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ASIA | March 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 10 |
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 When China's maverick economic czar takes over the government, his open, gunslinging style is certain to change the way the country operates
By NISID HAJARI  hina's zhu rongji has suited up as the new sheriff in town before. In 1985 the poker-faced economics whiz introduced himself to the outside world with a curt telex to American Motors. Don St. Pierre, president of the auto giant's high-profile joint venture in China, Beijing Jeep, had campaigned for months to save the struggling project, even appealing directly to Premier Zhao Ziyang for help. Getting no reply, St. Pierre returned to Detroit-and, he thought, certain dismissal. Instead he received a note from a vice minister of the State Economic Commission: "I have been given a copy of your letter and am entrusted with solving this problem. Please send a high-level delegation to China immediately, and we will solve this problem-Zhu Rongji." St. Pierre flew to Beijing; he met with Zhu, and things were indeed quickly resolved. "Right away," St. Pierre recalls, "I knew they had sent a serious man."
These are serious times across Asia, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Middle Kingdom. Over the next two weeks in Beijing, the National People's Congress will formally name a new team to lead 1.2 billion Chinese into the 21st century. It's a vexing time: the graceless financial collapses of its neighbors have forced upon vast China-a country addicted to double-digit growth rates-intimations of its own economic mortality. That unease has underscored the need to resolve problems that have plagued the People's Republic for years-from flimsy banks to rust-bucket factories to legions of sullen unemployed. The situation calls for heavy guns, and so Beijing has wheeled out the 69-year-old Zhu-a lifelong technocrat who has been purged twice, raised the hackles of socialist diehards and generally irked cadres across the country with his habit of laying down the law. "I'm not sure he is a man you like or dislike," Singapore's Senior Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, told Time. "He is a man you respect or don't respect, and I respect him." So does a younger generation of technocrats who quietly cheer his disdain for Confucian niceties and official-speak. If all goes as planned, next week this maverick will replace hard liner Li Peng as Premier of the world's last communist power. As the next generation takes its leadership cues from the new boss, Zhu's personality and policies are likely to push the country toward a truly revolutionary transformation. China can't get by with half-measures. "For years they opted to muddle through because the whole region was in such great shape," says an American banker in Beijing. The humbling of Southeast Asia, though, has given ample proof of the dangers of procrastinating. Soon, too, those fallen economies will evolve from warning to threat: once their streamlined factories begin humming again, the devaluations of their currencies should help them steal business from China's cut-rate export machine. Already Chinese sales to the rest of Asia fell 1.4% in January from a year earlier, while worldwide total exports could rise by as little as 6% in 1998-half of last year's growth rate. Cover: Illustration for Time by Mitch Confer; Photograph of Zhu Rongji by Forrest Anderson
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