Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Zhao Ziyang, the party's General Secretary and widely recognized as Deng's successor at the time, was sidelined due to his sympathy to student protesters. In his place, party elders brought in then Shanghai party secretary Jiang Zemin to take over the position of General Secretary. However, Jiang, who had spent much of his career in Shanghai, was a compromise candidate who had no prior experience in the party's central organization.