Life seems different when you are looking down the barrel of a gun--more focused, urgent. That is the way Zhu Rongji, China's Premier, likes it. Zhu, 70, is a risk taker, a breed apart in the Chinese leadership. In Beijing they call him Zhu Fengzi, Madman Zhu, as he crashes through the rickety communist superstructure in the name of reform, laying off millions of workers from state-owned enterprises, terrorizing corrupt officials, having smugglers shot. On a good day they call him Zhu Laoban, Zhu the Boss, the only man capable of imposing order on an economy of 1.3 billion money-hungry people snarled in one of the greatest economic traffic jams the world has ever seen. Discipline has always been Zhu's touchstone, from his early days as a lowly planning official to his current position as China's fiscal field marshal. When he was mayor of Shanghai in 1988, two relatives asked him over dinner to bend strict residency laws so they could come to live in the port city. Zhu turned them down, according to another family member present, saying, "What I can do, I have done already. What I cannot do, I will never do."
The moment the mad boss steps off his Air China jet in Los Angeles this week on the first stage of a scheduled American tour, he knows he will be in the cross hairs of U.S. anger at China's dismal human-rights record and allegations of nuclear espionage. "Let [Americans] vent their anger," said Zhu in a press conference last month. "I will go to tell the truth."
But the truth is not pretty: a Chinese crackdown on domestic dissent harsher than anything since Tiananmen in 1989; allegations of a concerted campaign of espionage in U.S. nuclear labs; an American trade deficit with China of $57 billion that is second only to the nation's deficit with Japan; and a brewing showdown over providing Taiwan with defense systems against China's ballistic-missile buildup. Relations between Washington and Beijing are frostier than they have been for years, and some in Congress are even talking as if China were the new cold war enemy.
Having reached threescore and 10 years, Zhu should be resting on his achievements. But in fact he is taking on the weight of U.S.-China tensions just as his own economy is teetering on the edge of breakdown. Time is short. "Black hairs have already turned to gray," he said last month, expressing his frustration at the slow pace of negotiations with the U.S. for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. He could have been referring to his own life story, an ever more difficult struggle against the forces of disintegration, anarchy and corruption that could yet rip China apart.
Tall and sharp, with the features of a falcon, Zhu dominates meetings with his quick mind--his IQ "must be 200," Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers once said. Zhu has a Rolodex memory, endless energy and an overpowering impatience. He is not a man that one likes, but "a man that one respects," says Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Above all, Zhu is a man in a hurry, with a mission to make up for lost time, both for himself and for China.