Xinhua’s State media, has announced the death of a former Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, who passed away at the age of 96.
According to Xinhua’s reports “Jiang Zemin had passed away due to leukaemia and multiple organ failure in Shanghai at about 12:13 p.m. on November 30, 2022, at the age of 96. It was announced on Wednesday.”
Zemin had been one of the major figures of Chinese history in recent decades as he had led the country through a transformational era from the late 1980s and into the new millennium.
He had come into power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and replaced Deng Xiaoping in 1989, leading China to emerge as a global powerhouse.
According to a BBC report, Zemin had additionally overseen the peaceful handover of Hong Kong in 1997, but he had been bashed for a heavy-handed crackdown on the religious sect Falun Gong in 1999.
Zemin’s rise to power after the infamous and bloody 1989 crackdown on protesters in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square -which caused China to be being ostracized internationally- had sparked a gruesome power struggle at the top of China’s Communist Party between hard-line reactionaries and the reformers.
