Jiang Zemin’s days are numbered. It is only a question of when, not if, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party will be arrested. Jiang officially ran the Chinese regime for more than a decade, and for another decade he was the puppet master behind the scenes who often controlled events. During those decades Jiang did incalculable damage to China. At this moment when Jiang’s era is about to end, Epoch Times here republishes in serial form “Anything for Power: The Real Story of Jiang Zemin,” first published in English in 2011. The reader can come to understand better the career of this pivotal figure in today’s China.
Chapter 1: Adoption by a Dead Man: The Lie That Fooled the CCP
When Jiang Zemin was mayor of Shanghai, the word on the street was that Jiang was the incarnation of a toad. That people there would so readily identify with this idea is most surprising, given that not only is Shanghai a hi-tech, well-developed city under the direct jurisdiction of the central government, but moreover the place where Jiang climbed the political ladder. The association later followed Jiang to Beijing, to which he moved in 1989. Beijing residents took to calling him “Big Toad Jiang.” Jiang does bear resemblance to a toad, after all. And the association is fairly understandable in light of China’s cultural context, as similarly blurred boundaries between animal and human reach far back in Chinese history; many will recall the fox soul that reincarnated as a beautiful concubine and wreaked havoc in the imperial court. [1] That a toad’s incarnation could become the mayor of Shanghai was not, in a sense, an entirely new concept.The toad that had inhaled the wicked, age-old qi was a creature that had depended on water for its survival. After its death the toad reincarnated in a wealthy family by the name of Jiang, which lived on Tianjia Lane in Yangzhou City of Jiangsu Province, and was given the name “Zemin,” meaning literally, “he who survives on water.”
