Jiang Zemin, the most powerful figure in China for most of the past 15 years, has relinquished his sole remaining official position, chairman of the Central Military Commission.

* Jiang Zemin, the most powerful figure in China for most of the past 15 years, has relinquished his sole remaining official position, chairman of the Central Military Commission. The 78-year-old Jiang has now handed all his positions over to his successor, 61-year-old Hu Jintao, and we may regard the Jiang Zemin era of modern Chinese history as over. The principal characteristic of that era was, of course, a continuation of the breathtaking pace of economic advance that the policies of Jiang's own predecessor, Deng Xiaoping, had set in motion. This progress must be counted a plus for the Chinese people and the world, though the main demand it imposed on Jiang was that he keep out of the way. Outside the sphere of economic reform, everything Jiang did was directed toward the preservation of the Communist party's despotic power, the enriching of the party nomenklatura, the crushing of all attempts to move China toward a rational system of governance, the suppression of religious movements, and the continuing forced Sinicization of Tibet and East Turkestan. A colorless technocrat who rose through the favor of old party hard-liners--and without, of course, any input whatever from the ordinary people of the "People's Republic"--Jiang will soon, and deservedly, be forgotten. The rigid, brutal, and lawless system he served staggers on toward its inevitable crisis.