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Modern World Leaders

Hu Jintao

Modern World Leaders Michelle Bachelet Tony Blair George W. Bush Hugo Chรกvez Jacques Chirac Hu Jintao Hamid Karzai Ali Khamenei Thabo Mbeki Angela Merkel Hosni Mubarak Pervez Musharraf Pope Benedict XVI Pope John Paul II Vladimir Putin The Saudi Royal Family Ariel Sharon Viktor Yushchenko

Modern World Leaders

Hu Jintao Daniel K. Davis

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Hu Jintao Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing

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Table of Contents Foreword: On Leadership

6

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The Chinese Century Hu Jintao’s Early Years A Promising Career The Fourth Generation Domestic Challenges Foreign Affairs The Future for Hu and China

94

Chronology

110

Bibliography

113

Further Reading

120

Index

122

12 16 25 38 53 73

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

On Leadership

L

eadership, it may be said, is really what makes the world go round. Love no doubt smoothes the passage; but love is a private transaction between consenting adults. Leadership is a public transaction with history. The idea of leadership affirms the capacity of individuals to move, inspire, and mobilize masses of people so that they act together in pursuit of an end. Sometimes leadership serves good purposes, sometimes bad; but whether the end is benign or evil, great leaders are those men and women who leave their personal stamp on history.

Now, the very concept of leadership implies the proposition that individuals can make a difference. This proposition has never been universally accepted. From classical times to the present day, eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no more than the agents and pawns of larger forces, whether the gods and goddesses of the ancient world or, in the modern era, race, class, nation, the dialectic, the will of the people, the spirit of the times, history itself.

Against such forces, the individual dwindles into insignificance.

So contends the thesis of historical determinism. Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace offers a famous statement of the case.

Why, Tolstoy asked, did millions of men in the Napoleonic Wars, denying their human feelings and their common sense, move back and forth across Europe slaughtering their fellows? “The war,” Tolstoy answered, “was bound to happen simply because it was bound to happen.” All prior history determined it. As for leaders, they, Tolstoy said, “are but the labels that serve to give a name to an end and, like labels, they have the least possible

“ON LEADERSHIP” connection with the event.” The greater the leader, “the more conspicuous the inevitability and the predestination of every act he commits.” The leader, said Tolstoy, is “the slave of history.”

Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism of class. Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of human freedom—the assumption of free choice that underlies every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are by definition beyond their control. No one can live consistently by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this themselves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership.

More than that, history refutes the idea that individuals make no difference. In December 1931, a British politician crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City between 76th and 77th streets around 10:30 p.m. looked in the wrong direction and was knocked down by an automobile—a moment, he later recalled, of a man aghast, a world aglare: “I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry.” Fourteen months later an American politician, sitting in an open car in Miami, Florida, was fired on by an assassin; the man beside him was hit. Those who believe that individuals make no difference to history might well ponder whether the next two decades would have been the same had Mario Constasino’s car killed Winston Churchill in 1931 and Giuseppe Zangara’s bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

Suppose, in addition, that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in 1895 and that Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916.

What would the twentieth century have looked like now?

For better or for worse, individuals do make a difference.

“The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously,” wrote the philosopher William James, “is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small,

FOREWORD and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow.”

Leadership, James suggests, means leadership in thought as well as in action. In the long run, leaders in thought may well make the greater difference to the world. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. . . . The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

But, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “Those only are leaders of men, in the general eye, who lead in action. . . . It is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.” Leaders in thought often invent in solitude and obscurity, leaving to later generations the tasks of imitation.

Leaders in action—the leaders portrayed in this series—have to be effective in their own time.

And they cannot be effective by themselves. They must act in response to the rhythms of their age. Their genius must be adapted, in a phrase from William James, “to the receptivities of the moment.” Leaders are useless without followers. “There goes the mob,” said the French politician, hearing a clamor in the streets. “I am their leader. I must follow them.” Great leaders turn the inchoate emotions of the mob to purposes of their own. They seize on the opportunities of their time, the hopes, fears, frustrations, crises, potentialities. They succeed when events have prepared the way for them, when the community is awaiting to be aroused, when they can provide the clarifying and organizing ideas. Leadership completes the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history.

It may alter history for better or for worse. Leaders have been responsible for the most extravagant follies and most

“ON LEADERSHIP” monstrous crimes that have beset suffering humanity. They have also been vital in such gains as humanity has made in individual freedom, religious and racial tolerance, social justice, and respect for human rights.

There is no sure way to tell in advance who is going to lead for good and who for evil. But a glance at the gallery of men and women in Modern World Leaders suggests some useful tests.

One test is this: Do leaders lead by force or by persuasion? By command or by consent? Through most of history leadership was exercised by the divine right of authority. The duty of followers was to defer and to obey. “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.” On occasion, as with the so-called enlightened despots of the eighteenth century in Europe, absolutist leadership was animated by humane purposes. More often, absolutism nourished the passion for domination, land, gold, and conquest and resulted in tyranny.

The great revolution of modern times has been the revolution of equality. “Perhaps no form of government,” wrote the British historian James Bryce in his study of the United States, The American Commonwealth, “needs great leaders so much as democracy.” The idea that all people should be equal in their legal condition has undermined the old structure of authority, hierarchy, and deference. The revolution of equality has had two contrary effects on the nature of leadership. For equality, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his great study Democracy in America, might mean equality in servitude as well as equality in freedom.

“I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world,” Tocqueville wrote. “Rights must be given to every citizen, or none at all to anyone . . . save one, who is the master of all.” There was no middle ground “between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man.” In his astonishing prediction of twentieth-century totalitarian dictatorship, Tocqueville explained how the revolution of equality could lead to the Führerprinzip and more terrible absolutism than the world had ever known.

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FOREWORD But when rights are given to every citizen and the sovereignty of all is established, the problem of leadership takes a new form, becomes more exacting than ever before. It is easy to issue commands and enforce them by the rope and the stake, the concentration camp and the gulag. It is much harder to use argument and achievement to overcome opposition and win consent. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the difficulty. They believed that history had given them the opportunity to decide, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper, whether men are indeed capable of basing government on “reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend . . . on accident and force.”

Government by reflection and choice called for a new style of leadership and a new quality of followership. It required leaders to be responsive to popular concerns, and it required followers to be active and informed participants in the process. Democracy does not eliminate emotion from politics; sometimes it fosters demagoguery; but it is confident that, as the greatest of democratic leaders put it, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. It measures leadership by results and retires those who overreach or falter or fail.

It is true that in the long run despots are measured by results too. But they can postpone the day of judgment, sometimes indefinitely, and in the meantime they can do infinite harm. It is also true that democracy is no guarantee of virtue and intelligence in government, for the voice of the people is not necessarily the voice of God. But democracy, by assuring the right of opposition, offers built-in resistance to the evils inherent in absolutism. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to justice makes democracy necessary.”

A second test for leadership is the end for which power is sought. When leaders have as their goal the supremacy of a master race or the promotion of totalitarian revolution or the acquisition and exploitation of colonies or the protection of

“ON LEADERSHIP” greed and privilege or the preservation of personal power, it is likely that their leadership will do little to advance the cause of humanity. When their goal is the abolition of slavery, the liberation of women, the enlargement of opportunity for the poor and powerless, the extension of equal rights to racial minorities, the defense of the freedoms of expression and opposition, it is likely that their leadership will increase the sum of human liberty and welfare.

Leaders have done great harm to the world. They have also conferred great benefits. You will find both sorts in this series.

Even “good” leaders must be regarded with a certain wariness.

Leaders are not demigods; they put on their trousers one leg after another just like ordinary mortals. No leader is infallible, and every leader needs to be reminded of this at regular intervals. Irreverence irritates leaders but is their salvation.

Unquestioning submission corrupts leaders and demeans followers. Making a cult of a leader is always a mistake. Fortunately hero worship generates its own antidote. “Every hero,” said Emerson, “becomes a bore at last.”

The single benefit the great leaders confer is to embolden the rest of us to live according to our own best selves, to be active, insistent, and resolute in affirming our own sense of things.

For great leaders attest to the reality of human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. And they attest to the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of us, which is why Abraham Lincoln remains the supreme example of great leadership. A great leader, said Emerson, exhibits new possibilities to all humanity. “We feed on genius. . . . Great men exist that there may be greater men.”

Great leaders, in short, justify themselves by emancipating and empowering their followers. So humanity struggles to master its destiny, remembering with Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities.”

