapped mixtures of herbal remedies still stands, adorned in front by groups of chatting elders reclining in wicker chairs.

Jiang Shixi was the link to the family past. The village of Jiang (meaning "river"), from whence their surname came, sat beside a tributary of the Shuxi River, which winds its way through the mist-enshrouded Huangshan mountains in the southern part of the poor inland province of Anhui. Life in this tea-growing region was tranquil but unforgiving. Poverty and famine took the lives of Grandfather Jiang's first two sons, born there in the late 1890s. As prospects for his medical practice were better in the prosperous canal area of the Yangtze River, he moved his family of seven to the town of Xiannu, just outside Yangzhou, in the early 1900s.

Settled outside Yangzhou, Grandfather Jiang Shixi at first made a modest living from the medical secrets he had brought from inland. Better work was soon, however, available on the canal system, which was finding new life in the industrial expansion of the early years of the century. In 1915, at the age of 45, Jiang Shixi took a lucrative job as assistant to the Dada Inland Water Transport Company. The Dada company was based just downriver from Yangzhou at Nantong, the marshaling area for much of the cargo flowing in and out of the Grand Canal. Jiang Shixi was the company representative in Yangzhou. His traditional long gown was discarded in favor of a crumpled linen suit made in Shanghai. In the common parlance, he had "jumped into the sea" of commerce.

With five children, aged 1 through 20, the family moved to Tianjia Lane in Yangzhou's well-to-do Dongguan district. Canals and their attendant freshwater wells run everywhere through the old city, which was doubtless a pleasant change from the need to haul water, if only for short distances, in the suburbs. The move also meant that the education of the family would be assured.

Jiang Shixi spent a lot of time in Nantong at his new job, even taking part in the formulation of an agricultural development plan for the downstream city. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he also devoted himself to national affairs, railing first against foreign incursions into China and then against the weakness of the Qing dynasty and later the Nationalist government. He composed several songs lamenting warlord President Yuan Shikai's infamous concession to Japan's Twenty-one Demands of 1915, ditties that he taught to itinerant Nationalist Party musical troupes organized and funded by the better-off merchants. The demands, which gave Japan control over large swathes of Chinese territory, including the Yangtze Valley, seemed to symbolize the sorry plight of the Chinese nation.

Only a few elders along Tianjia Lane still recall the Jiang household. Grandfather Jiang died in 1933, at which point the family home on Tianjia Lane seems to have been sold. But the enterprising doctor left behind two important legacies, which would be passed on to his four surviving children (his lone daughter, Jiang Shiying, died shortly after marriage), and to their children in turn, at a critical time in the nation's history: an intellectual strain that emphasized action as well as comment, and an indignant nationalism aimed as much at the corrupt Chinese Republic as at the invading Japanese.



4

The first beneficiary of this legacy was the eldest child and son, Jiang Shijun, nicknamed Guanqian, or "Thousand-Time Champion." Born in 1895, this little-known man was later to be confined to official footnotes as merely the "biological father" of Jiang Zemin. But he acquitted himself well at school and managed to gain entry into Lianghuai Middle School on Dongguan Street, a prestigious institution founded in 1902 as the first publicly funded middle school in the city.

Jiang Shijun proved an adept writer at the school, which he attended even though the family was then still residing in the suburbs. As the eldest son, he shared the burdens of family responsibility with his parents, however, and had to forsake his writing career to earn a living wage. Soon after graduation, he accepted a job in Yangzhou with the Nantong Tongming Electric Company.

More inspired by the example set by their father was the sixth child, Jiang Shihou. He was later known by the name Shangqing, or "Rising Youth," acquired because his siblings agreed that he was the family's greatest hope of achieving power and prestige. Born in 1911, when his eldest brother was already 16, Jiang Shangqing and his younger brother, Jiang Shufeng, both attended Nantong Middle School for a year in 1927 because Yangzhou was temporarily in upheaval as a result of Nationalist campaigns against local warlords. There they met Gu Minyuan, a classmate who would later become Nantong's most famous revolutionary son, and by the time they returned to Yangzhou, the brothers had been enlisted by Gu into the underground Chinese Communist Party Youth League.

