Chinese leader Xi Jinping told a Beijing audience China needs an “indomitable fighting spirit” to confront coming challenges, in a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of former party chief Jiang Zemin. Addressing thousands of officials at the Great Hall of the People, Xi said China must “actively confront major challenges, whether they be rough seas or even raging storms.”
Jiang led China from 1993 to 2002 and died in 2022. According to the People’s Daily transcript of the address, Xi praised Jiang as the “core” of the party’s third-generation leadership and the principal architect of the “Three Represents” ideology.
In the speech, Xi credited Jiang with “resolutely supported and implemented” the Communist Party’s decision to use troops to clear the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, saying Jiang “effectively maintain[ed] stability in Shanghai” during the unrest. The 1989 crackdown remains one of the most censored topics inside mainland China, and footage of the killings does not appear in state media retrospectives, including a 12-episode documentary on Jiang that aired the week prior.
Jiang became General Secretary of the Communist Party shortly after the crackdown, replacing Zhao Ziyang, who had been seen as sympathetic to the protesters. By 1993, Jiang was China’s undisputed leader, and his tenure oversaw China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, with U.S. support.
No official death toll has ever been released by Beijing. China’s own count places the figure at 241. The Chinese Red Cross estimated roughly 2,700 dead in the immediate aftermath. A declassified British cable, sent by ambassador Alan Donald a day after the crackdown, cited a Chinese State Council source giving a “minimum estimate of civilian dead” of 10,000. Separately declassified US files, drawing on an internal Chinese military source, put the toll at 10,454 dead and roughly 40,000 injured, according to a 2014 report. As many as 10,000 people were arrested in the crackdown’s aftermath, and several dozen were later executed for their roles in the protests.
Xi’s endorsement of the crackdown carries weight because Beijing has spent 37 years suppressing discussion of it. Public commemoration of June 4 remains banned in mainland China, and references to the event are routinely scrubbed from the domestic internet, including from state retrospectives on Jiang Zemin’s life released this month. Xi’s remarks mark one of the most direct public defenses of the crackdown by a sitting Chinese leader in recent years, at a moment when he is simultaneously asking the country for “indomitable fighting spirit” against unspecified external pressure.
Xi did not name the United States in the speech. But the timing, and the pairing of “fighting spirit” language with vows to “defend national sovereignty,” echoes a pattern in Xi’s rhetoric dating back to March 2023. That month, Xi told the National People’s Congress that “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China,” naming Washington directly. In his January 2026 New Year’s address, Xi called Taiwan’s reunification a “trend of the times.”
At the Communist Party’s 105th anniversary in July 2026, Xi said China “must resolutely combat separatist forces advocating for Taiwan’s independence, counter external interference, and steadfastly advance the cause of national reunification.”
That phrasing is traditionally read as directed at the United States and its support for Taiwan, without naming it. That same coded pattern reappeared this week in his Jiang Zemin centenary remarks.
Xi’s posture suggests more militarization and closing rather than opening the country. Washington’s post-1990s engagement strategy, including support for China’s 2001 WTO accession, was built on the expectation that trade integration would push Beijing toward a more open, liberal market economy. That expectation has not been realized. China’s Ministry of National Defense confirmed the 2026 defense budget at 1.94 trillion yuan, a 6.9 percent increase, with spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang stating that the funds are meant “to comprehensively enhance our strategic capability to defend national sovereignty, security and development interests.”
The Pentagon’s own 2025 report to Congress assessed that the People’s Liberation Army revised its basic code of conduct that February to place greater priority on preparing the force to “fight and win wars.” The report also noted that China had dropped “peaceful unification” language from high-profile statements in 2024 and 2025. Beijing is also advancing a revised National Defense Mobilization Law, which the National People’s Congress Standing Committee took up for a first reading in April 2026. The revision is explicitly intended to implement “Xi Jinping’s thought on strengthening the military” and expand the legal basis for mobilizing civilian resources for national defense.
On the economic side, Xi has pursued what Chinese economists call “the state advances, the private sector retreats” (国进民退) since 2020, rolling back market reforms rather than extending them.
New laws have re-centralized control over rural land under party organizations, reversing autonomy granted to farmers in the late 1970s. State-owned enterprises have been directed to formalize the party’s leadership role in their governance structures.
The private sector, once the primary engine of Chinese growth, has been repeatedly deprioritized in favor of state planning. The resulting stagnation, property market collapse, high youth unemployment, and deflation have pushed Xi to periodically reassure business leaders like Jack Ma that policy “cannot and will not change” back.
The pattern points in the same direction as the military buildup and coded rhetoric described above: consolidation and control at home, paired with confrontation abroad, rather than the opening toward the West that Washington had anticipated.
Xi is scheduled to meet U.S. President Donald Trump again in late September, with trade, artificial intelligence, and Taiwan expected on the agenda. In Monday’s speech, Xi said “people’s lives continue to improve,” even as official data shows slowing economic growth.
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