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Born into an intellectual family in Yangzhou in China's eastern Jiangsu province, Jiang was adopted at an early age by his uncle, a veteran revolutionary, who was killed fighting for the communists in the civil war. Teachers described the boy as an "illustrious student," and he attended a provincial university before switching to engineering studies at Shanghai's Jiaotong University. In what was then China's naughtiest and most revolutionary-minded city, he discovered Benny Goodman and English films as well as communist politics. He joined the party at the age of 19, and once had to escape the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek by hiding in the trunk of his university president's car.
Compared with predecessors Mao and Deng, he enjoyed an easy revolution, and he had a far more worldly upbringing. "I wouldn't describe him as a closet Western-culture buff," says Kenneth Lieberthal, a China scholar at the University of Michigan, "but he has a more appreciative attitude than many Chinese." He once told an American visitor that he regretted not earning a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but one of his sons did get his from Philadelphia's Drexel University and worked for Hewlett-Packard in California before returning to China.
For decades, Jiang worked in the boiler room of the new China, running soap and candy factories. He spent a year in Moscow learning the wonders of Soviet auto production. He made it to Beijing in 1976 as the administrator of the First Ministry of Machine-Building Industry. It was an unimpressive-sounding title, but it was his first shot, at the age of 50, at the higher ranks of Chinese politics. He was part of the team charged with transforming Shenzhen, a sleepy village across the border from Hong Kong, into one of Deng's first boomtowns, and he eventually rose to Minister of Electronics Industry.
The engineer from Shanghai still had much to learn about life at the top. A friend and former colleague recalls an incident in which Jiang was asked for a special favor by one of the Old Guard generation of revolutionary heroes who wielded enormous power. Jiang refused, saying it would bend the rules. He suffered for that in 1984, when the Old Guard refused to support his candidacy for the vice-premiership. By the time he was appointed mayor of Shanghai, in 1985, he had learned his lesson. "He spent a lot of time and effort pleasing the Old Guard who would visit Shanghai during the winter," says the colleague. "He realized that abiding strictly by party principles wouldn't do."
The 1989 Tiananmen episode, one of China's most divisive modern tragedies, was the turning point in Jiang's career. Three weeks after the protests were quelled with violence and bloodshed, Deng named Jiang the new General Secretary of the Communist Party. The choice was a surprise. Jiang's record in Shanghai was solid, if unspectacular, but in the prism of Chinese politics he had other things going for him. He was now a favorite of the Old Guard. During the early days of the Tiananmen protests, he had sacked the editor of a daringly liberal, independent newspaper in Shanghai called the World Economic Herald, an act that proved his toughness to Beijing. His main rival for the job was Premier Li Peng, who had ordered the martial law that preceded the Tiananmen killings and been widely reviled for it.