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C H A P T E R

1

The Chinese Century When the leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) met in

November 2002, one man’s name was on everybody’s lips. Hu Jintao, vice president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1998, was widely expected to be named the new general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, taking over the highest position within the party from the outgoing General Secretary Jiang Zemin. This would pave the way for Hu (in China, family names are listed first) to also take over the role of president of China from Jiang the following spring.

Hu, being groomed for his new positions, rose steadily through the ranks of the CPC. He joined the party in 1964, and as vice president, was given opportunities to gain experience in foreign affairs, a necessity in an era of increased international relations for China.

This grooming was not a guarantee of success, however.

In the history of the PRC, dating back to its founding by

12

THE CHINESE CENTURY

After working his way up the political ranks since joining the Communist Party in 1964, Hu Jintao (above) was elected president of the People’s Republic of China, succeeding Jiang Zemin. In addition to holding the title of president of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao is also the chairman of the Communist Party of China and the chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Mao Zedong in 1949, no heir apparent actually succeeded, at least for long, in taking over as party general secretary. The others either were purged (kicked out of the party), were pushed aside after a short time in office or, in one case, died in a plane crash.

So what were Hu’s chances of successfully assuming power?

This proved to be hard to say, especially for Western observers, since they knew very little about the man. One word that popped up time and again in reference to Hu was “mystery.”

Since he spent little time out of China until the lead-up to the

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HU JINTAO transfer of power in November 2002, few people outside the country had had a chance to learn about, much less speak to, the future leader of the most populous nation on the planet.

There were some signs that he would keep China the same closed society it had historically been under the Communists, as well as other signs that he might allow more economic and political freedom. One thing many observers agreed upon was the fact that Hu kept a low profile throughout his career, being careful not to step on any toes on his way up.

If China were some small third-world country of minor significance, it might not matter much to world leaders that they had very little information about Hu. But, given that the nation had more than 1.2 billion people, a surging economy, and a powerful and rapidly modernizing military, it concerned many leaders greatly that they did not know enough to even decide if they would have an ally or an enemy in China under the leadership of Hu Jintao.

The country had been headed down a path of modernization for a while, starting with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s and 1980s, which led to a more open society and economic growth. (Deng was CPC general secretary from 1956 to 1957 but ran the country for much of the rest of his life after that.) Jiang Zemin continued Deng’s policies after taking over as general secretary in 1989 and president in 1993. Would Hu stay the course? Would he accelerate the pace of reform and broaden relations with other countries? Or, would he close down society even more and isolate China from the world while spending more money on a military buildup?

The answer was of grave importance to, among others, Japan, an ancient and frequent enemy of China. It was important to North Korea, the most isolated Communist nation in the world. And, it was important to the United States, who relied upon China heavily for trade and for financial reasons and was seeking another ally in its “war on terrorism.”

THE CHINESE CENTURY The twenty-first century has often been called “the Chinese century,” meaning that China is expected to dominate this century economically and perhaps militarily and even culturally the same way the United States dominated the twentieth century.

However, will it be able to do so if it isolates itself from the rest of the world? Even if it engages with the world economically, can it enjoy peaceful growth if it continues to deny its citizens the freedoms that billions of others around the world enjoy? In a TIMEasia.com feature article, Matthew Forney presents two possible versions of China’s future: one is the Chinese century of prosperity and global leadership, but the second is one of economic and social collapse, with rioting retirees, millions of unemployed peasants, military crackdowns, and environmental degradation with global consequences.

Forney calls both versions equally plausible, with limitless other scenarios possible as well. What is most probable at this point is that, whatever China’s future, it will be shaped largely by the decisions and policies of President Hu Jintao. At the time of this writing, he is expected to be reelected to another five-year term at the next National People’s Congress in 2007 and perhaps to a third in 2012. Just as Deng Xiaoping is credited with selecting Hu to ascend to a leadership position in the CPC, Hu could groom a party member to carry out his vision for China as it makes its way into the second half of the twentyfirst century. Only recently is that vision becoming clear, five years into President Hu’s first term in office.

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C H A P T E R

2

Hu Jintao’s Early Years As if to confirm the various journalists’ and observers’ use of

“mystery” regarding Hu Jintao, there is even confusion surrounding his birth. The Web site for the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CPC, says that he is “a native of Jixi” in the province of Anhui. Some Web sites say he was born in Shanghai, while others believe he was born in the town of Taizhou in the province of Jiangsu. In August 2004, the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online claimed Taizhou to be Hu’s birthplace and researched a pair of explanations for the official listing of Jixi.

The first is that due to a rule of the Communist Party Central Committee which states that, in order to spread out representation as much as possible, no two standing committee members can come from the same province. When Hu was being considered for the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC (also known as the Politburo Standing

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HU Jintao’s Early Years Committee, which is made up of the top leadership of the CPC) in 1992, Jiang Zemin was already a member of the committee. Since Jiang is from Jiangsu, that province was already represented, and so Deng Xiaoping decided that Jixi, Anhui Province, would be Hu’s new hometown.

Anhui is the Hu family’s ancestral place of origin, and Hu’s paternal grandparents are from Jixi, Asia Times Online said.

However, Hu’s father, Hu Jingzhi, was born near Shangba in Jiangsu Province. According to the second explanation of the mystery of Hu Jintao’s birthplace, Hu Jingzhi met a disgraced end in Taizhou, causing the mourning son to change his place of origin to Anhui.

Hu Jingzhi’s father had a tea-selling business, which he passed on to Jingzhi. Being tea merchants, the Hus were considered “petit bourgeois,” a class of shopkeepers and professionals which came under attack during China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. The Communist authorities seized the tea business for the government, and in 1968, threw Hu Jingzhi in jail on apparently made-up charges after a public condemnation.

While in jail, he was subjected to “cruel physical punishment,” according to Asia Times Online, and withered away before dying in his late fifties in 1978. Hu Jintao went back to Taizhou after his father’s death and tried to persuade local officials to clear his father’s name, but he did not succeed.

Asia Times Online reported that Hu Jintao has not returned to Taizhou since then.

Youth in Taizhou Whatever the truth may be about Hu Jintao’s place of birth, his date of birth is universally accepted as December 21, 1942.

He has two younger sisters, Hu Jinrong and Hu Jinlai. Their mother died when Jintao was just seven years old, forcing their father to send the three children to live with a pair of aunts in Taizhou. There, Hu Jintao attended Dapu Elementary School and then Jiangsu Provincial Taizhou Middle School.

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HU JINTAO Taizhou is located in the southern part of Jiangsu, a coastal province on the Yellow Sea. Today it is a prefecturelevel city, a governmental designation below “province” but above “county,” but in Hu’s youth it was a just a city—though one with a rich cultural history dating back more than 2,000 years. It has a good location that has ensured it prosperity over most of that span of time. Before losing the business, the Hu family made a good living selling tea, and Hu Jintao had a comfortable upbringing from an economic perspective.

The Troubled ’60s In 1959, Hu left Taizhou and entered Tsinghua University (also referred to as Qinghua University) in Beijing. The youngest student in his class, Hu majored in hydropower generation in the school’s Water Conservancy Engineering Department and joined the Communist Youth League. He also met his future wife, Liu Yongqing, at the university. He received his degree in 1964 but stayed on at Tsinghua as a postgraduate student and a political instructor. He became a full-fledged member of the CPC in 1965.

Then in 1966, the Cultural Revolution struck China. The movement lasted a decade and became one of the darkest periods in China’s long history. Besides the trauma of seeing his father’s family business seized and good name ruined, Hu fell victim to the Cultural Revolution in another way as well.

The movement was led by Mao Zedong (also spelled Tsetung) who in 1945 was named chairman of the Communist Party of China, the top position in the party until it was abolished in 1982. (General secretary has been the highest position since that time.) In 1949, after he led the Communists to victory against the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek in China’s civil war, Mao founded the People’s Republic of China and was named its chairman.

For much of the next quarter century, Chairman Mao enjoyed unchallenged power and control of the country.

HU Jintao’s Early Years

In 1966, chairman of the Communist Party of China Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a movement that lasted for 10 years and brought much chaos and damage to China. In the photograph above, Mao Zedong surveys the armed forces of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

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HU JINTAO However, he started to lose the universal support of his fellow party members after implementing disastrous economic policies. The worst of these was the Great Leap Forward, a program of economic and social changes meant to rapidly modernize the country. Mao believed that he could fuel industrialization in large part by controlling the production and distribution of agriculture.

The program failed miserably, however. The result was the collapse of the food production system that caused widespread depression, famine, and an estimated 30 million deaths. Mao subsequently stepped down as chairman of the PRC in 1959.

