Hand-picked by Deng Xiaoping to be built up as China's future leader, Jiang Zemin (born 1927) became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee in 1989.

Jiang Zemin was born in July 1926 in Yangzhou city, Jiangsu Province, a small town on the banks of the Chang River west of Shanghai. After one of his uncles joined the then-outlawed Communist party and was killed in combat, his biological father offered him for adoption to the surviving family members so that they would have an heir to continue the Shinquing's bloodline. Jiang joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1946 and graduated from the electrical machinery department of Jiaotong University in Shanghai the following year.

After the Communists took over power in China in 1949, Jiang assumed several positions in Shanghai: CCP committee secretary and first deputy director of the Yimin No. 1 Foodstuffs Factory; first deputy director of the Shanghai Soap Factory...