Zhu Rongji's formula won't work anymore. But that doesn't mean Xi Jinping's will work either.

Zhu Rongji has passed away at the age of 97. He was not the only architect of the economic reforms that have made China a modern powerhouse — Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, and others were all important — but Zhu was perhaps the most skilled, versatile, and far-sighted. He presided over China’s greatest era of reform and opening up — 1991 to 2003 — and handled both macroeconomic and microeconomic policy with a skill that perhaps no other Chinese leader has ever matched.

In many ways, Zhu was the man who really made China a capitalist country. The privatization of state-owned enterprises had begun earlier, but Zhu continued and accelerated it. He was the main champion of China’s successful drive to join the WTO, which supercharged China’s export industries and led to a massive wave of foreign investment; he also engaged in a deregulation program to lure foreign businesses to manufacture things in China.





...