A legacy of 'Made in China'
Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 2003

Tuesday, Premier Zhu Rongji formally hands over power to Wen Jiabao.

BEIJING – For China, it is the end of an era.
Monday marks the departure of Premier Zhu Rongji - the face of China's epic economic transformation over the past decade, and the man whose policies opened centuries of closed doors, created a vibrant market ethos in a Communist state, and put China into the global mainstream as a member of the World Trade Organization.

Premier Zhu, a Hunanese orphaned at age 9 and twice put in prison for his pro-capitalist "rightist" views under Mao Zedong, took the reins of reform in the early 1990s, [...]

Mr. Zhu's departure as premier - he is succeeded by Deputy Premier Wen Jiabao - is part of a sweeping set of generational changes that began last fall.

In China, the Communist Party is all-powerful, and last November's Party Congress, which occurs once every five years, the top party slot shifted from Jiang Zemin to the youthful Hu Jintao in the first peaceful transition of rule in modern China.

Monday closed the annual National People's Congress, which oversees state, as opposed to party, affairs - [...]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 7:46 pm