Known as China’s “economic czar,” Zhu led the country to embrace market liberalization and globalization, steering its transition from a centrally planned backwater to a more open and market-friendly economy.
In some ways his death marks the end of a more economically optimistic era for many Chinese who witnessed their country’s sweeping transformation during its reformist years. Those reforms led to huge reduction in poverty, an exploding middle class and a scramble by foreign companies to access the lucrative Chinese market.
Zhu steered China’s economic policy for more than a decade since the early 1990s, first as a vice premier and then the premier under late leader Jiang Zemin, who died in late 2022.
A dogged technocrat, Zhu pushed through a barrage of painful yet necessary reforms to liberalize the economy, from a substantial overhaul of the country’s fiscal and taxation regime to a drastic shakeup of its bloated state sector.