CHINA’S “Red Capitalist”, a man whose life spanned the commercialism of Shanghai before the Communist Revolution and who led Beijing’s drive towards economic reforms after the Cultural Revolution, has died. He was 89.

Rong Yiren, who rose to the largely ceremonial post of Vice-President, died on Wednesday after an illness. No further details were available.

He was one of the few people to reach the highest echelons of power without becoming a member of the Communist Party and his death was given unusual prominence for a non-communist on the nightly evening news — underscoring his role in helping to lead China away from the ideological restraints imposed by Chairman Mao and into the age of reform and opening pioneered by the late Deng Xiaoping.

Rong, born into a rich family in Wuxi in eastern Jiangsu province in 1916, played a pivotal role in China’s economic liberalisation of the 1980s when he advised Deng on how to implement the reforms that have been credited with pulling a struggling China out of poverty.

His life reflected the vicissitudes of Communist rule.

Rong took over a prosperous textile and flour business employing 80,000 people in 1940s Shanghai after earning a history degree from the elite church-founded St John’s University there.

Unlike most businessmen of that time, his family refused to flee to Taiwan after the Communists swept to power in 1949. He proceeded to win the trust of the Communist Party by co-operating in the confiscation of family assets in the 1950s and subsequently served as a vice-mayor of Shanghai, from 1957 to 1966.

But Rong was persecuted during the 1966-76 ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution because of his former capitalist credentials.

He used to recount how, as part of the humiliations imposed by Mao’s radical Red Guard, he was forced to sweep the floors of the factories he had once owned.

He was rehabilitated only when Deng took power in the late 1970s. Under Deng’s protection, Rong created in 1979 the Government’s China International Trust and Investment Corp, or CITIC. It became China’s most respected international business organisation, with holdings in companies abroad ranging from Hong Kong banks to Australian aluminium smelters.

In 2000, Forbes ranked Rong as China’s richest, and oldest, businessman, with a family fortune estimated at $1.9 billion (£1 billion) in CITIC shares.

In the early years of China’s opening, CITIC was seen as China’s window on the world — and, indeed, a restaurant on the top floor of the CITIC building (once the only high-rise in Beijing) was called Windows on the World.

CITIC spread rapidly into Hong Kong, where it bought a 25 per cent share in Cathay Pacific from the Swire Group in 1996.

CITIC was also largely instrumental in the entry of the insurer Prudential into the long-closed China market in 2000, when it became the first British insurer in China.

The urbane, grey-haired and immaculately suited Rong served as a vice-premier and was named Vice-President in 1993, becoming China’s highest-ranking non-communist official. He held that post until 1998.

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