Mystery Man to Lead China: Hu likely Pick For President
(by Edward A Gargan | Newsday | November 3, 2002)
When China's communist leaders gather this week to anoint a new leader, they are widely expected to pick Hu Jintao to run the affairs of 1.3 billion people, manage the world's most dynamic economy and guide China's gradual journey to the center of the world stage.
But few people know who Hu is. As China's vice president, age 59, he is even less known in his country than he is abroad, where China experts have labored over scraps from the official record, gleanings from sporadic diplomatic encounters and occasional crumbs from senior party officials to paint a faint portrait of him.
Beginning with Friday's opening of the Chinese Communist Party Congress, a meeting held every five years, China is set to hold an orderly transition of leadership - one without war, violence or turmoil - for the first time in more than a century. That feat reflects the essential stability of China's economic and political course, many analysts say, a course unlikely to be much affected by a transition from the 13-year reign of Jiang Zemin to the Hu era.
"To tell you the truth, very few people are even discussing the leadership issue," said a senior European diplomat with many years of experience in China. "There won't be any major political changes in any case. At the margins, maybe Hu would ease the party's stranglehold on political discussion. But no one really knows."
Hu Jintao's career suggests a man content with the country's direction. His record evinces a devotion to economic growth, particularly in the countryside, and minimal tolerance of dissent, though he seems willing to expand the boundaries of political debate within the confines of the Communist Party itself.
"I don't see big room for future economic reforms," said Wu Guogang, a professor of government and public administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a former senior aide to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist leader ousted during the upheaval surrounding the Tiananmen Square student protests in 1989. "They could just try harder to consolidate the existing economic reform measures. And in terms of political reform, I don't see any hope, actually. At the coming party congress, they will talk a lot about political reform, but it will just be shallow words."
So opaque is the leadership selection process, and so unknown is China's presumed next leader, that even in the capital, to ask who's Hu in a random survey of several dozen residents is to elicit blank stares. Even those who claim to be aware of him speak only in the most general terms.
"I guess he's in his 50s; he's a good guy," said Wang Chenglu, 65, who runs a small business consulting firm. "He is honest, loyal and has high prestige. I've heard that he's going to be president." Hu Jintao was born in 1942 to the family of a prosperous Shanghai tea merchant. He won admittance to the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he studied hydroelectric engineering and joined the Communist Party. When, amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, educated elites were shipped to the countryside to raise pigs or build roads, Hu was swept along.
He spent 14 years in the backward province of Gansu, first as a manual laborer, then as an engineer and manager for the provincial construction commission. Gansu's party secretary, Song Ping, noticed Hu and became his patron. As Song went on to senior posts in Beijing, his young protege rose, too. By 1982, Hu, at age 39, was named to the party's central committee.
Hu's ascent was highlighted in 1988 by a stint as party chief in Tibet, which was in turmoil after protests against Chinese rule that had been savagely repressed by the army. Hu promptly declared martial law, a step that earned him credit in Beijing.
The following year, Hu supported violent repression of the pro-democracy rallies at Beijing's Tiananmen Square – and thus came to the attention of Deng Xiaoping, China's preeminent leader. Three years later, he was elevated over dozens of more senior party members to the politburo's standing committee, the seven-man body that decides all major policy of the party and state.
In 1993, Hu was appointed head of the central party school, the training ground for all senior government officials, and since its inception a stronghold of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist orthodoxy. Hu instigated a quiet revolution, broadening the school's curriculum to include Western ideas about economics and politics, and for the most part banishing dogma. Only since 1999 has Hu had any public visibility. After US jets bombed China's embassy in Belgrade during the NATO air war on Yugoslavia, Hu was chosen to deliver a blistering televised attack on the United States. He gave the green light for student protests outside the US embassy that led to extensive vandalism of the embassy compound.
Since then, Hu has raised his international profile with regular trips abroad, including one to the United States this year. During appearances in Washington and elsewhere, Hu was relaxed and presented himself as a man in command of his subject. A U.S. diplomat said Hu never deviated from Chinese policies, but was more coherent and less elliptical than Jiang Zemin, whose pattern of conversation, laced with Chinese aphorisms, often leave foreign leaders mystified.
In his rise to the summit of power, Hu has left few signs of his policy predilections. His role in the decision to restrict competition in the telecommunications sector and hamper foreign entrants into the industry suggests greater comfort with regulation and control than with genuine economic liberalization.
Wu Guogang, the Hong Kong-based professor, met Hu years ago, and says he has never revealed much of himself. "For his whole career, he was always in a leading position for his generation," Wu said. "That means that he is a standard product of that regime, of that system. Under that system, it's very useful to show no character, no personality. It's a political skill to survive in Chinese politics."
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