He did, however, keep his position as chairman of the CPC. Mao was succeeded as PRC chairman by Liu Shaoqi, who, together with CPC General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, had spoken out against the Great Leap Forward. They pushed instead for more gradual industrialization. Mao made his move against them and other rivals of the Cultural Revolution. He started by denouncing Liu and Deng and their economic reform policies as capitalistic. He compared his rivals to Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, who Mao considered to be too friendly toward the West. Setting himself up as the true Communist, Mao called Liu, Deng, and other rivals “capitalist roaders,” meaning they wanted to start China on the road to capitalism. He then began to mobilize students across the country to remove these undesirable elements from power.

In May 1966, the first Red Guards unit formed at the Middle School attached to Tsinghua University, where Hu Jintao was currently a political instructor. The Red Guards were groups of youth, mainly students, dedicated to the Cultural Revolution and encouraged by Mao to root out “imperialism” and “intellectuals” from schools and other government positions. The students and other youth ended up becoming violent and split into factions. Eventually, they were reined in by Mao, but not before millions of people were purged, imprisoned, or killed.

HU Jintao’s Early Years

In the photograph above, supporters of the Cultural Revolution raise their fists and hold up booklets containing the writing of Chairman Mao Zedong during a 1966 demonstration by the Red Guard youth groups. The Red Guard was comprised of young people who supported Mao and became violent to those who opposed the chairman’s beliefs.

Although the Red Guards in large part targeted university officials, Mao’s real goal was to eliminate his rivals and reconsolidate his own power. Deng Xiaoping was purged from the party in 1966. Liu Shaoqi was sent to a detention camp in 1968 and died there the next year. Many others outside the realms of politics and education fell victim to the antiintellectual, anticapitalist movements of the time. It was in this atmosphere that Hu Jintao’s father was imprisoned after having his family business taken away.

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HU JINTAO

Mao’s Down to the Countryside movement of 1968 sent young intellectuals out of urban areas to rural environs for manual labor, with the goal of curbing the turmoil Mao had himself unleashed.

Hu and the Cultural Revolution Just what Hu Jintao’s role was in the Cultural Revolution during the unrest and violence on the Tsinghua campus is unclear. The subject of the Cultural Revolution is still taboo in official circles in China, and official Hu biographies pay little attention to this period of his life. Joseph Fewsmith, writing for the Washington Quarterly, says that Hu “became an object of criticism, at least briefly, in the early days of the Cultural Revolution.” Jasper Becker of The Independent of London notes, however, that after Hu rose to power in 2002 he promoted several fellow Tsinghua students, including the president of the student union in 1966 and a leader of one of the Red Guard factions. This, together with Hu’s work in the Communist Youth League and his position as a political instructor during his Tsinghua days, would seem to be evidence that Hu had some involvement in the Red Guards, Becker suggests, but there is no definitive proof.

While Hu’s good name survived the actions of the Red Guards at Tsinghua University, he could not escape another program of the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s Down to the Countryside movement of 1968 sent young intellectuals out of urban areas to rural environs for manual labor, with the goal of curbing the turmoil Mao had himself unleashed.

Hu found himself in the remote Gansu Province working on a construction project. (Coincidentally, Wen Jiabao, who

HU Jintao’s Early Years

During the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, general secretary of the Communist Party Deng Xiaoping (above) was targeted by the Red Guard and removed from office. He was sent to the Xinjian County Tractor Factory in rural Jiangxi province, where at the age of 65 he was forced into manual labor.

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HU JINTAO became premier when Hu became president, was also exiled to Gansu in 1968.)

Hu spent the rest of the Cultural Revolution in Gansu.

As it turned out, this exile ended up helping his career. Not only was he able to land a job as a junior hydroelectric engineer and thus put his college training to use, he also met Song Ping, a fellow Tsinghua alumnus and well-connected Communist Party member who became Hu’s mentor.

C H A P T E R

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A Promising Career If Hu Jintao considered being sent to the remote province of Gansu

during the Cultural Revolution to be a punishment, he did not show it by his behavior. In fact, Andrew J. Nathan and Bruce Gilley say in China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files that Hu volunteered for service in Gansu in response to Chairman Mao’s call to “go where the fatherland needs you.” In either case, he worked hard and was rewarded with increasingly important jobs.

Gansu is one of the poorest provinces in China, with a vast majority of its mostly Han Chinese (the largest ethnical group in China) residents living outside cities. Its poverty must have shocked Hu to some degree, growing up as he did in a bustling city in a developed and prosperous coastal province. Gansu is located in the northwest of the country on the border with Mongolia. Its terrain ranges from mountainous country in the south, including the Liujia Gorge on the Yellow River, to plateaus and a stretch of the Gobi Desert in the north. Hu toured

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HU JINTAO the province extensively over several years, visiting many people in some of even the most remote areas and learning the unique problems of this desolate land.

Hu’s Gansu career began in 1968. He spent this year and part of the next in the province’s poor countryside helping the Ministry of Water Conservancy’s Liujia Gorge Engineering Bureau build houses for the Liujia Dam project. In 1969, he transferred to another department within the Ministry of Water, serving as technician and secretary of No. 813 SubBureau, Fourth Engineering Bureau, as reported by the People’s Daily. He eventually landed a job in the Sub-Bureau’s head office as deputy secretary of its general Party branch and stayed with the unit until the dam project was completed in 1974.

Hu’s next stop was the Ministry of Construction where he served as a secretary in the Gansu Provincial Construction Committee. This transfer brought him out of the poor countryside and into Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province. He stayed in this position only until 1975, when he was promoted to deputy director of the Committee’s Project Design Management Division. Here he worked for the next five years, putting his engineering skills to work but also gaining valuable managerial experience. More importantly, it was during this time that he caught the eye of Song Ping, chairman of the Gansu Provincial Revolutionary Commission.

Song graduated from Tsinghua in 1937 and worked at the Central Party School and Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

He spent much of his career as an economic planner and was known for his conservative views. When Deng Xiaoping called upon leaders to consider more youthful cadres—or ultradedicated party members—for promotions, Song, now First Party Secretary Song of Gansu, looked to Hu.

Important Connections Song may well have already been aware of Hu before Hu came to work in Gansu. Song’s wife, Chen Shunyao, was deputy party

A PROMISING CAREER secretary at Tsinghua University when Hu was a student there, and may have heard of Hu’s reputation for hard work. In any case, First Party Secretary Song was impressed enough with Hu to promote him to vice chairman of the Gansu Provincial Construction Commission in 1980. Soon thereafter, he promoted Hu again to deputy secretary of the Gansu Provincial Communist Youth League in 1980. But Song was not done with Hu yet. Song then recommended him for the Central Party School’s new training program for young cadres.

When Hu was in training at the Central Party School, the school’s vice president was Jiang Nanxiang, who was president of Tsinghua University during Hu’s time there. ABC Radio Australia reported that Hu defended Jiang from more radical Red Guards in the turmoil at Tsinghua during the Cultural Revolution. Hu thus had two powerful and well-connected leaders on his side. Song Ping was promoted to vice chairman of the Central Planning Commission in Beijing in 1981. Song and possibly Jiang as well gave Hu his next big break. In 1982, they recommended him to Hu Yaobang, CPC chairman from 1981 until he became general secretary in 1982, when the position of chairman was abolished at the twelfth National Party Congress. The National Party Congress is held every five years to elect a CPC Central Committee, which is made up of party, state, and army leaders, and to ratify any changes to the party Constitution. These National Party Congress meetings are different than the National People’s Congress, which is the top legislative body of the PRC (that is, the state as opposed to the party).

Hu Yaobang named Hu Jintao as an alternate member of the CPC Central Committee at the twelfth Party Congress in 1982.

At 39 years old, Hu was the youngest member ever. He returned briefly to Gansu to become head of the Provincial Communist Youth League, only to be promoted once again a few months later to secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Youth League Central Committee in Beijing.

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HU JINTAO

The Dalai Lama, photographed in India in 1959, went into exile after rumors circulated about a possible kidnap attempt by Chinese officials. Tibet has long been a nation in turmoil, as the native Tibetans seek freedom and independence from China’s rule.

The Communist Youth League In 1984, Hu was promoted to first secretary of the Communist Youth League Central Committee, a position that put him in close contact with many of the future leaders of China. The Communist Youth League (CYL) was formed in 1922 as a training ground for young party members. The idea was to give

A PROMISING CAREER young people ages 14 to 28 the general education, knowledge of party principles, and leadership experience they needed to keep the CPC vibrant from one generation to the next. The structure of the CYL even mirrors that of the CPC, with its own Central Committee and National Congress. It is the largest youth organization in China, with nearly 70 million members reported in 2003.

