Talking to Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” in 2000, wagging his finger—and with his ever-mobile face fixed, briefly, in a stare—Jiang Zemin quoted from the Gettysburg address. He had committed it to memory as a student activist, before the Communist Party came to power in 1949. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he said. His English was not great, but it brimmed with the confidence of a man who was delivering “for the people” all right: material progress on a scale and at a speed that history had not seen before. And it had started on his watch.

His own rise had been remarkable, too. In 1949 he was just an engineer in a food factory in Shanghai that had once produced one of China’s most popular brands of ice-cream, “Beautiful Woman”. (Appropriate, that, for a man who seldom missed a chance to eye up a pretty girl.) Had his skills not caught the attention of a visiting senior official that year, he might have stayed there. Instead he was groomed for leadership, at first in state-owned firms and then in politics. He seemed destined to be one of the “flower-vases”—all decoration, no action, just a low-key technocrat.