The Death of Jiang Zemin

[PeterRS]

I suspect not many will remember Jiang Zemin other than he took over the leadership of China when Deng stepped aside after 1989. As the obituaries have noted, he was a very different type of leader from the present President Xi. He even charmed Bill Clinton after Clinton had earlier virtually trashed him as a "butcher of Beijing"!

He certainly seems to have been a man who revelled in life. A recent book about the tenor Luciano Pavarotti has an interesting anecdote which perhaps illustrates this. In 2001 the Olympic Bidding Committee was in Beijing making its final assessment of the bids for the 2008 Games. To coincide with this, the Chinese had organised a concert with the famous Three Tenors inside the Forbidden City. Until then, only Bertolucci had been allowed access to the Forbidden City for his movie The Last Emperor. Although none of the top leadership attended the concert, President Jiang invited the tenors to lunch the following day. 

After a pleasant lunch with Jiang, who spoke good English, the Prime Minister Zhu Rongji and the Minister of Culture, Jiang thanked the tenors for helping with the Chinese bid for the 2008 Summer Games. He then said there was a western tradition that you "sing for your supper". So he proposed that the tenors sing duets with the senior leaders. After Carreras sang something with the Culture Minister and Domingo with the Prime Minister, it came to Pavarotti's turn. President Jiang apparently loved the Neapolitan songs which Pavarotti had sung many hundreds of times. What he did not know was that Pavarotti not only could not read music, he could never remember words. So when they sang their duet, while Jiang was note and word perfect, Pavarotti could not remember certain words and had to resort to the Italian version of "rhubarb, rhubarb."

That gaff aside, Pavarotti - clearly a very intelligent man despite his often appearing less so - claimed that having met many of the world's Kings, Queens, Princes, Prime Minsters and other senior leaders, he found Jiang the most intelligent of them all!