The CYL began in 1922 as the Chinese Socialist Youth League. Since that time, it has earned a reputation as being one of the most important institutions of the Communist Party of China. The CYL forms the core of the All-China Youth Federation (ACYF), which lists among its basic tasks, “Hold aloft the banners of patriotism and socialism; Encourage young people to study Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory.” (Marxism-Leninism called for the proletariat, or lower classes of society, to rise up and violently overthrow capitalism. Maoism differs in that it calls for the revolution to be led by the peasant proletariat rather than the urban proletariat.) Hu Jintao was also appointed chairman of the ACYF in 1982.

Despite the hard-line Communist rhetoric of its goals, the CYL is known for being a somewhat more liberal branch of the CPC, with lively discussions of democracy, market economics, and social reform. Hu Yaobang, a noted reformer most famous for reforming (in other words, restoring the good name of) many of the people purged during the Cultural Revolution, was once head of the CYL. There he nurtured a “tradition of democracy, liveliness and flexibility,” according to an open letter from Lu Yuegang, deputy director of the CYL’s China Youth Daily newspaper, as translated on www.zonaeuropa.com.

The early 1980s saw a movement against “bourgeois liberalism” in China. Some conservative leaders spoke out against “spiritual pollution.” By this they meant the more radical ideas of reformers such as Hu Yaobang, which they thought were tainting Communism. Hu Jintao was now in a position to help

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In Hu they found somebody willing to listen to their problems and complaints as well as their success stories. out his benefactor, and used the China Youth Daily to rebut the conservatives.

In the process, however, Hu Jintao may have made some enemies among “princelings,” as sons of party leaders who fought the Nationalists in the Chinese Revolution were known.

John Tkacik, senior research fellow in Asian Studies for the Heritage Foundation, reported in a lecture that Hu Yaobang and Song Ping agreed that it would be best if Hu Jintao left the CYL and got some experience in the provinces. The next stop for Hu Jintao would be another of China’s poorest provinces, Guizhou.

On to Guizhou Hu was 43 years old when he was appointed party secretary of Guizhou in 1985, making him the youngest head of a province.

This mountainous province in the south has the lowest per capita gross domestic product in China. Like Gansu, Guizhou is mainly Han (the Han people make up more than 90% of the population of China nationwide and almost 20% of the population of the planet), but it has a minority population of more than 37%, one of the highest percentages in the country.

As he did in Gansu, Hu toured extensively in Guizhou. The province has 86 counties, and Hu saw them all. Not only did he talk to farmers, loggers, miners, and other workers, he also visited people in their homes. Citizens of non-coastal provinces—which typically did not receive nearly as much development assistance from the government as their counterparts with easy sea access—were not used to such personal attention from national leaders, even ones assigned to their province. In

A PROMISING CAREER Hu they found somebody willing to listen to their problems and complaints as well as their success stories.

Hu did more than listen, however. At Guizhou University for example, where he audited classes, Hu spearheaded a program to expand and modernize the school’s run-down infrastructure. He also made it possible for more of the poorest youth in the province to attend school by granting them tuition waivers. His ties to the university and its student body helped later when a group of students took over the main lecture hall in a prodemocracy demonstration. Hu paid a personal visit to the students and was able to talk them into peacefully ending their occupation of the hall and dispersing.

Another situation that caught Hu’s attention in Guizhou— perhaps, as Tkacik suggested, because of his own family connection to tea—was a state-run tea plantation that was underperforming compared to a semiprivate plantation in the same county. Hu showed signs of reform-mindedness and a concern for workers’ rights when he declared the absence of a contract system for workers to be one of the main things holding back the government-owned operation.

Hu also implemented some of the same economic reforms then being carried out on the eastern seaboard and south coast provinces. Even if the result was improved living conditions for citizens, however, reform was a dangerous game. In late 1986, students in Beijing took to the streets in demonstrations calling for more political freedom. CPC General Secretary Hu Yaobang refused to act against them, and hard-liners within the party seized the opportunity. They called the general secretary soft on democracy and questioned his commitment to Communist ideals. Deng Xiaoping’s reformist ways were put to the test, and he sided with the hard-liners. Hu Yaobang, once considered Deng’s successor, was forced to resign in January 1987.

Tkacik reported that, after this, some officials from Beijing arrived in Guizhou to look into reports of Hu’s reforms, but nothing came of the inspection. Perhaps because of his

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HU JINTAO handling of the situation at Guizhou University, Hu was spared the fate of Hu Yaobang. The next year, Hu Jintao was reappointed party secretary of the province.

Taking the Reins in Tibet His days in Guizhou were numbered, however. Later in 1988, Song Ping suggested to Hu that he put himself up for consideration for the newly opened job of party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Former party secretary Wu Jinghua had recently resigned, another victim of the hardliners’ push to purge reformers.

Wu was known for implementing relatively liberal economic policies, promoting more Tibetan cadres, and even tolerating the flying of Tibetan flags. Although he was not Tibetan himself (he was of Yi nationality), Wu was very popular in the troubled region. He was not popular with conservative national leaders, however, who blamed him for being too lenient in the face of pro-independence demonstrations in late 1987 and early 1988.

Tibet was not originally part of the People’s Republic of China. In 1950, the year after the founding of the PRC, the Chinese government took possession of Tibet, using as justification a 1717 declaration by Emperor Kang Xi after China repelled a Mongol invasion of Tibet that said that Tibet was to be a protectorate of China. However, Tibet continued to be ruled by the Dalai Lama as it had been since the fifth Dalai Lama assumed power in 1656. The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of the Buddhist people of Tibet, and each one is believed to be the reincarnation of his predecessor.

The fourteenth and current Dalai Lama was just nine years old when he was enthroned in 1940, and 15 years old when he became head of state following the People’s Liberation Army invasion. He sought political asylum in India in 1959, following a rumored plot by Chinese officials to kidnap him; he has been in exile ever since.

A PROMISING CAREER Over the next couple of decades, Tibet—which was reorganized into the TAR in 1965—suffered greatly under Chinese rule. Agricultural policies dictated by Beijing led to mass starvation, and occupying soldiers destroyed religious and cultural monuments and crushed any signs of rebellion.

In 1987, the Dalai Lama, greatly troubled by the situation in Tibet, outlined his Five-Point Peace Plan at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington, D.C. The plan called for, among other things, more rights, freedom, and democracy for Tibetans. A year later, speaking in France, he also called for a democratic and self-governing Tibet “in association with the People’s Republic of China,” fueling the pro-independence demonstrations in his native land, which were soon to boil over.

The highest-ranking Tibetan in Tibet at this time was the Panchen Lama, the second-most senior lama. He was one of the first people Hu Jintao sought out when he arrived in Tibet in January 1989 as the newly named TAR party secretary. The region was in a state of turmoil following riots that began on December 10, 1988—the day after Hu’s appointment was announced. He became the first party secretary of Tibet without a military background, but he soon had to call upon the military’s assistance.

Hu arrived at the Panchen Lama’s residence in Shigatse on January 23. That day or the next, the Panchen Lama gave a speech in which he criticized the Chinese occupation of Tibet, saying that it had cost his people more than it had benefited them. On January 28, the Panchen Lama died. The official government report said that he suffered a major heart attack, but many Tibetans felt that the government itself was responsible for his death.

Upheaval in Tibet Unrest spread quickly across the TAR, with massive street demonstrations in the capital of Lhasa. Hu remained tolerant of the marchers and their Tibetan national flags through most

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In spring 1989, protestors gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during a massive prodemocracy demonstration. The demonstrations led to a violent clash between protestors and the People’s Liberation Army, resulting in many people left dead or injured.

of February, but on the twentieth he called in 1,700 police as a show of force. A riot broke out on March 5. At least ten civilians died when police opened fire on the crowds. One officer died that day as well.

More civilians died in the turmoil that followed over the next two days. After a phone call with Beijing on March 7, Hu announced the imposition of martial law. In all, at least 40 civilians lost their lives before the police, the Chengdu

A PROMISING CAREER Military Region (which contributed around 170,000 troops), and the People’s Liberation Army got control of the situation.

Hundreds of Tibetans, including Buddhist monks, landed in prison.

Martial law remained in place in Tibet for a year, through the violent and deadly suppression of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and subsequent declaration of martial law in Beijing. Hu was among the first provincial leaders to voice his support for the Tiananmen crackdown.

