New Delhi, Aug. 12 -- far too large and too deeply woven into global commerce for anyone to easily contain.

Zhu Rongji, China's premier from 1998 to 2003, died in Beijing on August 12, Reuters and the Associated Press confirmed. In five years as head of government under President Jiang Zemin, he restructured the state sector, recapitalized a banking system on the verge of insolvency, and negotiated the country's accession to the World Trade Organization, a decision that most directly produced the US-China trade truce now fracturing under its own contradictions.

No modern Chinese leader remade the country's economic architecture as rapidly, or at such human cost. Whether his gamble, that openness would make China unassailable, was the ri...