Xi to Address Jiang Zemin Centennial Commemoration
President Xi Jinping will attend and deliver an important speech at a grand ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of late Chinese leader Jiang Zemin, scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, according to Xinhua News Agency. The event marks one of the highest-profile state commemorations for a former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader in more than two decades.
A Historic Commemoration
Jiang Zemin, who was born on August 17, 1926, in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, served as General Secretary of the CCP from 1989 to 2002 and as President of China from 1993 to 2003. He died in Shanghai on November 30, 2022, at the age of 96. The commemoration will make Jiang the seventh CCP leader to receive a high-level centennial state ceremony, following Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yun, as reported by Zaobao.
The last comparable event was held in 2004 for Deng Xiaoping’s centennial, when then-President Hu Jintao delivered the keynote address. The ceremony will be broadcast live by China Media Group and Xinhuanet, with simultaneous relay across major state media platforms including People’s Daily Online, CCTV.com, and China.com.cn, as confirmed by the Chinese government’s official website.
A Series of Commemorative Measures
The ceremony is the culmination of a month-long series of commemorative activities. CCTV has been airing a 12-episode documentary series titled “Jiang Zemin” from August 11-16 during prime time, produced jointly by the Central Propaganda Department, the Central Party History and Literature Research Institute, the National Radio and Television Administration, and China Media Group.
The documentary has drawn significant public attention for its previously undisclosed historical details, including first-time revelations of Jiang’s wedding photos with his wife Wang Yeping from the early 1950s, his role in helping underground CCP members evacuate Shanghai in 1948, and his experience during the Cultural Revolution when he was stripped of his position and assigned to clean toilets, as detailed by Zaobao’s coverage.
China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, has also announced it will issue four commemorative coins starting August 17 to mark the centennial, including one ordinary commemorative coin with a face value of 1 yuan and a mintage of 10 million pieces, along with two gold coins and one silver coin, according to People’s Daily Online. In early July, the Central Propaganda Department designated Jiang’s ancestral home in Yangzhou as a national patriotic education base.
The Reform Era Legacy
Jiang Zemin is remembered as the “core” of the third generation of Chinese leadership, selected by Deng Xiaoping to lead the party during a period of profound transformation. Under his leadership, China continued and expanded market reforms, pushed forward state-owned enterprise restructuring, achieved WTO accession in 2001, and presided over the Hong Kong handover in 1997.
The commemoration comes just days after the death of former Premier Zhu Rongji, Jiang’s key partner in governance, who died on August 12 at age 97. The two men formed what has been described as the “golden partnership” of China’s reform era, together steering the country through one of the most sweeping periods of economic transformation in modern history. As Foreign Policy noted, Zhu’s death is being perceived as “the definitive end to the era of breakneck reform” that the two men came to represent.
Political Significance
Analysts see the high-level commemoration as serving multiple purposes for the current leadership. Professor Chien-Wen Kou of National Chengchi University in Taiwan told Zaobao that the event is “not only about commemorating the past, but also about looking toward the future; while affirming the contributions of former leaders, it also consolidates the position of the current leadership.”
Kou further noted that with many high-ranking officials and military generals having fallen in anti-corruption campaigns since the 20th Party Congress, the high-level commemoration helps stabilize party morale. “So many high-ranking officials and military generals have fallen since the 20th Party Congress, causing unrest within the party,” he said. “Commemorating Jiang Zemin at such a high level now both demonstrates the necessity of inheriting history and highlights the current leader’s governance philosophy, which to a certain extent serves to stabilize party morale.”
The commemoration also carries an economic signal. Highlighting Jiang’s reform legacy signals continued prioritization of the private economy and Western economic cooperation amid current challenges including real estate slumps, weak domestic demand, local government debt, and US-Europe trade tensions, as analyzed by The Chosun Daily.
What to Watch For
Observers will be closely watching Xi Jinping’s speech for signals about how the current leadership frames Jiang’s legacy within the CCP’s historical narrative. The documentary’s treatment of the 1989 events, which described Jiang’s appointment as “shouldering responsibility in a time of crisis” without showing footage of the Tiananmen protests, has been noted as significant.
With attention growing on Xi’s succession ahead of next year’s party congress, analysts interpret the focus on Jiang as emphasizing a unified CCP lineage from Mao to Deng, Jiang, Hu, and Xi, rather than promoting specific factions. The ceremony on Monday will provide the clearest indication yet of how the party intends to position Jiang’s reform-era legacy within its contemporary political framework.
As Global Times reported, the event is expected to bring together thousands of attendees from across the capital. The full text of Xi’s speech, expected to be released following the ceremony, will be scrutinized for its historical framing and forward-looking guidance.