Hu remained TAR party secretary for three more years, but he did not spend all of that time in Tibet. He made some tours of the region, but none as extensive as those he had made in Gansu or Guizhou. He suffered from “fatigue” in September 1989, according to official records, and from that point on started spending more time in Beijing. He reportedly fell victim to altitude sickness in June 1990, despite having been in Tibet a year and a half at the time and, by 1991, was living permanently in Beijing. In addition to performing his TAR duties remotely, he worked with Song Ping in the influential Organization Department.

Song Ping came through for Hu again in 1992, when he recommended Hu for the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, or Politburo Standing Committee for short. Hu also had the backing of Deng Xiaoping, who was impressed with Hu’s strong-handed management of the riots in Tibet and put Hu in charge of organizing the fourteenth National Party Congress. At that Congress, Hu was named member of the Politburo Standing Committee, making him one of the seven most powerful men in the country.

A Dubious Early Career His appointment to the Politburo Standing Committee marked the start of Hu’s career on the national stage, but the jury was still out on whether he was a reformer or a

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On the night of June 3, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the protestors in Tiananmen Square. The exact number of people who were killed is still unknown. Above, a blood-soaked man is evidence of the bloody encounter between the protestors and the People’s Liberation Army.

hard-liner. On the one hand he had the enthusiastic support of more liberal-minded cadres such as Hu Yaobang, and he benefited from the elder Hu’s policy of pressing for technocrats—trained experts in fields such as engineering and economics—to take control of the CPC, which up until his time had been made up mainly of peasant-class revolutionary veterans. Hu Jintao was also closely linked with the reformist Communist Youth League, although he did not leave much of

A PROMISING CAREER a personal stamp upon the organization; he is best known for leading its ballroom dance club while a student at Tsinghua.

On the other hand, he also listed the conservative Song Ping among his backers, he showed a firm hand in suppressing Tibetan protestors, and he expressed unqualified support for the Tiananmen crackdown, despite the fact that the uprising was led in part by engineering students (some from Tsinghua University) in support of the recently deceased Hu Yaobang.

Perhaps it was Hu’s ability to get results without provoking or offending that allowed him to win support from leaders of different stripes and thus rise through the ranks so rapidly. In his early career he was often promoted ahead of more senior cadres, a practice not at all commonplace in the CPC. When he was named to the Politburo Standing Committee, he was again among the youngest ever in his position. Whatever role Hu would assume at the national level, he was surely a leader to watch out for in the future.

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4

The Fourth Generation The fourteenth National Party Congress in 1992 saw the transfer

of power from the Second Generation of CPC leadership, headed by Deng Xiaoping, to the Third Generation, led by Jiang Zemin. Jiang became general secretary of the CPC in 1989 and took over the presidency in 1993.

It was Deng himself who numbered the generations and named their “cores,� or leaders. The First Generation, Deng said, had Mao Zedong as its core. Deng named himself the core of the Second Generation, and Jiang Zemin the core of the Third Generation. His motivation was to pave the way for a smooth transition from one generation to the next and thereby avoid the infighting and backstabbing that had marked earlier successions, his own included.

One way he hoped to achieve this was by taking away the power of the general secretary/chairman to name his own successor. He thus wanted to select one Politburo Standing

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the fourth generation Committee member at the fourteenth National Party Congress who was under 50 years old to be the core of the Fourth Generation. In choosing Hu Jintao to be this person, Deng was setting him up to be Jiang’s successor.

The Central Party School Hu at this point undoubtedly thought about what higher positions the future might hold for him, but he was given other duties to attend to in the meantime. In 1992, he was made a member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee in charge of personnel. He was also given responsibility for party organization and assigning cadre ranks and numbers to different national and state offices. In March 1993, Hu was named president of the Central Party School, a position he held until 2002.

The Central Party School is older than the PRC itself, having been established in a guerilla camp during the Communists’ fight against the Nationalists. After the founding of the PRC in 1949, the school was moved to Beijing. Today, it has around 1,600 students. Its location near the imperial Summer Palace marks its importance to the revolutionary cause—as it was when Hu attended the school in the early 1980s. The school’s main task has been to teach young cadres Marxist Communist theory (named after Karl Marx, the German philosopher who first laid down the basic principles of communism in The Communist Manifesto).

With Hu at the reins, however, the Central Party School branched beyond the typical teachings of Marx and Mao. Charles Hutzler of The Wall Street Journal reports that over Hu’s decade-long tenure the school started studying the military, economic, and legal systems of non-Communist countries and introduced courses in science and technology, management, Western-style economics, and even some of the less threatening principles of democracy, such as the separation of governmental powers. It started up a foreign policy institute,

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In 1992, power was transferred from the Second Generation of the Communist Party Central Committee to the Third Generation. Deng Xiaoping, core of the Second Generation, paved the way for a smooth transition for Jiang Zemin to assume power as the core of the Third Generation of the CPC. In the photograph above, Jiang Zemin (left) is seen with his predecessor Deng Xiapoing.

the fourth generation a move that Hu may have made to give himself more of the exposure to foreign affairs he would need to assume the position of head of state.

The Central Party School also started joint research with Western institutions, such as Harvard University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and invited foreign guest lecturers, Hutzler said. Among those speaking at the school during Hu’s reign were Électricité de France President Francois Roussely, who discussed how the public utility competes with private firms; Asia expert Ezra Vogel of Harvard; and Peter Mandelson, a member of the British Parliament who lectured on the rise of his country’s Labor Party. The trend continued after Hu left the school in 2002 with lectures by, among others, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 2003 and Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsein and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. It also collaborated and held exchanges with the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

His actions at the Central Party School gave many hope that Hu would prove to be a reformer once he took control of the CPC and PRC and lead the country down the path toward democracy. Hutzler, for instance, said that Hu’s more open policies included the debate as to how the CPC could prepare for more democracy in China in the future. Others, such as John Tkacik of the Heritage Foundation, argued that Hu’s reforms were only meant to justify and solidify the CPC’s monopoly of power in the country. By introducing for the most part only new economic ideas into the classroom while avoiding grassroots democratic theories, such as human rights and freedom of the press, the Central Party School could help open the country to a more market economy while lengthening the dominance of communism as the one legitimate form of government.

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HU JINTAO Lessons in Power Hu also learned the lesson of Hu Yaobang’s experience, which taught that pushing reforms too quickly could end up getting a person purged, even (or perhaps especially) if that person is in line to become general secretary or president. Jiang Zemin was known as a reformer during his time at the top, but only so far as he carried out the economic reforms set in motion by his predecessor, Deng Xiaoping. With Deng maintaining control of the government even after his official retirement thanks to his government connections—connections he established by promoting allies while he was still in office—Jiang was not able to consolidate power until well into his reign.

Jiang was considered a weak ruler when he became general secretary and then president. He was not considered a visionary or man of ideas like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping; he had not yet established a network of political allies in Beijing; and he had no real connections to the military elite, despite being named chairman of the Central Military Commission (the body that controls the military) in 1989.

In fact, Jiang seemed to be in danger of being purged before he even became president. In 1992, Deng conducted his famous “southern tour” in which he traveled around the south part of China calling for faster economic reforms. Many believed that Deng was expressing his disappointment with the speed with which General Secretary Jiang was implementing Deng’s policies. Jiang sprung into action, issuing a series of documents supporting Deng’s reforms. Behind the scenes, Jiang exploited Deng’s fear of a military threat to his power by playing up the growing influence of the brothers Yang Baibing and Yang Shangkun. Instead of purging Jiang at the fourteenth National Party Congress, Deng removed Yang Baibing from the military and Yang Shangkun from the presidency. The path was then clear for Jiang Zemin to become president.

Jiang had a couple more moves to make before he could consolidate his power. In 1995, he purged a major rival, Beijing

the fourth generation Party Secretary Chen Xitong (known as the “Boss of Beijing”).

Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997, freeing up Jiang to call more shots himself rather than having policy dictated to him by his old boss. Later in 1997, Jiang purged National People’s Congress Chairman Qiao Shi, thus eliminating the last of the biggest threats to his power and clearing the way for himself to appoint allies to key positions in the government.

A Potential Rival to Hu The man at Jiang’s side through all of these moves was Zeng Qinghong. Zeng is a “princeling,” his father having served as a senior commander for the Communists in the war against the Nationalists. He met Jiang Zemin in 1985 when Jiang became mayor of Shanghai—Zeng was working in the party’s Shanghai municipal organization department at the time. It was here that Zeng first helped Jiang’s career. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, students were demonstrating in Shanghai as well. According to Andrew Nathan and Bruce Gilley in China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files, Zeng was instrumental in closing the liberal newspaper the World Economic Herald when the protests were peaking, a move that brought Jiang to the favorable attention of Deng and many conservative leaders in Beijing. When Jiang became party general secretary later in 1989, he brought Zeng with him to Beijing.