Jiang Zemin was fortunate as a child in that his father held down a steady job, even as his young uncles got involved in the clandestine Communist movement. For within a year of returning to Yangzhou to continue middle school there, Uncle Jiang Shangqing was arrested for his underground activities at the family's newly acquired home on Jiangjia Bridge Lane. His first incarceration, in a Suzhou jail, lasted only six months. His aging father and his older brother hired lawyers who convinced the courts that he was merely a misled youth. But a year later, in the winter of 1929, he was arrested again after entering the literature department of Shanghai's Fine Arts College. It was not until the summer of 1930 that the Jiang family in Yangzhou learned the news. Elder brother Jiang Shijun was dispatched to find his headstrong younger brother when he did not return for the summer vacation. Informed of the incarceration, his aging father, Jiang Shixi, traveled to Shanghai and won his son's release that winter.

Favoring the traditional long Chinese men's gown over Western garb, Jiang Shangqing cut the perfect figure of an engaged young intellectual, with circular-rimmed glasses, delicate nose, and pursed lips. Undeterred by his year-long jail term--during which he contracted asthma and began to suffer from arthritis--Jiang Shangqing chose to remain in the revolutionary hotbed of Shanghai by entering the social sciences department of the city's Jinan University in the fall of 1931.

The young Jiang Zemin's formal education began at about the same time, but his informal instruction had already been under way for several years. In Chinese tradition, a young man's education, and his later self-cultivation, was based on four arts: music, chess, literature, and calligraphy. Except for the chess, which was the least practical of the quartet, Jiang was shepherded along this traditional path from a young age. From the moment he began to recognize the swirling Chinese characters used before simplification was introduced by the Communists after 1949, Jiang was forced by his father to recite an article of classical Chinese literature each day. Often it was the hated "three-character classic," column after column of three-character sentences that encapsulated the rote learning of Chinese tradition. But just as often it was poetry from the Song or Tang dynasties, masterworks of feeling and ambiguity, peppered with handy aphorisms. These would remain deeply embedded in Jiang's memory for the rest of his life.

Jiang was also forced to learn calligraphy, because, as he explained, "in the old China it was very difficult to find a job if you did not have good handwriting." It would never be his forte; although he never misses a stroke, Jiang's calligraphy is described by most as undisciplined and crude. He still uses the complex pre-1949 characters.

This head start in reading and writing helped win the young boy a place in the prestigious Dongguan Primary School, just a few hundred meters from his Tianjia Lane home. The six years Jiang spent in the school exposed him to a stark contrast in proximate calm and distant turmoil. Dongguan Primary School cultivated a happy environment for its young charges. Days were filled with songs and games, which drew liberally from both Chinese and Western traditions. It was here that Jiang developed his lifelong and comparatively worldly appreciation of music. He was a natural musician. Whatever instrument was placed before him, whether the whining two-stringed Chinese violin played off the knee, the erhu, the long bamboo flute, or dizi, or even an upright piano, proficiency came easily. "When I was young I loved playing instruments," he would recall. The piano and Western violin seemed to him to be better developed than Chinese instruments, "because their range is wider." He would also at this time develop a lifelong affection for Western classical music, later calling "Ave Maria" "some really beautiful music" and on another occasion asserting that "it's not good if the Chinese people know nothing about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

Although his siblings and cousins never excelled as he did in the traditional arts, Jiang would always attribute his aptitude to his cultured upbringing rather than to innate abilities. "Because Yangzhou is a city of culture, and because of the cultured historical background of my family, I am a true lover of music and literature," he would say.

At home, Jiang reveled not only in the doting love of his own mother, Wu Yueqing, but also in that of his aunt, Wang Zhelan, the wife of Uncle Jiang Shangqing. The two families moved into new quarters on Dongquanmen following the death of Grandfather Jiang Shixi in 1933. In the spacious one-story home, Jiang was the family prodigy. His mother was a simple peasant woman. But Wang Zhelan was able to see the spark in her young nephew and became his earliest mentor. She is said to have loved Jiang most among all the children in the crowded Jiang household on Dongquanmen.

Dongquanmen (now Dongquanmen Street) was Yangzhou's street of the rich. At two meters, it was twice the width of the average street in the old city. The ornately pockmarked iron doors and marble plinths of the houses were the respectable outward displays of wealth and prestige. The irony for Jiang's family was that, just as they reached this distinguished address, the old order on which its distinction was based was about to crumble under the impact of foreign invasion and civil war. It is ironic that the most distinguished street in Yangzhou nurtured the future head of a proletarian state.



