China tightens grip on mourning for reform-era leaders amid nostalgia fears

The death of two men who shaped China's modern economy has opened a window into what the government fears most: the idea that things could have gone differently.

Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin led China together from 1998 to 2003, a period when the country seemed to be moving toward something its people had not experienced before. They closed failing state factories. They dismantled the old housing system and built a commercial property market in its place. They steered the nation through the Asian financial crisis and brought China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The economy surged. The world opened up. And something else happened too—people began to believe that openness might be permanent.

What lingers in memory, though, is not just what they did but how they did it. Zhu had a gift for the unexpected remark. At a 1999 news conference, when asked whether China had donated money to Bill Clinton's Democratic Party, he responded with a calculation that made the room laugh: if political donations were truly that effective, why would China waste only $300,000 when it had $146 billion in foreign reserves? The question dissolved into absurdity. He was a leader who could be funny, who seemed to speak plainly, who appeared to care about getting things done rather than performing ideology.

Now, as these two men have passed into history, the Chinese state is working hard to control what that history means. Online, posts mourning the reform era have been censored. An essay by economist Zhao Jian, which described that time as an age when people were "properly poor" but sustained by hope and a sense of forward movement, was suppressed. The government acknowledges Zhu as a "loyal" party member and praises his contributions. But it is deeply wary of what nostalgia for his era might become—a quiet criticism of the present, a suggestion that China's leadership has moved in a different direction, away from the openness and entrepreneurial energy that once seemed to define the country's future.

Xi Jinping has moved to contain this narrative. In a 40-minute speech, he presented himself and the current leadership as the true continuation of Jiang's legacy, framing the present as the fulfillment of what those earlier leaders began. He even praised Jiang's 1989 crackdown on a reformist Shanghai newspaper that had supported the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. The message was clear: there is one story to tell about China's past, and it leads directly here, to now, to this government. Any suggestion of an alternative path—any "what if"—will not be permitted public space.

What makes this moment significant is what it reveals about anxiety at the top. The material abundance is undeniable. The skylines are full of high-rises. The streets are crowded with traffic and commerce. And yet the government feels compelled to police memory itself, to ensure that when people think about Zhu and Jiang, they do not think about a time when things seemed to be opening rather than closing, when the future felt uncertain but full of possibility rather than predetermined. The fear is not that people will forget the reform era. It is that they will remember it too well, and begin to ask questions about the road not taken.