BEIJING — Zhu Rongji, the former Chinese premier who drove his country into the World Trade Organization and closed thousands of state-owned enterprises during a burst of 1990s reform, has died at 97, state media said Wednesday, attributing his death to illness.

Zhu's death removes the last active figure of a reform-first generation of Chinese leaders whose bet on opening to Western markets remade global manufacturing and, according to NPR, left roughly 30 million state workers unemployed within five years. Under President Xi Jinping, China has grown more nationalistic, state-dependent and isolated from the outside world, and Zhu's playbook no longer holds sway in Beijing.

From engineer to premier

Zhu was born in 1928 in Changsha, in Hunan province, and was orphaned before he was 10. He earned an electrical engineering degree from Tsinghua University and joined the Chinese Communist Party in October 1949, when the communist-led republic was founded. His career was interrupted twice by party purges: in 1958 he was labeled an ideological "rightist" for criticizing Mao Zedong's economic policies, and in 1970 he was sent to five years of manual labor at a Cultural Revolution reeducation school. He was rehabilitated after Mao's death in 1976 and by 1991 had become vice premier in charge of the economy.

The reform push

Sworn in as premier in 1998, Zhu pledged to restructure indebted state banks within two years and inefficient state enterprises within three. "No matter whether what lies ahead is a minefield or a bottomless abyss, I will carry out my duties until the last breath in my body," he said, according to NPR. He centralized tax powers, closed or privatized failing state firms, promoted home ownership and, as central bank governor before his premiership, brought runaway inflation to heel.

His signature achievement was pulling China into the World Trade Organization. The U.S. Senate granted China preferential trading status in 2000, and China joined the WTO the following year, an agreement that turned the country into an export powerhouse. Charlene Barshefsky, the former U.S. trade representative, told NPR that Zhu "embraced the notion of a China whose economic system was more compatible with that of the West."

Zhu was blunt in a system that prized script. He called rogue bankers "half-wits," described dams and flood dykes on the Yangtze as "flimsy and porous as tofu dregs," and, during an anti-corruption drive, told colleagues: "I have prepared 100 coffins: 99 for the corrupt officials and one for myself."

The cost

The reforms exacted a steep price. Worker protests broke out across the country after Zhu shuttered smaller state enterprises, and, in the view of critics, he ignored them. Dorothy Solinger, professor emeritus of political science at UC Irvine, told NPR: "The central government decided that the laid-off worker problem could just be ignored and forgotten." Northeastern regions dependent on heavy industry never recovered. A basic social welfare system Zhu created to blunt the impact endured, but his attempts to clean up bad debt at state banks and overhaul the pension system faltered against opposition inside the party.

The counterpoint

No conservative appraisal of Zhu appeared in the Western reporting of his death, and inside China his legacy remains contested. State media on Wednesday described his life as one of "revolution, struggle and brilliance" and called him an "outstanding leader of the Party and state," but the tax centralization he championed later fueled unsustainable local government debt, and party ideologues opposed to his push toward Western-style economics blocked much of the rest of his agenda.

Zhu spent his final years at his home in Beijing's western hills, listening to Peking Opera and, according to NPR, quietly advising younger technocrats who did not always heed him. State media did not announce funeral arrangements.