Nathan and Gilley credit Zeng with helping arrange the meetings between Jiang and Deng and the subsequent maneuvers that brought about the downfall of the Yang brothers, as well as playing crucial parts in the purging of Chen Xitong and Qiao Shi. Thanks to his extended family network, Zeng also had connections to the military, which eventually came in handy for Jiang after he became chairman of the Central Military Commission. By 1993, thanks in large part to his association with Jiang, Zeng had risen to director of the party General Office, which manages administrative matters and logistics for the entire top members of the CPC leadership.

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HU JINTAO Zeng was thus seen rather early on as the member of the Fourth Generation most likely to challenge Hu’s rise to the top.

In 1998, Jiang launched his Three Stresses campaign, calling for CPC members to stress theoretical study, political awareness, and good conduct in their daily lives. According to Wen Yu of the Jamestown Foundation, Zeng submitted this campaign to the Politburo and then, after the Politburo approved it, had 15 articles written by Jiang listed as required reading for the campaign, along with 15 articles each by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

While Hu spent the rest of the 1990s keeping a low profile and not offending Jiang by trying to grab power too early, he was not totally inactive during this time. He developed a reputation for fighting nepotism, the practice of awarding positions to people based on relationships instead of merit.

After he was named to the Politburo Standing Committee in 1992, he implemented antinepotism rules and set standards for promotion based on performance. These reforms came at a time when Jiang Zemin was promoting many of his loyalists to a wide variety of governmental positions. Just as Deng Xiaoping continued to hold much power even after he retired, so too was Jiang seen as building a network through which he could influence the country’s direction after giving up his official posts.

In this, too, Zeng would be a valuable aid to Jiang. In 1999, Zeng became head of the CPC Central Organization Department, a powerful position from which he could promote Jiang’s allies to the highest levels of government and put them in line for key appointments during the sixteenth National Party Congress in 2002. With Zeng’s help, Jiang promoted many of his old associates from Shanghai, forming what would become known as the “Shanghai Gang.” In his book China’s Leaders: The New Generation, Cheng Li reports on Shanghai Gang members assuming posts in the national education, general office, and propaganda departments as

the fourth generation well as editorial positions at the People’s Daily and Guangming Daily newspapers.

Hu Survives as Successor Even if Jiang did see Hu as a rival to his protégé Zeng, however, he never made a move to have Hu purged. Hu did not build a power base of his own during the 1990s, and that may have made him seem less of a threat. Nathan and Gilley note that although Hu’s roles during the 1990s, when he was in charge of promotions, appointments, and cadre assignments, seemed to put him in a position to place allies in key governmental offices, only two of his close associates were named to the Politburo in 2002, when the Fourth Generation came into power. By contrast, six cadres linked to the Shanghai Gang joined the Politburo Standing Committee that year. Despite his ties to Tsinghua University, the Communist Youth league, and the Central Party School, three of the most important institutions in the CPC apparatus, he did not develop a protégé. Nathan and Gilley agree that it was Zeng Qinghong, in his roles first as CPC Central Committee General Office deputy director and then director, and then as head of the Organization Department, who held the real power to place allies in important positions.

It was Hu, however, who was named vice president of the People’s Republic of China in 1998. By this point, Hu had become widely respected among many party leaders for his hard work, good management, and humble personality. Because of the bitter struggles in the past surrounding power transfers, the need for a smooth transition from the Third Generation to the Fourth was extremely important in the minds of senior cadres, which would have made it even more difficult for Jiang to block Hu’s rise. Also, as the Fourth Generation gained more influence, ability and merit became more important and favoritism was increasingly frowned upon; promoting his protégé Zeng ahead of Hu would have been seen as obvious favoritism on Jiang’s part.

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HU JINTAO Instead of seeking to have this rising star removed, if that thought ever did enter his mind, Jiang contented himself with building up connections which he could use as a counterbalance to Hu, even after Jiang retired. By simply not giving Jiang any reason or justification to remove him from power, Hu set himself up to become president in four years’ time.

The Vice Presidency Hu’s term as vice president was a period of relative inactivity, dotted with episodes of being thrust into the spotlight. These episodes can be interpreted as Jiang setting Hu up for a fall or giving him the exposure he would need to become president and general secretary.

Yao Jin, writing for the Jamestown Foundation, notes three examples of what he calls “thankless jobs” that Jiang passed on to Hu. The first addressed was the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in May 1999. A U.S. stealth bomber, operating under NATO, struck the target as part of a three-month campaign during the Balkan War. The United States and NATO claimed that the bombing, which killed three people and wounded 20, was a mistake resulting from an outdated map, although even tourist maps at the time had the correct location of the embassy. George Tenet, director of the CIA, later testified that out of the approximately 900 targets bombed during the three-month campaign, the embassy was the one target provided by his agency.

Many Chinese leaders and citizens were more than skeptical, and unrest broke out in Beijing as protesters threw rocks at the U.S. Embassy.

Jiang had made closer relations with America one of his priorities for ensuring economic growth and was therefore reluctant to be too critical of the United States on television.

His solution was to put Hu in front of the camera instead. Two days after the bombing, Hu appeared on national television to express China’s anger over the incident and called the act

the fourth generation “criminal” and “barbarous,” though he refrained from the even more anti-American language he used during a previous, nontelevised address to party and government insiders. He also pressed for calm in Beijing and an end to the rock throwing at the embassy.

Later that year a movement similar to the one that targeted Hu Yaobang and other reformers in the 1980s threatened to make a comeback when a Beijing University student attacked a researcher for promoting bourgeois liberalism. Jiang left it up to Hu to handle the situation, and he responded with an effective diplomatic solution. Out of fear of appearing soft on the subject, Hu ordered five articles to be written condemning bourgeois liberalism—but only five, no more, and they all had to appear in only one newspaper. By limiting the response in this way he could both claim that he moved against liberalism and at the same time stop the criticism from escalating into a broader hard-line movement.

Hu was again given responsibility for stemming public criticism a couple of years later. In March 2001, some magazines criticized Jiang’s theory of the Three Represents, which stated that the CPC must represent the country’s most advanced culture, society, and production capabilities. Many viewed this as Jiang’s way of opening the party to more private businessmen and intellectuals. According to Joseph Fewsmith in China Leadership Monitor, the magazines said that Jiang should be paying more attention to the nation’s poor rather than allowing rich capitalists to enter the party. Yao reports that Hu had the CPC’s Propaganda Department temporarily shut down two of the more liberal magazines as an example to the others.

Besides having tasks imposed upon him, Hu also seized opportunities to prove himself loyal to the party and to Jiang.

He often spoke in support of Jiang’s policies, including the Three Stresses and the Three Represents. In 1999, Hu became vice chairman of both the PRC and CPC Central Military

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When he was vice president, Hu Jintao appeared on television following the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1999. Hu Jintao addressed the attacks on the embassy and expressed China’s anger over the incident. Hu Jintao also called for an end to the rock throwing by Chinese protestors who gathered around the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Commissions and, according to Tkacik, took charge of enforcing Jiang’s orders to have the military give up the many commercial ventures it had set up since the early 1990s.

Foreign Travel Hu’s role as vice president allowed him to gain some initial foreign experience as well. Unlike the Third Generation leaders, many of whom studied in other countries and traveled

the fourth generation widely, Fourth Generation members generally had very little if any foreign experience before rising to power. Hu gained this experience sooner than most of them, making excursions as early as 1984 and traveling over the years to several countries including India, Pakistan, Romania, Portugal, Mexico, Cuba, Columbia, South Africa, and Australia. Tkacik reports that Hu traveled in an official capacity as vice president to Japan and Korea in the spring of 1998 and later that year to Vietnam. He visited Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand in 2000, and Cyprus, Iran, Jordan, Syria, and Uganda the following year.

In October and November 2001, Hu made his first trip to Europe. He met with heads of state and business leaders in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Russia. When speaking with them, however, according to Yao Lin, he only echoed Jiang’s and China’s policies and did not give any indication of his own thoughts or opinions, lest he be seen as trying to draw attention to himself and thus away from Jiang.

