Zhu Rongji, Former Premier Who Pushed China to a Market Economy, Dies at 97

BREAKING: Zhu Rongji, the former Chinese premier who drove the country's shift to a market economy and led it into the WTO, has died at 97.

Zhu Rongji has died at 97. The former Chinese premier who, more than almost anyone else, dragged China into the global economy.

You can see him here, at the centre of party life for decades. Zhu ran Shanghai before Beijing called him up, and as premier from 1998 he took a hammer to the old state-run system, restructuring bloated state enterprises and forcing reforms that made him enemies at home and admirers abroad.

His biggest legacy has an address in Geneva. Zhu led the negotiations that put China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and everything that followed, the factories, the exports, the second largest economy on earth, runs through that door he opened.

The world you shop in, the supply chains you never think about, a lot of that traces back to one man who just died at 97.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.

Source Read the original reporting at nytimes.com