When Zhu Rongji died in Beijing on August 12 at the age of 97, Asia lost one of the finest public servants of its modern era. He was the premier who opened China to the world, the plain-spoken technocrat who took his country into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 after almost 15 years of talks.
The tributes have reached for the big numbers, and the numbers are extraordinary. But the most valuable thing he left behind is smaller and more useful than any of them: a method any government in Asia can copy. Make a binding promise to the outside world, then use it to win the arguments you cannot win at home.
Zhu trained as an electrical engineer at Tsinghua University, and he governed like one. He did not preach ideology. He asked what was broken and what would hold.
As vice premier from 1991, he beat back inflation by cutting off credit to money-losing state firms. In 1994, he rebuilt the tax system so that revenue reached Beijing. As premier from 1998, he pushed banks, airlines and oil companies to run as real businesses without selling them off, and built a private housing market almost from scratch.
None of it came from free-market faith. He simply wanted a machine that would not break down. The WTO fit the same instinct. One of Beijing’s own negotiators later compared the talks to bargaining in a vegetable market. But the real prize was always at home.
Membership turned openness into a national promise, written into international law. That gave Zhu the leverage he needed against officials who protected favored firms and a state sector that would not otherwise move. Reformers expected the WTO to force changes in banking, company law and the courts that were too hard to attempt alone. Call it reform by treaty: borrow pressure from outside to do the hard things inside.
What makes the example worth following is that he chose it knowing what it would cost, and said so. His restructuring left an estimated 40 million state workers without jobs — critics called it surgery without anaesthesia.
Import tariffs on cars and much else came down to no more than 25% from 100% or higher, and officials at home accused him of giving away the country. On taking office, he vowed to go forward whether what lay ahead was “a minefield or an abyss.” He meant it.
Nor did he leave those workers to fend for themselves. As state jobs disappeared, state apartments were sold to their occupants for next to nothing, cheap mortgages followed and basic welfare and unemployment insurance arrived alongside them. It was imperfect, and he would have been the first to say so. But a generation that lost its jobs gained, for the first time, something of its own.
Then there was the quality rarest in any political system anywhere: he apologized. After floods killed 4,150 people in 1998, he said dikes built with embezzled money were no stronger than bean curd. Three years later, he went on national television to take responsibility for a school explosion that killed at least 42 people, most of them children.
A leader who owns a failure in public is telling citizens and markets the same thing: the numbers will not be massaged. Trust is built that way, and very little else builds it.
An honest accounting has to note what came later, and most of it came after him. The fiscal system he designed left local governments leaning on land sales, which in time helped feed the property crisis that broke in 2021.
The financial opening promised at accession was never completed, and the government procurement market pledged in 2001 remains closed. But Zhu retired in 2003: treaties set the boundaries, and successors decide what happens inside them.
For his neighbors, the gains were never going to be equal, and he never promised they would be. World Bank economists predicted before accession that the biggest benefits would flow to China and to the countries supplying its factories with parts, machines and raw materials, while those competing head-to-head with Chinese manufacturers would feel the squeeze.
That is roughly what happened. Preparation, not membership, decided who came out ahead — a lesson within reach of every government here.
Today’s arguments over overcapacity and a record trade surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion are real enough. But they belong to choices made in the decades since he left office, not to the bargain he struck.
So the tribute he would have wanted is not nostalgia. It is use. Asia’s next great bargains — deepening the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), widening the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), writing rules for digital trade, green goods, subsidies and data — all turn on the same question.
Do governments have the nerve to do what Zhu did, and sign an agreement abroad precisely because it breaks a deadlock at home? That works in Jakarta, Delhi, Hanoi and Seoul as surely as it worked in Beijing.
His quietest legacy points the same way. As founding dean of Tsinghua’s school of economics and management, he trained the economists and finance officials who served China for decades afterward. People and institutions outlast tariff schedules.
He once joked that an official photograph made him look like a dead man. The man is gone now, and the region is poorer for it. His idea is not. It is still there on the table, waiting for the next reformer with a fraction of his courage to pick it up.
Y. Tony Yang is an Endowed Professor at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
