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ASIA | March 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 10 |
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Such prospects have convinced many that Beijing will eventually have to devalue its renminbi, perhaps by 20% or more. Officials well know that any such move would likely shatter Hong Kong's peg to the U.S. dollar-as well as the region's already thin confidence. Those considerations play heavily upon a leadership more cognizant of-and concerned about-China's role in the world; some think Zhu's firm pledges not to devalue are partly designed to ease Beijing's bid for membership in the World Trade Organization. "I give [President] Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji more credit than I do the previous generation," says China strategist Denis Simon of Andersen Consulting. "They understand that they can't just ignore the external environment." Zhu arms Beijing with a powerful weapon against what is at heart a crisis of confidence. Alone among China's top brass, he has developed a coterie of Western fans, who admire his grasp of detail and his penchant for efficient, often unconventional, solutions. "He behaves more like the ceo of an international corporation than a politician," says John Wadsworth Jr., chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. "He's very 'American.'" That affinity has earned Zhu a reserve of trust that encourages others to take him at his word. "Why do people continue to doubt, when I've said three times we won't devalue?" he asked Nobel Prize-winning economist Merton Miller in January. Laughed Miller: "The problem was the second and third times you said it." Zhu's words, however, have a far more unpredictable impact within the People's Republic. Tall (1.75 m) and gaunt, he presents an unforgiving mien that sets him apart from his compatriots, some of whom read his Yankee-style forthrightness as abrasive, and his renowned temper as boorish. By many accounts he possesses a wry sense of humor, and is a doting grandfather who will break out into impassioned renditions of Peking Opera among close friends. "He cannot conceal his emotions: when he's angry, he's angry; when he smiles, no one can think he is being disingenuous," says an admirer. But the ferociously bright Zhu holds little tolerance for fools and tends to save more projects than face. As a leader, he hardly resembles the stolid apparatchiks who have paced reform in China at a dull trudge. "He's not a boring bureaucrat," says Martin Posth, former deputy managing director of Volkswagen's China subsidiary. "He's a personality." Zhu's individuality emerged early on. Born in 1928 to a dirt-poor family in Changsha, capital of Hunan province and hometown of Mao Zedong, the young Zhu lost both his parents early and was raised by an uncle. Legend holds that the schoolboy spent his days reading alone-a recluse buffeted by the grand passions of civil war and the Japanese invasion. In 1947 he left to study electrical engineering at Beijing's élite Qinghua University. There he joined the revolution as a student leader and signed up with the Communist Party in October 1949, soon after Mao announced the formation of the People's Republic. Years later, he married a fellow Qinghua engineer, Lao An, and raised a daughter and a son in Beijing.
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