By contrast, when former President Jiang Zemin became General Secretary of the Communist Party following the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, he was able to rely on capable and loyal officials in Shanghai to run the bureaucracy; he then expanded his support base by co-opting other factions in the 1990s. And Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, hailed from the Communist Youth League, which has alumni at all levels of the party-state.