Jiang chronicles his career

He speaks English and shows it off by reciting the Gettysburg Address. Now former President Jiang Zemin is adopting another Western custom: the post-retirement publishing binge.

Ahead of his 80th birthday Thursday, government publishers have released a retrospective on Jiang’s foreign travels -- the closest thing yet to a Chinese presidential memoir -- and a three-volume set of speeches, letters and decrees.

The books are a testament to Jiang’s hybrid persona during his time in office as leader of a communist dictatorship that crushed any challenge to its monopoly on power and a globe-trotting bon vivant.

His travel book, “For a Better World: Jiang Zemin’s Overseas Visits,” includes 167 pictures of Jiang with leaders including former President Bill Clinton and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. It describes Jiang’s campaign in the early 1990s to thaw ties with the United States and the West and end the diplomatic isolation imposed on Beijing after it crushed pro-democracy protests in 1989 -- an incident that the book avoids discussing.

Some analysts say that the book reflects Jiang’s desire, three years after he gave up power, to be remembered as the leader who presided over China’s rise to unprecedented importance in trade and global affairs.

The “Selected Works of Jiang Zemin,” meanwhile, has been made compulsory reading for all military personnel. It expounds on Jiang’s notion of a modernized Communist Party, which he says must represent entrepreneurs as well as the working class.