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COVER:
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ASIA | March 16, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 10 |
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His departures from the capital were rarely voluntary. In 1957 he was branded a "rightist"-for criticizing government policy-and was packed off to teach poorly educated cadres everything from basic economics to Chinese literature. After returning to Beijing, he piqued ideologues again during the Cultural Revolution and was banished for five years to northeast China, where he tended livestock. The forced exiles didn't leave much of a stigma. Rehabilitated with thousands of others (including Deng Xiaoping) in 1979, he rose quickly through a series of posts in central government economic ministries, building a reputation as a shiganjia (doer), initially through his 1985 rescue of Beijing Jeep. In December 1987 St. Pierre, now a wine importer in Beijing, was sharing lunch with the Chinese leader at a conference in Hawaii when Zhu received a phone call that left him ashen. "I said, 'Mr. Zhu, what's wrong?'" St. Pierre recalls. "He said, 'That was Li Peng on the phone. On April 15, I am to be the new mayor of Shanghai.' I asked him how he felt about that, and he said, 'I don't want to go there.'" If Zhu's reluctance seems uncharacteristic, what the new mayor accomplished in the threadbare former "Paris of the East" more than met expectations. On his first day in Shanghai, goes one story, Zhu ordered tourism officials to scrub every public toilet in the city. He won over crucial foreign investors with an even bigger clean-up job, striking out at official corruption and slashing to one the number of stamped approvals needed to open foreign ventures (thus earning one of his many nicknames-"One-Chop Zhu"). The Pudong development zone, little more than farmland before Zhu flung two bridges across the Huangpu River to link it to Shanghai proper, has since attracted more than $15 billion in foreign investment. The mayor's eye for the bottom line also brought out his hard edges. Flunkies grumbled when he forced them to recite anti-corruption hymns, and again when he shrunk official dinners from lavish feasts to nothing more than one soup and four dishes. When he erupted into his frequent rages, they simply cowered. In one municipal meeting, a director reported that his bureau had increased production that month by "around 5% or 6%." Zhu broke in: "Comrade bureau director, is it 5% or 6%? Is it 5.1% or 5.9%? When it comes to statistics, we must be very exact." Says one of Zhu's former assistants: "Many cadres thought he was grandstanding at their expense. They hated his pushiness, the cavalier style." The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre brought forth both sides of Zhu's personality. After the tanks rolled into Beijing, the mayor supposedly tossed aside a Propaganda Bureau spiel and made a heartfelt, televised plea that persuaded Shanghai's own furious students to clear the streets. His triumph, though, was quickly co-opted by central authorities, who used Zhu's clean reputation to rebuild Beijing's own when he embarked on a 1990 tour of Hong Kong, Europe and America. Where he had once vowed "the truth will come out," Zhu now coolly deflected criticism of Beijing's graybeards.
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