BEIJING: Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin was cremated in Beijing on Monday after he passed away last month in Shanghai due to leukemia and multiple organ failure.
Jiang, 96, was among the very few leaders who held top positions including general secretary of the Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission, and president of China.
His death was announced in a letter addressing the whole Party, the entire military and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, Xinhua news agency reported.
The letter said Comrade Jiang Zemin was an “outstanding leader enjoying high prestige acknowledged by the whole Party, the entire military and the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat.”
Much has been said about the progressive steps taken under his leadership that ushered China’s economy in a positive direction. Tibet party Branch Secretary said his community is “deeply saddened because we really have deep memories of him.”
However, it is beyond doubt, according to the Delhi-based advocacy group Tibet Rights Collective that Jiang is leaving behind a tainted Tibet legacy – one that reeks of crimes against humanity and authoritarianism against Tibetans in Tibet, which it occupied in the 1950s.
The Tibet rights group said Tibetans and Uyghurs recall Jiang’s rule as the beginning of the tightening of already repressive policies that Xi, today, has since intensified to dystopian levels.”
“China hardened its policies on Tibet during his tenure, as reflected in the outcome of the “Third Forum on Work in Tibet” held in Beijing in 1994 during which the policy of assimilating Tibet in the Chinese economic structure was proclaimed,” the report added.
Jiang Zemin’s tenure saw re-engaged talks to resolve the Tibetan-Chinese conflict, according to a report published by the International Campaign for Tibet in the wake of Jiang’s his passing away.
The Washington-based group, in its report, said the government under Jiang detained the then six-year-old boy Panchen Lama and selected their own boy as the Panchen Lama in 1995. His whereabouts remain unknown even to this day. (ANI)