The same was true during his first visit to the United States in April and May 2002, a trip made at the invitation of U.S. vice president Dick Cheney. During the trip, he told reporters that he was there to build on the work Jiang and U.S. president George W. Bush had done establishing relations between the two countries. Before arriving in Washington, D.C., Hu stopped in Hawaii to meet with the Chinese community in Honolulu and then continued on to New York. In Washington, he met with Bush, whom he had already met briefly when Bush went to China in February 2002. Charles Hutzler reported in The Wall Street Journal that this trip was not about Hu taking care of business or even pushing any agenda, but rather simply gave him a chance to meet members of Bush’s administration and gave him more credibility as a leader back home.

The Next General Secretary Many in the press thus saw Hu’s trip to the United States as the latest in a series of incidents confirming that he was slated to

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HU JINTAO replace Jiang as China’s next supreme leader. Leading up to the visit, he formed a team to develop long-term strategies in dealing with the United States. In February 2002, Willy Wo-Lap Lam reported for CNN that Zeng Qinghong, once considered Hu’s top rival to become the core of the Fourth Generation, praised Hu at a seminar for senior cadres at the Central Communist Party School and called for the cadres to strive to achieve the “clear-cut demands of comrade Hu Jintao.” The rivalry, if there ever was one, was apparently over.

At the sixteenth National Party Congress in November 2002, the 59-year-old Hu was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of China. Jiang Zemin stepped down from this position but retained his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission, following a precedent set by Deng. Several Jiang allies were appointed to the new nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, including Zeng Qinghong. Hu was the only returning member of the committee. As a nod to Jiang’s legacy, the Congress also made his theory of the Three Represents one of the guiding principles of the CPC, equally as important as Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory, according to the People’s Daily.

In an address Hu gave at the Congress as quoted by the People’s Daily, he promised that the CPC would put the Three Represents into practice. He also touched upon some other main points of Jiang thought, saying that the party will “carry on the past and keep pace with the times, and work hard for building a well-off society in an all-around way, accelerating socialist modernization and striving to usher in a brand new situation for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The term “socialism with Chinese characteristics” refers to the mix of Marxism and open market economics that came to characterize Chinese communism, first under Deng Xiaoping and then under Jiang. Jiang used the phrase often, including

the fourth generation

Pictured above, China’s Fourth Generation leadership with Hu Jintao at far left.

Hu Jintao assumed the role of General Secretary after Jiang Zemin stepped down at the sixteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2002.

nine times in a June 1999 speech at the seventy-eighth anniversary of the founding of the CPC.

The Next President At the First Session of the tenth National People’s Congress the following March, Hu was elected president of the People’s

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HU JINTAO Republic of China. Jiang’s protégé Zeng was elected vice president, though Ching-Ching Ni of the Los Angeles Times noted that the 177 “no” votes for Zeng and 190 abstentions, both unusually high numbers for a National People’s Congress, could be interpreted as a sign of dissent against Jiang.

The party had made the smooth and peaceful transition of power one of its top priorities over the preceding years if not decades, and it appeared to have achieved this at the sixteenth National Party Congress and at the tenth National People’s Congress. But with Jiang retaining control of one of the three organs of power in the country (the other two being the party and the state), having a majority of loyalists on the Politburo Standing Committee, and his major theory written into the party Constitution, how much power would Hu Jintao actually wield? Many in the press speculated that during his entire first five-year administration, Hu would have Jiang pulling the strings behind the scenes and would have little leeway to implement his own policies. The press considered Hu a mystery man before his rise to the top of the CPC and the PRC, but the question remained as to how well they would get to know him afterwards.

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Domestic Challenges Although the People’s Republic of China had just completed its first

successful, strife-free transition of power in its history, not all was well in the country. Despite the economic success under the open-market reforms ushered in by Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, the situation as Hu Jintao came into power was troubled, with rampant corruption in all levels of government, unrest among peasants and unemployed workers, and a widening gap between the rich and poor.

In 2001, an unusual book came out in China—unusual because of its openness about China’s problems and the fact it was on sale at bookstores across the country for anyone to see— though it was soon withdrawn from store shelves. The book was called The China Investigation Report 2000–2001: Studies of Contradictions Within the People Under New Conditions and was produced by the CPC’s Central Organization Department, headed at the time by Zeng Qinghong.

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HU JINTAO The report confirmed that thousands of people were protesting all over the country, and that the protests were becoming larger and more violent. The demonstrations began among workers laid off by closed-down state businesses as well as by farmers protesting high taxes, environmental damage, and flat wages, but more recently spread to teachers, demobilized soldiers, and even cadres. While the book blamed widespread unemployment—tens of millions were left jobless as a result of the country’s transition to a market economy—and the widening income gap for (in large part) causing the unrest, the spark behind many of the conflicts between protesters and the authorities was official corruption. Some officials were killed by protesters, and one in Hunan Province had his ear cut off by a farmer as the official tried to collect fees.

Hu was aware of this widespread domestic discontent and sought to position himself as a man of the people. Rather than setting off on trips to meet foreign leaders, Hu spent his first several months as general secretary traveling around China, meeting with workers, farmers, and others unhappy with the direction the country was taking. One of his first stops of his cold-winter tour was Xibaipo, the village in Hebei Province from which Mao Zedong and other revolutionaries departed for Beijing to found the PRC in March 1949. Hu made a speech there in which he invoked Mao in urging party members to work hard and live modestly. Next he visited the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and met with poor herdsmen surviving in subzero temperatures. In a speech there he called upon officials to put their greatest efforts toward improving the welfare of those in need. In January 2003, he gave the keynote speech at a rural work conference in which he stressed the need to raise incomes for farmers and decrease the disparity between rural and urban development, no doubt popular themes in a country where farmers made up more than half the population.

Wen Jiabao, who would become premier of the State Council (the main administrative body of the PRC) in March

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES

In this 2002 photograph, Hu Jintao visits an 83-year-old CPC member. From his days touring the remote province of Gansu, he learned to talk with citizens and learn about their unique problems.

2003, made a similar speech at the conference. Taking a cue from Hu, Wen visited miners on Chinese New Year and ate dumplings with them. These moves seemed to say that if the Third Generation leadership was about expanding the party’s reach to capitalists, the Fourth Generation was about reconnecting the party with the common man. Though he had not yet become president when he made the tour, Hu was already plotting a new course for the party: to keep it relevant while heartening those who hoped for more political reform and freedom in China.

A Deadly New Disease Hu knew that one of the keys to maintaining the CPC’s monopoly on power was maintaining social stability, and his first tour as general secretary was his way of addressing some of the key threats to that stability as identified in The China Investigation

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HU JINTAO

An officer tries to restrain journalists, who are covering the release of patients afflicted with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), from entering a hospital on the outskirts of Beijing in 2005. The outbreak of SARS was the first crisis during Hu Jintao’s leadership.

Report 2000–2001. The report could not, however, predict the first real crisis Hu had to face during his first term in office.

On March 15, 2003, the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) issued a worldwide travel health advisory seeking to contain the spread of a mysterious new illness called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. Little was known about the disease at the time except for its

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES

As more cases arose and more information leaked out, it became clear that Chinese officials helped spread the disease in the early months by denying its existence. pneumonia-like symptoms including fever, aching muscles, headache, sore throat with a dry cough, and shortness of breath. Scientists could not figure out its causes, though bioterrorism was not ruled out. Cases had appeared in Canada, China (including Hong Kong), Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Nine people had died from the disease at that point.

The day after the alert, Chinese officials reported to the WHO that they had been gathering information for months and had traced the outbreak in their country back to Guangdong Province. They ensured the WHO that new cases there were on the decline after peaking in February, though their report raised many questions for the WHO, such as how to carry out the reported cure of patients.

Soon after, a WHO team arrived in China to try to figure out what the disease was, where it came from, and how to stop it, but they were frustrated by the lack of statistics provided by tight-lipped Chinese officials. Foreign scientists weren’t the only ones from whom Chinese officials were withholding information. New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rosenthal described the case of a lady in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, who fell ill with SARS in late February.

Health officials said at the time that the disease was under control, yet after the lady shared a private room at a restaurant with friends, they all contracted SARS. One of the women, who had a fever and a cough at the dinner, died a month later. The story rang new alarm bells among doctors who thought that

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HU JINTAO closer contact than from a simple contact with friends in the restaurant was required to spread the epidemic.

As more cases arose and more information leaked out, it became clear that Chinese officials helped spread the disease in the early months by denying its existence and allowing patients and doctors in Guangdong to travel around China and out of the country. As late as March 25, Beijing health officials were still denying any cases in their city, but finally they admitted to nine cases and three deaths there. In early April, the government was pressured into revealing more accurate statistics, and the reported number of suspected cases jumped from 806 to 1,190, while the number of deaths rose from 34 to 46. This time, when Chinese Health Minister Zhang Wenkang said that the disease had been contained, foreign health officials were skeptical.

