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Like China, Zhu lost two decades of his life as Mao pushed an already poor country into famine and industrial ruin in the 1960s and '70s. He is from a different shade of red than the standard communist cadre. The Chinese character for his name means vermilion, the color used on the gates of wealthy people's mansions in old China. Descended from Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming-dynasty Emperor (1368-98), the Zhu clan was a big landowner around Changsha in Hunan province, where Zhu was born in 1928. "The Zhu family was very rich," says Zhu Yunzhong, 66, a retired doctor and Zhu Rongji's cousin. "That caused many of them problems after the revolution--even myself."
Zhu Yunzhong lives in Ansha township, 19 miles from the city of Changsha. Ten minutes' walk up the valley from his two-room house he pointed out where the Zhu clan's palace once stood. It had "dozens of rooms" and a covered walkway leading over the hill to the family temple. "We used to say that whichever path you took from here to Changsha, you had to pass over Zhu land," says Yunzhong. The palace was destroyed in an antilandlord campaign in the 1950s, but Zhu's privileged background was not forgotten by Mao's regime.
Zhu's parents died when he was young, and he was raised by an uncle who gave his charge 100 pieces of silver when it came time for the young man to go to university. Zhu studied electrical engineering at Beijing's Qinghua University, adroitly joining the Communist Party in 1949, and then worked in the state planning commission. In 1957 he made a speech questioning the party's economic policies. The following year, he was disgraced as a rightist, thrown out of the Communist Party and spent some years in the northeast tending livestock until Deng Xiaoping began looking for people to help carry out his economic reforms. Zhu was rehabilitated in 1978, and rose as an economic planner, largely on his own merit, since he had no base of support in the army, party or bureaucracy. "Everyone knew Zhu, not just for being efficient and honest, but primarily because of his rightist background," says Zhu Xingqing (no relation), a journalist in Shanghai in the 1980s when Zhu was mayor.
Zhu opened Shanghai to foreign investors during his three years as mayor, starting a boom that lasts to this day, and displayed his no-nonsense approach to the business of doing business. According to Gareth Chang, who was head of a McDonnell Douglas joint venture in Shanghai, Zhu cut official banquets from 12 dishes to four because "first of all, most of us couldn't eat that much, and second, he thought the longer meals were a waste of time." In 1991, Zhu was recalled to Beijing, where he became Vice Premier and successfully curbed China's rampant inflation. Last year he rose to the premiership just as Asia's economic collapse threatened to push China into another abyss.
This is Zhu territory, right on the edge between disgrace and success, between oblivion and celebrity, between smiling self-confidence and apoplectic fury at incompetence and corruption. "I've seen documents detailing corruption involving local leaders," says a Beijing official. "On the margins is Zhu Rongji's terse inscription: CHE (Fire him!)." When TIME wrote last October that his wings had been burned by being too ambitious with reforms, Zhu sent a message through former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills: "Tell TIME my wings are still strong."