Jiang Zemin
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The Head of the Chinese Communist Party
The President of the People's Republic of China

Jiang Zemin was born in August 1926 to an intellectual family in Yangzhou, a historically and culturally famous city at the lower reaches of China's Yangtze River. The cultural background of his family with a long tradition of learning enabled him to read extensively Chinese and foreign literary masterpieces and thus to have a solid foundation in literature. However, he chose Shanghai Jiaotong University after all, a prestigious university of engineering in China, with electrical engineering as his major. It was Jiang Shangqing, his uncle and foster father, who exerted a great influence on his later taking the road of a revolutionary as his career. His uncle, a Communist, who led a regional anti-Japanese armed forces in the northeast of Anhui Province and north of the Huai River in China, sacrificed his life for the country in a battle in 1939.

Jiang graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1947. During his college years, he participated in the CPC-led student movement against Chiang Kai-shek's autocratic rule, and joined the Communist Party of China in 1946. After the founding of New China, Jiang served as an associate engineer, head of a workshop and deputy director of a factory in Shanghai. In 1955, he was sent to the Soviet Union to work in Moscow's Stalin Automobile Works as a trainee for one year. After his return home in 1956, he served as director of factories and research institutes in the big industrial cities of Changchun, Shanghai and Wuhan. Later, he was transferred to Beijing to take charge of the Foreign Affairs Department of the First Ministry of Machine-Building Industry under the State Council. Since 1980, he served successively as Deputy Director of the State Import and Export Administration and the State Foreign Investment Administration, Vice-Minister and Minister of Electronics Industry, Mayor of Shanghai, Secretary of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee, and member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. After June 1989, he was elected General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, President of the People's Republic of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Jiang as a statesman of the new generation has the distinct makings and style of a scholar. He has extensive knowledge. He loves reading, and the most he reads are the latest books on economics, science and technology, politics and culture. While in office in Shanghai, he wrote papers such as On the New Features of the Development of World Electronic Information Industry and the Strategic Problems of the Development of China's Electronic Information Industry, The Trend of Energy Development in the World and the Main Energy-Saving Measures, which were published in the "Shanghai Jiaotong University Journal." He can use English, Russian and Romanian, and knows some German and Japanese. In meeting with foreign guests, he often expresses his viewpoints in foreign languages. He is highly accomplished in famous works of classic Chinese literature and often quotes in talks well-known lines from exponents of various schools of thought as well as Tang, Song and Yuan poetry. He also reads extensively famous works of Western literature. He loves to read novels by Mark Twain, and can recite passages from "Hamlet" by Shakespeare and verses from "Ode to the West Wind" by Shelley. He also knows very well works by Leo Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov and Turgenev. He not only loves literature, but has a wide range of other interests. He likes both erhu tunes by A Bing, a great master of Chinese folk music, and symphonic music by Mozart and Beethoven, great masters of Western music. At leisure, he may play erhu and bamboo flute, traditional Chinese musical instruments, as well as the Western musical instrument piano.

Jiang has a warm, harmonious and happy family. He and his wife have two sons, a grandson and a granddaughter. In his spare time, Jiang often indulges in sporting with these "pearls in his palm" in great joy, tells them stories and teaches them to recite ancient poetry and read English, thus enjoying the traditional Chinese family life of "several generations living together."

(The text is adapted from official profile published in Beijing, China)

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