SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
In China, national flags are at half-mast on Tiananmen Square and at government offices across the country. They've been lowered to mourn former Premier Zhu Rongji. He died at age 97 last week. And he oversaw one of the most explosive growth periods in China. NPR's China correspondent Jennifer Pak is covering this from Beijing. Hi, Jennifer.
JENNIFER PAK, BYLINE: Hi, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: The former premier was cremated today. Give us a sense of how he's being remembered in China.
PAK: Officially, it's very scripted and controlled. So state-run Xinhua News Agency reports that President Xi Jinping and other leaders attended the funeral at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in the morning. They bowed three times. On Chinese social media, Zhu Rongji is being called the people's premier, remembered for being a straight talker, which is in stark contrast to many bland officials today. Let's listen to him back in 1998.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ZHU RONGJI: (Speaking Mandarin).
PAK: He says, "no matter whether the path ahead is a minefield or a bottomless abyss, I will carry out my duties until my last breath." That's a quote that's stuck with economist Tianchen Xu with the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing.
TIANCHEN XU: This is very different from, let's say, the posturing of a politician who just paying lip services.
PAK: Because, he says, Zhu Rongji was a true reformer. He pushed China from a 100% state-controlled economy to one that's more mixed, not popular at the time because it triggered mass layoffs. But he also negotiated China's entry into the World Trade Organization, turning China into a manufacturing powerhouse. Overall, there's a lot of nostalgia for Zhu's time.
PFEIFFER: But, Jennifer, China is still, of course, a manufacturing and tech powerhouse. So what exactly are people nostalgic for?
PAK: Well, if you look at the recent economic data, it's quite uneven, this growth. So yes to high tech and AI, exports, exponential growth. But if you look at traditional sectors that traditionally offered a lot of jobs, like construction and property, those are down. The jobless rate is up. Consumption was stagnant last month. That's very different from the explosive growth during Zhu Rongji's time, says Julian Gewirtz, a China political historian and senior research scholar at Columbia University.
JULIAN GEWIRTZ: Zhu Rongji is a symbol of a time when China was changing in ways that ordinary people could feel directly were improving their lives.
PAK: And he says now China is indeed growing as a superpower in fundamental ways, but ordinary people can't feel it. Now, there are also academics who have traced some of today's problems back to Zhu Rongji's policies. Economist Xu says the former premier's policies were right for the time.
XU: Zhu Rongji was doing the right thing for his time.
PAK: But he says the policies didn't evolve when they needed to.
PFEIFFER: Jennifer, you've given us the view from China. How would you describe the former premier's legacy as viewed in the U.S.?
PAK: Well, American officials back in the 1990s saw Zhu Rongji as a liberal reformer, says political historian Gewirtz.
GEWIRTZ: But they emphasized his enthusiasm for markets while overlooking his commitment to a strong state, to Communist Party rule.
PAK: And now there is a reexamination of China's WTO entry in the U.S. So yes to cheaper goods for everyone, but also there was a hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. So you could actually trace some of the sources of U.S.-China tensions all the way back to Zhu Rongji's era.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR's Jennifer Pak in Beijing. Thank you, Jennifer.
PAK: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF HUSHED'S "PILLARS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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