This biography tries to counter the Western perception of Jiang Zemin (b. 1926) as a dictator of Communist China and emphasizes instead how far Chinese leadership has come since the days of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. A mild-mannered but patriotic grassroots organizer of protests during the Japanese occupation, Jiang matured into a good-natured technocrat who was, according to the author (host of PBS's series Closer to Truth
and a former adviser to the Chinese government), without greater political ambition while serving as mayor of Shanghai. But he avoided political pitfalls in his dealings with student protesters in Shanghai in the period leading to the Tiananmen Square massacre—dealings Kuhn tries to portray as firm but not unkind. As China's head of state from 1993 to 2003, Jiang was, in Kuhn's view, a visionary who put a new face on China through his love of science and technology as well as a series of important foreign policy encounters; the author emphasizes Jiang's tension-fraught relationship with the Western press, his quirky style of winning over foreign leaders through bursting into song and his support of America's war on terror. Though detailed and readable, the book is at times cloying: the less flattering points in Jiang's career—his role in squelching mass movements seen as threatening stability and his power-amassing maneuvers—are glossed over. 32 pages of b&w photos. (Dec.)
