Analysis: Under Jiang, China projected a more open image

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Jiang's death, smack in the middle of the most visible demonstrations since that 1989 bloodshed on Tiananmen Square, illuminates how much has changed between the China of the late 1990s and early 2000s — when he was at the height of his rule — and today's economic powerhouse and more powerful and dominant country. Jiang, a former Shanghai mayor and onetime soap factory manager, was appointed by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping — the architect of China's post-Mao “reform and opening up” — as general secretary three weeks after the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in which hundreds, perhaps thousands died. By contrast, China today — encouraged in no small measure by Xi himself — presents a robust, sometimes swaggering presence on the world stage and, perhaps even more so than a generation ago, bristles at any suggestion that the ghosts of Western nations' Cold War “containment” policies might be coming back to do some haunting. He's just a regular guy.” Today, 25 years later in a different era with a very different China, it's hard to imagine one of Xi Jinping's handlers ever wanting to convey something like that to anyone — much less daring to do so.