From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Analects
: “It is a pleasure to receive friends from afar.”
He had missed me when he visited Singapore in the early 1980s, and when I
visited Shanghai in 1988 when he was mayor there. He had visited Singapore
twice, on the first occasion for two weeks to study how the Economic
Development Board (EDB) got investments into Singapore and how we
developed industrial estates. He was then tasked with setting up special
economic zones in Guangdong and Fujian. The second visit was a transit stop.
He had carried away a deep impression of Singapore’s city planning, orderliness,
traffic conditions, cleanliness and standard of service. He remembered our
slogan, “Courtesy is our way of life”. He was pleased he could speak Mandarin
with ordinary people in the streets, which made it easy for him to get around.
Jiang said that after the “6-4” incident, the West claimed that through
television it was possible for them to interfere in Chinese affairs. The West acted
in accordance with their value system. He could accept that there were different
views, but not that only one view was correct. There was nothing absolute in
these concepts of democracy, freedom and human rights. They could not exist in
abstraction, but were linked to a country’s culture and level of economic
development. There was no such thing as freedom of the press. Western
newspapers belonged to and were controlled by various financial groups. He
referred to Singapore’s decision in 1988 to restrict sales of the 
Asian Wall Street
Journal
and said China should have done the same during Gorbachev’s visit.
Many Western media reports on the “6-4” incident were not accurate.
Deng’s policy of opening to the world and adhering to socialism remained
unchanged. Since I had expressed concern about the continuance of this open-
door policy, Jiang assured me that it would be “accelerated”. They had decided
to break away from the Soviet centrally planned system. He had studied in the
Soviet Union for two years and visited the country on 10 occasions, so he knew
the difficulties of their system. China wanted to establish a mixed economy, to
combine the best of the centrally planned economy and market regulation.

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China wanted to maintain contact with other countries. It faced difficulties in
feeding 1.1 billion people. It was an enormous effort to supply the whole country
with grain alone. As mayor of Shanghai, with a population of 12 million, he had
found it difficult to supply two million kilos of vegetables daily. For an hour he
spoke of China’s colossal needs. At dinner the conversation was lively. He
quoted couplets and verses from his immense mental anthology memorised since
childhood. His comments were peppered with literary allusions, many beyond
my limited knowledge of Chinese literature, which added to the work of the
interpreter.
Instead of the stereotyped grey communist apparatchik I had expected, I
found a medium-height, stocky, fair, bespectacled, broad-faced, black hair
combed straight back, ready-smiling party chairman. He was the No. 1 man in
China, chosen by Deng Xiaoping in a matter of days after “6-4” to take the place
of Zhao Ziyang. He was highly intelligent and well-read and had a gift for
languages. He was fluent in Russian, spoke English and German, and could
quote Shakespeare and Goethe. He told me he also spoke Romanian, having
worked in Romania.
Jiang was born in 1926 into a scholarly family in Yangzhou town, Jiangsu
province. His grandfather was a renowned physician and a talented poet, painter
and calligrapher. His father was the eldest son. An uncle who had joined the
Communist Youth League at 17 and been killed at 28 in the civil war against the
Nationalists in 1939 was considered a revolutionary martyr. His father gave
Jiang Zemin, then 13, to the widow of this uncle who had no son. So Jiang had
impeccable revolutionary antecedents when he joined the communist student
groups in the universities in Nanjing and Jiaotong in Shanghai.
He was brought up in a home with books, paintings and music. Jiang sings,
plays the piano and enjoys listening to Mozart and Beethoven. There were
significant differences in academic performance between people of the various
provinces. Jiangsu was the “Lake District” of China where over the millennia its
pleasant micro-climate had attracted retired mandarins and literati. Their
progeny have raised the academic level of the population there. Suzhou in
Jiangsu province, once the capital of one of the states in the Spring Autumn
period (about 770–476 BC), has one street called Zhuang Yuan Jie.