China’s former President Jiang Zemin, who rose to power after the Tiananmen Square protests, died Wednesday at the age of 96 from leukemia, state media in the Asian giant reported.
Jiang, who was general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) between 1989 and 2002 and president of the country between 1993 and 2003, died of multi-organ failure in the city of Shanghai, as reported by the Chinese news agency Xinhua.
The former president, who came to lead the CCP after replacing Zhao Ziyang -replaced for his support to the mobilizations-, was responsible for introducing the concept of «socialist market economy» during a party congress in 1992 and for supervising the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong and Macao from the hands of the United Kingdom and Portugal in 1997 and 1999, respectively.
