CHINA: Zhu Rongji steps down as China's prime minister on Sunday. Jasper Becker in Beijing assesses his rule - an era dominated by massive economic swings and huge public spending
China will be a very different place without Premier Zhu Rongji who formally retires next week after a decade steering China towards free markets.
More than anyone else, apart from the late Deng Xiaoping, his forceful leadership kept the Chinese Communist Party in power, largely by aggressively pushing an almost Thatcherite economic vision.
He hammered the Left so relentlessly that one cannot now scarcely imagine a Marxist government ever regaining power in China.
Vehemently hated by some, hero worshipped by others, Zhu's retirement has even inspired some newspapers to publish commemorative editions in homage.
Many commentators have rightly hailed China's membership of the World Trade Organisation as his most enduring legacy. He pushed this through despite many setbacks and personal attacks. In the post-Tiananmen slump, China swung back towards central planning and no one could have imagined that China would ever have gone this far.
When Zhu emerged into the limelight on the back of Deng's 1992 Southern Tour, his main task was curbing the runaway inflation unleashed by the new round of reforms. In the mid-1990s, he spearheaded such a harsh austerity campaign that there were believable rumours that he, and family members, had narrowly escaped assassination attacks.
Tens of millions lost their savings and often their jobs as investment projects collapsed and people rushed to withdraw their savings from shaky banks or shady investment schemes.
Zhu kept the state sector going during the liquidity crisis by aggressively funnelling money raised on domestic and overseas stock markets but he also reined in countless other over-ambitious experiments in capitalism: local stock markets, futures markets, trust and investment corporations and some crazy property bubbles like that in Hainan Island.
Hard on the heels of the successful campaign to bring down inflation, he faced down another internal attack on market capitalism spurred by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Chinese papers were suddenly filled with neo-Marxist triumphalism about the imminent collapse of capitalism and dangers to China's freedom that the lurking "sharks" and "crocodiles" of international finance posed.
Zhu cleverly managed to exploit the crisis as an opportunity. When foreign investment dried up, he used this to insist that it was all the more urgent that China enter the World Trade Organisation. He pushed through a deal with the United States, despite being accused of selling out the country and this has cemented in place a programme of deeper reforms.
An estimated 30 million jobs were lost in the aftermath of the crisis, especially in rural industries, but Zhu countered it by launching wave after wave of mega infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy. He also successfully stimulated the economy by pushing the privatisation of housing and unleashed a building boom.
To boost China's prestige, he refused to join neighbouring countries and devalue the currency, ignoring the pain this caused especially in rural China where wages and incomes have not risen for over seven years.
Zhu got away with a lot through bluster and bluffing; manipulating statistics to say the economy was growing at around 8 per cent in 1998 even though it was barely growing at all. Likewise, his claims to have restored the state sector to profitability in just three years seem doubtful.
Zhu says he is leaving having successfully slashed the size of the bureaucracy but if this is true, he will be the first premier to have done so. More likely is that the officials are still on the state payroll albeit doing different jobs. Perhaps his worst legacy is the high esteem many younger Chinese now have for his brand of strong authoritarian leadership, and for the merits of heavy-handed state intervention and big government spending.
Speaking to the National People's Congress last week, Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng hinted that Zhu's policies cannot be sustained and announced a public spending freeze. The trouble is that central government revenues are still just 6 per cent of GNP and Beijing is now issuing treasury bonds - $16.8 billion this year - which mostly cover the interest payments on existing treasury debt costing $11.3 billion this year.
Just how big and dangerous is the state debt that accumulated under Zhu is hard to see clearly because he used the state banks to finance what should be government spending. Zhu leaves his successor, Wen Jiabao, to cope with some $450 billion in non-performing loans as well as unsecured pensions and other liabilities that raise the total two or three times as high.
As Zhu's efforts to build a social welfare system for urban Chinese largely failed and since the peasants have still not been given legal title to the land they farm, most Chinese still remain deeply insecure.
Last year Premier Zhu boasted he saved the Chinese economy from collapse and while he did enough to stave off fresh political upheavals, the day of reckoning may only have been postponed. It may be too early to call Zhu a great man.