Red Star

By Terry McCarthy/Shanghai

Life seems different when you are looking down the barrel of a gun--more focused, urgent. That is the way Zhu Rongji, China's Premier, likes it. Zhu, 70, is a risk taker, a breed apart in the Chinese leadership. In Beijing they call him Zhu Fengzi, Madman Zhu, as he crashes through the rickety communist superstructure in the name of reform, laying off millions of workers from state-owned enterprises, terrorizing corrupt officials, having smugglers shot. On a good day they call him Zhu Laoban, Zhu the Boss, the only man capable of imposing order on an economy of 1.3 billion money-hungry people snarled in one of the greatest economic traffic jams the world has ever seen. Discipline has always been Zhu's touchstone, from his early days as a lowly planning official to his current position as China's fiscal field marshal. When he was mayor of Shanghai in 1988, two relatives asked him over dinner to bend strict residency laws so they could come to live in the port city. Zhu turned them down, according to another family member present, saying, "What I can do, I have done already. What I cannot do, I will never do."

The moment the mad boss steps off his Air China jet in Los Angeles this week on the first stage of a scheduled American tour, he knows he will be in the cross hairs of U.S. anger at China's dismal human-rights record and allegations of nuclear espionage. "Let [Americans] vent their anger," said Zhu in a press conference last month. "I will go to tell the truth."

But the truth is not pretty: a Chinese crackdown on domestic dissent harsher than anything since Tiananmen in 1989; allegations of a concerted campaign of espionage in U.S. nuclear labs; an American trade deficit with China of $57 billion that is second only to the nation's deficit with Japan; and a brewing showdown over providing Taiwan with defense systems against China's ballistic-missile buildup. Relations between Washington and Beijing are frostier than they have been for years, and some in Congress are even talking as if China were the new cold war enemy.

Having reached threescore and 10 years, Zhu should be resting on his achievements. But in fact he is taking on the weight of U.S.-China tensions just as his own economy is teetering on the edge of breakdown. Time is short. "Black hairs have already turned to gray," he said last month, expressing his frustration at the slow pace of negotiations with the U.S. for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. He could have been referring to his own life story, an ever more difficult struggle against the forces of disintegration, anarchy and corruption that could yet rip China apart.

Tall and sharp, with the features of a falcon, Zhu dominates meetings with his quick mind--his IQ "must be 200," Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers once said. Zhu has a Rolodex memory, endless energy and an overpowering impatience. He is not a man that one likes, but "a man that one respects," says Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Above all, Zhu is a man in a hurry, with a mission to make up for lost time, both for himself and for China.

Like China, Zhu lost two decades of his life as Mao pushed an already poor country into famine and industrial ruin in the 1960s and '70s. He is from a different shade of red than the standard communist cadre. The Chinese character for his name means vermilion, the color used on the gates of wealthy people's mansions in old China. Descended from Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming-dynasty Emperor (1368-98), the Zhu clan was a big landowner around Changsha in Hunan province, where Zhu was born in 1928. "The Zhu family was very rich," says Zhu Yunzhong, 66, a retired doctor and Zhu Rongji's cousin. "That caused many of them problems after the revolution--even myself."

Zhu Yunzhong lives in Ansha township, 19 miles from the city of Changsha. Ten minutes' walk up the valley from his two-room house he pointed out where the Zhu clan's palace once stood. It had "dozens of rooms" and a covered walkway leading over the hill to the family temple. "We used to say that whichever path you took from here to Changsha, you had to pass over Zhu land," says Yunzhong. The palace was destroyed in an antilandlord campaign in the 1950s, but Zhu's privileged background was not forgotten by Mao's regime.

Zhu's parents died when he was young, and he was raised by an uncle who gave his charge 100 pieces of silver when it came time for the young man to go to university. Zhu studied electrical engineering at Beijing's Qinghua University, adroitly joining the Communist Party in 1949, and then worked in the state planning commission. In 1957 he made a speech questioning the party's economic policies. The following year, he was disgraced as a rightist, thrown out of the Communist Party and spent some years in the northeast tending livestock until Deng Xiaoping began looking for people to help carry out his economic reforms. Zhu was rehabilitated in 1978, and rose as an economic planner, largely on his own merit, since he had no base of support in the army, party or bureaucracy. "Everyone knew Zhu, not just for being efficient and honest, but primarily because of his rightist background," says Zhu Xingqing (no relation), a journalist in Shanghai in the 1980s when Zhu was mayor.

Zhu opened Shanghai to foreign investors during his three years as mayor, starting a boom that lasts to this day, and displayed his no-nonsense approach to the business of doing business. According to Gareth Chang, who was head of a McDonnell Douglas joint venture in Shanghai, Zhu cut official banquets from 12 dishes to four because "first of all, most of us couldn't eat that much, and second, he thought the longer meals were a waste of time." In 1991, Zhu was recalled to Beijing, where he became Vice Premier and successfully curbed China's rampant inflation. Last year he rose to the premiership just as Asia's economic collapse threatened to push China into another abyss.

This is Zhu territory, right on the edge between disgrace and success, between oblivion and celebrity, between smiling self-confidence and apoplectic fury at incompetence and corruption. "I've seen documents detailing corruption involving local leaders," says a Beijing official. "On the margins is Zhu Rongji's terse inscription: CHE (Fire him!)." When TIME wrote last October that his wings had been burned by being too ambitious with reforms, Zhu sent a message through former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills: "Tell TIME my wings are still strong."

Zhu is widely admired for his integrity in a society where holding an official post is all too often a license to enrich oneself. But unable to trust others, Zhu is obsessed with micromanaging everything that comes across his desk. He reads many of the 16,000 letters a year sent to him by ordinary citizens with their grievances. "It is good for him to read them and know how people feel," says a Zhu aide. "But he should not be doing that too often. He should be dealing with the big problems."

How will China's marksman stand up to Washington's ire? Yugoslavia may be preoccupying Capitol Hill, but Zhu cannot pass entirely under the radar of China critics like Senator Jesse Helms. Zhu "knows the trip won't be easy, but he is amazingly calm," says Fred Hu, head of Asia Economic Research for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong.

For all his volcanic impatience, the English-speaking Zhu will also bring charm, shrewdness and a disarming sense of humor to the task of softening U.S. opinion on China. He will try to use those qualities to deflect questions on human rights and the nuclear-espionage affair. In last month's press conference he made his audience laugh when he complained that a recent business-magazine cover picture made him "look like a dead man." He then went on to admit that difficulties in the Chinese economy over the past year were greater than he had expected: "I have not done a good job."

A communist with a sense of humor who admits he is wrong? Even Helms might hold his fire on that.

--With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing and Wendy Kan and Isabella Ng/Hong Kong

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing and Wendy Kan and Isabella Ng/Hong Kong