5

The din of tambourines and dizi inside the happy confines of Dongguan primary school could not entirely muffle the sounds of war outside. In September 1931, Japan's incursion into China began in the distant northeast. Some months later the Nationalist government in Nanjing was briefly forced to relocate north to Luoyang because of the Japanese invasion. Over the following six years, leading up to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the insecure Nationalist government would launch sporadic assaults on the expanding Communist movement, even as young students protested that "Chinese should not fight Chinese."

Jiang and his young colleagues knew the heavens were shaking. But Yangzhou remained calm. Indeed, the spontaneous welling up of anti-Japanese sentiment at this time brought a seemingly festive atmosphere to the lives of the young boys. "Long before the Japanese marched into Yangzhou, we were already going crazy," Jiang was to recall. "We saw ourselves as Chinese heroes of ancient times, feasting on the blood of the Japanese pirates in the South China Sea!"

For Jiang, in particular, the events outside primary school were vividly told. His young uncle Jiang Shangqing, already suffering from asthma and arthritis at age 21, returned to teach in primary and middle schools in Yangzhou in 1932. There he founded a Communist Party-controlled journal of Marxist literature, Xin shiji zhoukan (New World Weekly). The following five years saw Jiang Shangqing hounded from one Yangzhou-area school to the next and the magazine shut down by the local Nationalist authorities. Undaunted, he founded another magazine, Xiezou yu yuedu (Writing and Reading), with his old classmate Gu Minyuan and his brother Jiang Shufeng, in 1936.

In December 1936, mutinous Nationalist soldiers in Xian arrested their president, Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), who seemed bent on wiping out Communist forces rather than repelling Japanese invaders. The event was a stunning psychological victory for the Communists and their sympathizers, who had been urging an end to civil strife in order to focus attention on the threat from Japan. As a result of the coup, Chiang agreed to call off the anti-Communist extermination campaign (although not the blockades of Communist-held areas). The event also gave Jiang his first political lesson. Writing the entrance examination to the prestigious Yangzhou Middle School in the summer of 1937, he was asked to write about the Xian Incident. In his essay, he praised the rebellious behavior of Zhang Xueliang, the leader of the Nationalist Northeastern Army, who had taken his superior hostage. It was Jiang's first political statement in writing; given the influence of his uncles and his grandfather, his sympathies were never in doubt, however.

Entrance to Yangzhou Middle School was difficult, even for one as well-bred as Jiang Zemin. The school was compared to Tianjin's famous Nankai Middle School (which educated future premier Zhou Enlai among others) in the popular saying: "In the north there is Nankai Middle School, in the south there is Yangzhou Middle School." The whitestone three-story Shuren teaching hall, built in 1917 and still standing today, was the grandest classroom in the south. Jiang's father and his two young revolutionary uncles had all attended the school or its predecessors, but as its reputation improved throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the competition to enter became acute. In 1936, the year before Jiang entered, just 10 percent of the 3,000-odd students who wrote the entrance exam were accepted. In Jiang's year, first-year enrollment was expanded to 425, but that was still only 10 percent of those seeking admission. Jiang was among those accepted.

The playing fields of Yangzhou Middle School were a symbol of the fervent and worldly nationalism of youth at the time, which might have launched China into a development spurt, as it had in Japan seventy years before. The prestigious academy had already groomed a generation of leading scholars, politicians, and scientists. Most were men, since women constituted at best a quarter of the student body. Zhu Ziqing, a Yangzhou writer who would later be eulogized by Mao Zedong for refusing to eat American-supplied "relief grain," graduated in 1916. Hu Qiaomu, later to become Mao's secretary, head of the Xinhua News Agency, and a Politburo member, graduated in 1930.

Students at Yangzhou Middle School were angling for university. After three years in lower middle school, they rushed through the three-year upper-middle-school curriculum in two years and devoted the final year to preparation for university entrance exams. A university education was certainly the expectation when Jiang marched through the gates along the tree-lined avenue that led to the Shuren teaching hall on his first day of classes in the autumn of 1937. But the invading Japanese imperial army, which until now had been confined to the world outside this peaceful city, was soon marching down the same lane.

