The former Chinese premier helped dismantle inefficient state industries, strengthened Beijing’s economic management and drove China into the World Trade Organization, laying foundations for its emergence as a global manufacturing powerhouse.

Zhu Rongji, the formidable technocrat whose economic reforms helped propel China from a heavily state-controlled system toward the centre of global trade and manufacturing, has died in Beijing at the age of 97. His death was reported on August 12, closing the life of one of the most consequential economic policymakers of China’s post-Mao era.

Premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1998 to 2003, Zhu became synonymous with a period of rapid restructuring that reshaped Chinese industry, public finances and international commerce. His tenure coincided with a decisive stage in China’s economic opening, when Beijing sought to make state enterprises more competitive, attract foreign investment and integrate the country more deeply into the global trading system.

His reputation was built around an unusually forceful style of economic management. Direct, impatient with bureaucracy and openly hostile to corruption, Zhu stood apart from the carefully scripted public image traditionally associated with senior Chinese officials. Supporters viewed him as an exceptionally capable administrator prepared to impose painful reforms in pursuit of long-term economic stability. Critics pointed to the enormous social costs created by restructuring, particularly the loss of employment in state-owned enterprises.

Those reforms were transformative. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Beijing closed, merged or reorganised large numbers of inefficient state businesses while forcing surviving enterprises to operate under more commercially disciplined conditions. Tens of millions of workers were affected by the restructuring, with estimates cited in contemporary accounts reaching as high as 60 million layoffs.

The disruption was severe, particularly in industrial regions where employment, housing and welfare had historically been tied to state-owned workplaces. Yet the restructuring also helped create a more productive industrial sector capable of competing internationally. It was part of a broader transition that would ultimately make China a critical link in global manufacturing supply chains.

Zhu also strengthened the central government’s control over taxation and public finances, addressing a system in which provincial and local authorities had accumulated considerable economic power. His reforms contributed to a stronger fiscal position for Beijing and gave the central government greater capacity to direct national economic policy.

Another fundamental transformation came through housing.

China had traditionally provided urban housing largely through state employers. Under reforms associated with Zhu’s era, the country moved increasingly toward private home ownership and a commercial property market. The policy helped stimulate construction, household wealth accumulation and urban development, although it also contributed to the emergence of a property-driven growth model that would produce significant economic vulnerabilities decades later.

Zhu’s most internationally significant achievement, however, was China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

Beijing formally joined the WTO in December 2001 after years of complex negotiations and substantial domestic resistance. Zhu was a central figure in securing the agreement, accepting market-opening commitments that some Chinese officials feared would expose domestic industries to overwhelming foreign competition.

The opposite dynamic would eventually become one of the defining forces of the global economy.

WTO membership gave Chinese manufacturers much greater access to international markets, while multinational companies rapidly expanded investment in Chinese production. Low manufacturing costs, an enormous labour force, improving infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated supply chains transformed the country into the principal production base for an extraordinary range of consumer and industrial goods.

China’s rise as the “factory of the world” became one of the most important economic developments of the early 21st century.

The consequences reached far beyond China. Western consumers benefited from inexpensive manufactured goods, multinational companies built complex supply chains around Chinese factories, and hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens experienced rising incomes and dramatically improved living standards.

At the same time, China’s manufacturing expansion contributed to industrial dislocation elsewhere. Factories in Europe, the United States and other developed economies faced increasingly powerful Chinese competition, creating economic and political tensions that continue to shape international trade policy today.

Zhu’s career had been far from straightforward.

Born in Changsha, Hunan province, in 1928, he studied electrical engineering at Tsinghua University and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. His political career suffered repeated setbacks during Mao Zedong’s era, including punishment after he was accused of holding politically unacceptable views. He was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution and subsequently rose through China’s economic bureaucracy.

His ascent accelerated during the reform era initiated by Deng Xiaoping.

As mayor of Shanghai from 1988 to 1991, Zhu established a reputation as an effective economic administrator and helped prepare the city for its later emergence as one of Asia’s leading commercial and financial centres. His performance in Shanghai brought him to national prominence.

He subsequently became vice-premier and, for a period, governor of the People’s Bank of China. During those years he played a central role in fighting inflation, reforming taxation and restoring greater macroeconomic discipline before succeeding Li Peng as premier in 1998.

Zhu’s years as premier coincided with exceptionally rapid economic expansion. According to Associated Press, China recorded annual growth rates exceeding 8% during his premiership even as the government pushed through major structural changes.

His approach combined market-oriented economic reform with continued Communist Party political control. Zhu was not a political liberal in the Western sense. His objective was to make the Chinese state and economy more efficient and durable, rather than replace the political system governing them.

That distinction became central to the model that subsequently defined China: greater use of markets, international trade and private enterprise alongside continued strategic control by the Communist Party.

Zhu was also famous for his hostility toward official corruption. His uncompromising language and willingness to confront entrenched interests contributed to an image that was unusually personal for a senior Chinese leader. The determination with which he approached economic reform earned him admiration among technocrats and international investors, although some of his policies generated resistance within both the political establishment and society.

After leaving office in 2003, Zhu largely withdrew from frontline politics. Collections of his speeches, correspondence and public remarks later offered insights into his concerns about corruption, local-government debt, inequality and the quality of economic governance — issues that remain central to China’s economic debate more than two decades after his retirement.

His legacy is therefore more complicated than that of a conventional reformer.

The China Zhu helped construct became richer, more productive and far more deeply integrated into the global economy. But some of the mechanisms that powered that transformation — extensive industrial investment, property development, local-government borrowing and dependence on manufacturing — eventually created problems of their own.

Today, Beijing is attempting to encourage household consumption, reduce excessive property dependence and manage mounting local debt while simultaneously defending the enormous manufacturing base that emerged from the reform period Zhu helped shape.

That makes his economic record particularly relevant at the moment of his death.

China’s contemporary leadership governs a country vastly different from the one Zhu inherited as premier in 1998. It is now an industrial superpower, the world’s largest exporter of goods and a central actor in industries ranging from electronics and machinery to electric vehicles, batteries and renewable-energy technologies.

Much of the institutional and economic groundwork for that transformation was laid during the reform era in which Zhu was one of the principal architects.

His methods were often severe, and their social consequences were substantial. But Zhu Rongji belonged to a generation of Chinese policymakers prepared to accept enormous disruption in order to transform the structure of the economy.

More than two decades after he left office, the scale of that transformation is visible in virtually every corner of global commerce.

Zhu did not simply manage one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. He helped create the economic conditions under which China became an indispensable part of the global industrial system — a legacy whose consequences continue to shape trade, investment and geopolitical competition around the world.