Overview
- State media Xinhua announced Zhu Rongji’s death in Beijing on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, and called him an outstanding party member and statesman.
- Zhu served as China’s premier from 1998 to 2003 and led the long negotiations that won China entry to the World Trade Organization, a move that opened the country to global trade.
- He pushed sweeping market-oriented changes, including fiscal and tax reform, housing reforms, and a broad overhaul of state-owned enterprises to make them profit-oriented.
- Those SOE reforms helped modernize China’s economy but produced sharp social costs, with widely cited estimates of about 40 million job losses and lasting local debt and property-sector problems.
- Official obituaries emphasize his crisis management and anti-corruption stance while international commentators balance praise with concern about the human costs and unresolved structural challenges that successors still face.