In July 1937, Japanese troops stationed near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing had bombarded the local Chinese garrison on the pretext that they had been refused entry to a village to search for a missing colleague. Within weeks, an undeclared war was raging between the two countries. By December, Shanghai had fallen under Japanese occupation. A month later, the whole Yangtze valley up to Nanjing, including Yangzhou, was in enemy hands. The results were hugely disruptive, but not disastrous, for the young Jiang's education. Classes were halted after just one month, in October 1937. Hopes of resuming at the school under Japanese occupation were soon dashed. When the Japanese marched into town, their first item of business was to find a large walled compound with plenty of administrative offices and dormitories to serve as a command headquarters. Yangzhou Middle School's new campus in the western Dawangbian area was perfect. The sanctity of the school meant little to the Japanese soldiers. The gymnasium's wooden floor was torn up, and the building was turned into a horse stable. Books were burned for fuel or out of spite. And the students and teachers were all told to search elsewhere for accommodation.

This they did, but they had some difficulty finding it. As with many schools and universities, the Japanese occupation forced Yangzhou Middle School to disperse to a series of far-flung "campuses." It was a grand word for what were little more than exiled teaching colonies. One group went to Sichuan province, another to Shanghai, and two were eventually functioning in the Yangzhou suburbs. Students followed their long-gowned teachers depending on their own circumstances. As a Yangzhou native, Jiang joined one of the groups in the city's suburbs.

The first suburban campus was set up in the autumn of 1938 in Taizhou, along the network of canals feeding into the Grand Canal. Buildings were rented at a local middle school and students billeted with local families. Studies sometimes took place in the canteen. This makeshift beginning to Jiang's education proved a false start. In early 1939, the Japanese authorities briefly imposed a state of emergency on the entire Yangzhou area. Classes came to a halt again, and the students were sent home. By the autumn of 1939, the Japanese occupation was more secure. A new campus was opened in Yang Lane in old Yangzhou, just a stone's throw from Jiang's Dongquanmen home. After a two-year delay, and under the watchful eye of Japanese troops, Jiang's middle-school education finally began in earnest.

The disruption had a critical effect on the nature of Jiang's middle-school education, and indeed on his personal development in these formative years. For no longer was nationalism the preserve of idealistic intellectuals reacting to distant events, as it had been for his uncles and grandfather. Jiang and his teachers saw their nation crumble before their eyes. "Those were the days when the Chinese nation was ridden with disasters," he would recall.

The young boy was inspired in this plight by many people, both past and present. Just north of his home, beside the canal that encircled the old city, lay the simple temple of Shi Kefa, a local Ming dynasty official who had refused to surrender to the invading Qing armies in 1645. Although Shi lost his own life, as well as those of thousands of Yangzhou citizens, for his obstinacy, his dogged loyalty in the face of foreign invasion by the Manchus of the Qing dynasty made him a poignant symbol of Chinese nationalism.

"In those days when I was a student in Yangzhou, I was shocked to see and hear about the evil acts of the Japanese aggressors," Jiang would recall. "Each time I saw the tombstone of Shi Kefa with my classmates I felt a strong anti-Japanese and patriotic emotion and became determined to engage in revolutionary struggle."

Of course, some of this rage may be just so much ex-post facto ritual indignation. The takeover of Yangzhou was largely peaceful--in contrast to the unprovoked massacre of civilians by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing. And, as far as we know, Jiang lost no close family members in the war with Japan. Having school halted only one month into his education may have caused hand-wringing among his elders, but for a boy of 11, faced with a disciplined and taxing course load ahead, it may have been a welcome respite. The following two years of roving education may even have been something of an adventure. The variety nights organized by the school to raise funds to fight the Japanese would have been taken by Jiang, strumming his erhu in accompaniment, as good clean fun rather than serious political involvement. Indeed, Jiang later would not harbor any of the instinctive, visceral anti-Japanese hatred of those as little as five or ten years his senior. He even later regretted not having mastered Japanese when it became a mandatory part of the middle-school curriculum.

