Jiang Zemin was born in August 1926, in a intellectual family in Yangzhou. This is a culturally famous city on the Yangtze River in East China's Jiangsu Province. He received a good family education from his early childhood, which laid a solid foundation for his cultural attainment. His uncle, also his foster father, Jiang Shangqing had a major influence on the young Jiang on his way to becoming a professional revolutionary.

Jiang Shangqing, an activist in the War of Resistance against Japan, gave his life for the motherland during a battle in 1939. Four years later, in 1943, Jiang Zemin threw himself into the students' movement led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) joining the CPC in 1946 whilst a student at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, one of China's leading polytechnic universities, where he studied electrical machinery and engineering. He graduated in 1947.

After the founding of New China in 1949, Jiang worked as an associate engineer, a workshop director and a deputy director of a food factory in Shanghai. In 1955, he was sent to the Stalin Automobile Works in Moscow as an intern and returned the following year to serve as a factory director and a research institute director in Changchun, Shanghai and Wuhan. Later he went to head the foreign affairs bureau of the First Ministry of Machine-Building Industry.

In the decade following 1980, Jiang served successively as vice-chairman of the State Commission for the Administration of Import and Export Affairs and the State Commission for the Administration of Foreign Investment, vice-minister and minister of the Electronics Industry, Shanghai Mayor, secretary of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.

With a global perspective and keen on reform and progress, Jiang made a significant contribution to the establishment and development of China's special economic zones (SEZs). Towards the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s, he led a delegation on a foreign study tour after which he took it upon himself to direct the opening of special economic zones in China, thus translating Deng Xiaoping's conception into reality.

While in Shanghai, Jiang enjoyed a high reputation among local officials and the people alike for his able leadership. After June 1989, Jiang became the core of the third generation leadership of the Communist Party of China following Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, serving as general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, President of the PRC and chairman of the CMC.

During his 13 years as general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, he helped steer the nation through a precariously changing world situation and momentous progress in reform, opening up and initiating a modernization drive at home. Jiang exhibited staunch political courage and superb leadership as expected of a Marxist statesman in the face of opportunities and challenges,