The Japanese invasion did, however, spur an ardent desire on the part of Jiang and his classmates to reform their country by catching up to the West, just as the Japanese had done. Ignoring the contemptuous Japanese soldiers patrolling the bridges of the city, Jiang and his classmates redoubled their efforts to learn from the West. It was an act of imitation that was supposed to reflect national pride, not flattery of foreigners, the students were told. "Some people often feel ashamed to be Chinese. They say that even when a foreigner farts, it is a great thing," Jiang's railway engineering teacher, Lu Zuojian, would tell his students. "But we Chinese can do anything foreigners can do. We will even try things that they don't dare!"

Whatever the reasoning, the focus on mastering things Western was quaint. Tired old grammar books from England and monstrously difficult calculus texts from America were used. Jiang's eccentric English teacher, Li Zongyi, even led his charges in repetitions of the speeches of Thomas Jefferson and of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address. Jiang was to remember the latter for the rest of his life. He would also long assert that "the English we learned then was better than what even university students of today [learn]." As he later described his middle-school education: "It was mainly an education in British and American cultures."

There were other signs that the national stirrings caused by the Japanese occupation fueled rather than smothered the desire to learn about the outside world. For it was at this time that Jiang began to delve seriously into foreign literature in Chinese translation, in particular offerings from the Soviet Union, which were then widely available, such as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He also read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris. Jiang scored best in the sciences, but his own interests, plus "family pressures," as he later called them, meant that he absorbed much literature as well.

Besides Russian and French literature, Jiang also took in a strong dose of modern Chinese literature, which was flourishing during his youth. One of his favorite writers at this time was Zhu Ziqing, a dashing man whose neat, side-parted hair, circular wire-rimmed glasses, and waistcoat concealed a radical within. A native of Jiangsu province, Zhu had grown up in Yangzhou and attended what would become Yangzhou Middle School. While teaching in Beijing, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang in the late 1920s, he helped launch what became known as the "new poetry" movement, which eschewed traditional forms and encouraged topics based on everyday life.

A Communist sympathizer, Zhu would spend nine years from 1937 teaching at the wartime campus of Beijing's Qinghua University in the southwestern city of Kunming, then under Nationalist control. He returned to Beijing in 1946, aged 48, suffering from gastric illness. Two years later, the stomach ailment would take his life, aggravated by his refusal to eat American-supplied relief grain. The refusal would be part of a campus-led protest against the perceived tolerance by the U.S. occupation forces in Japan of resurgent militarism in the vanquished nation.

Zhu explained in his diary that he joined the relief-grain boycott because "we cannot evade our personal responsibilities." For his efforts, Mao Zedong would declare soon afterward that Zhu "embodied the heroic spirit of the Chinese people." Indeed, his death became a symbol for young Chinese like Jiang of the proud obstinacy in the face of foreign pressures that many saw best exemplified by the Communists. The hometown connections Jiang could claim with Zhu Ziqing made the spiritual identification all the stronger. "Zhu Ziqing was full of patriotic moral courage, which makes his writings attractive," a visitor once commented to Jiang. "Right!" came the reply. "I am moved every time I read them."

Zhu seemed to represent two important ideals to Jiang: first, that of the heroic man of letters, a figure his family had taught him to respect, notwithstanding that he himself never became one, having chosen to take up science; and second, the ideal of standing firm on principles in dealings with foreign countries, especially the United States. "Chinese youth should take Zhu Ziqing as a model and not bow obsequiously to and blindly envy the West," Jiang later said. The same sentiments were also expressed by other Chinese writers of the age. "We Chinese have backbone," Lu Xun (1881-1936) wrote famously, a line often quoted by Jiang. "We shall never yield to unreasonable pressure exerted on us by foreigners," he once explained after repeating Lu Xun's affirmation.

Jiang was later to characterize his upbringing in Yangzhou rather inexactly as the "Confucian" phase of his education. To be sure, he was put through the rigors of learning the traditional Chinese skills expected of a nobleman, out of which grew such habits as carving personal seals in fine calligraphy for his classmates. But as we have seen, the combined effects of the Japanese occupation and the worldly nationalism engendered by his teachers exposed Jiang to much more than the traditional "music, chess, literature, and calligraphy" lessons that his description suggests. By the time he graduated from Yangzhou Middle School in the spring of 1943, Jiang was already a cosmopolitan young man, schooled in Western culture and concerned about China's place in the world.