The epidemic was now becoming a crisis, although more due to the panic it was causing among citizens and the potential negative impact on the economy than to the sheer number of cases. Officials in the United States, which was now recording suspected cases of its own, urged travelers to stay away from Hong Kong, Guangdong Province, Singapore, and Vietnam, and later the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned against traveling anywhere in China. The WHO issued its first-ever travel warning for a specific area due to an infectious disease, cautioning travelers against visiting Hong Kong and Guangdong. Meanwhile, according to Lawrence K. Altman and Erik Eckholm of The New York Times, Health Minister Zhang continued to evade questions as to why Chinese health officials did not share information, allow WHO teams to inspect Guangzhou, or allow information to be published in the local press earlier that it had.

Hu Steps In With the public threatening to grow restless, combined with the specter of an economic downturn, President Hu finally

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES addressed the epidemic in mid-April, promising to devote more effort to containing it. Hu chaired a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, which stressed the need to monitor, report, quarantine, and treat the disease. A People’s Daily article covering the meeting ended by noting that the meeting participants “explicitly warned against the covering up of SARS cases and demanded the accurate, timely and honest reporting of the SARS situation.”

While the meeting brought Hu praise, some damage had already been done to his reputation. As Willy Lam of the Jamestown Foundation points out, in initially covering up the epidemic, the Fourth Generation leaders had followed the bad examples of their predecessors and tried to place social stability above the people’s welfare.

Hu was not done yet, however. On April 20, he fired Health Minister Zhang Wenkang, one of the officials most responsible for trying to keep the disease under wraps and misleading the international health community. Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong also lost his job that day, a reflection of the persistent effort to conceal SARS statistics in his city. The New York Times’ Eckholm reported that one alleged reason for the cover-up in Beijing was to keep foreign health authorities from warning against traveling there.

The Economic Wonder No doubt the government made the SARS situation much worse through its official secrecy about the disease, which, statistics indicated, was actually no more deadly than pneumonia in China, according to New York Times reporter Philip Bowring. An April 2003 report estimated that Hong Kong’s quarterly economic output could fall by seven-tenths of a percentage point due to lost business and tourism. This was a major concern for the Hu administration, which counted on Hong Kong as an engine helping drive the rest of the country’s economy.

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HU JINTAO China had reassumed control of Hong Kong from Great Britain in 1997. Britain first occupied the island during the First Opium War of 1840–1842, a war in which the British sought to force China to import opium from the British colony of India. The Treaty of Nanjing, which ended the war, gave control of Hong Kong Island to Britain, and on July 1, 1898, China officially leased it and other lands to Britain for 99 years.

Before the First Opium War, Hong Kong was a barren outpost occupied by fishermen, peasants, and pirates. Under British rule it grew into a global economic powerhouse by the end of the twentieth century and earned the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation’s title of “world’s freest economy” for several years running. China stood to benefit financially from Hong Kong’s success and so did not want to mess with the formula there too much. When Deng Xiaoping was negotiating the handover with Britain in the 1980s, he used the term “one country, two systems” to describe how Hong Kong would fit into the Chinese nation. Hong Kong would officially be part of China but would be allowed to retain its own laws, social structure, and economic system. At midnight on July 1, 1997, the territory became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, a designation that was set to last at least 50 years.

The Hu Administration got off on the wrong foot with Hong Kong. The city suffered economically because of the SARS crisis, with many there blaming the cover-up on the mainland for helping spread the disease to Hong Kong. They also directed their anger at Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, who seemed to follow Beijing’s lead in being slow to declare an emergency and implement a quarantine.

Even worse than the SARS mismanagement in the eyes of Hong Kong citizens was new legislation introduced in 2002 to implement Article 23 of the Basic Law, which serves as a constitution of sorts for the Hong Kong SAR. The article gave Beijing the power to enact laws to, among other things, “prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES

In 1997, China resumed control of Hong Kong, which had been under Great Britain’s rule since 1898. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, a designation which was set to last for the next 50 years. In the photograph above, Chinese Armed Forces raise the Chinese Flag at the Hong Kong convention center in celebration of the moment that Hong Kong fell back under Chinese rule.

from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.�

The people of Hong Kong saw the legislation as a direct assault on their freedom to join organizations, freedom of the press, and the right to remain free of searches and imprison-

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HU JINTAO ment without warrants. Again, Tung was slow to respond to rising public dissatisfaction, and on July 1, 2003, an estimated 500,000 people gathered in Hong Kong to protest the bill as well as Tung’s handling of the SARS crisis and the slowing economy.

Three high-ranking Hong Kong officials resigned over the next month, and the legislation was postponed.

President Hu was said to be disappointed with Tung’s handling of the situation, but publicly he backed him. According to Willy Wo-Lap Lam of CNN, sources in Beijing said that the Hong Kong government was directed by the Jiang Administration to implement a law putting Article 23 into practice. Thus, no matter how much Hu might disapprove of Tung, he was in favor of Tung enacting the bill.

In the midst of the July chaos, President Hu called for social stability in the city as a way of ensuring its continued economic success and said that some form of the “security” legislation, as it had come to be known, must be passed. Under this interpretation of the “one country, two systems” policy, the two systems were only of an economic nature, not a political or civil rights nature. Moreover, Hong Kong’s economic system was one that China had gradually been moving toward since Deng Xiaoping’s days—any social instability that might disrupt Hong Kong’s economy was seen as a threat to China’s move toward a more open market.

Although the increasingly unpopular Tung was the subject of more protests in 2004, what might have sealed his fate was the fact that Hong Kong’s economy did start to decline.

Property prices collapsed and unemployment rose sharply.

In December 2004, Hu publicly called on Tung to do a better job managing the territory. In March 2005, Tung resigned his post due to what he said were health reasons, though many in Hong Kong believed he was pressured to quit by the Hu Administration.

The situation in Hong Kong highlighted the conflict between economic reform and social reform on mainland China.

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES Many top conservative officials continued to resist the move toward market reform and the opening of the party to capitalists. Hu continued to insist that economic progress was the key to maintaining social stability. The debate between Marxism and capitalism reached a new level in March 2006 when it was openly discussed in the National People’s Congress.

Some leaders blamed the market reforms and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2003 for the growing income gap between rich and poor as well as between urban and rural areas, widespread corruption, pollution, and the resulting growing social unrest. Joseph Kahn of The New York Times, however, quoted Hu as insisting that China “unshakably persist with economic reform.”

Chinese Democracy As it became clearer that social stability and an open market economy were the two main and interconnected themes of Hu Jintao’s first term in office, democracy advocates began to lose heart. As early as July 2003, Hu disappointed those looking for signs of political reform. Many expected Hu to talk about at least some political change in his speech at the eighty-second anniversary of the founding of the CPC on July 1, but instead he focused on Jiang’s Three Represents. Prior to the event, the official media had talked about possible democratic elections in the CPC, but Hu made no mention of this in his address.

He did, however, bring up the subject in October of that year. As quoted by Joseph Kahn of The New York Times, Hu said the CPC “must enrich the forms of democracy, make democratic procedures complete, expand citizen’s orderly political participation, and ensure that the people can exercise democratic elections, democratic decision-making, democratic administration and democratic scrutiny.”

Hu gave no details on implementing democratic voting within the party at that time, and in 2004, China struck a pair of blows against democracy in Hong Kong. While Hu continued

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HU JINTAO to push the “one country, two systems” line, the Politburo Standing Committee approved new rules in April saying that the Hong Kong government must consult with Chinese leadership before changing the way Hong Kong leaders are chosen. In July, Beijing leaders prohibited popular elections for the Hong Kong chief executive in 2007 and said that they would not expand the number of legislature members up for vote to the general public in 2008.

An even more crushing setback to democratic hopes in China came in September 2004 when Hu insisted in a nationally televised speech marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the National People’s Congress that, according to the People’s Daily, “History proves following blindly western political systems would lead China to a dead end.” Instead he called for the CPC to police itself to combat corruption and called for members of the National People’s Congress to submit wholly to the party’s leadership. He also pushed the idea that China already is a democracy, with the People’s Daily summing up Hu’s take on the history of the PRC as the effort to “establish a brand new people’s democratic political system under which the people act as the master of the country.”

The Hu Administration continued to echo these themes over the following months. For instance, in an address to the U.S.-China Business Council in July 2005, PRC State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan said, “Development of democracy and rule of law in China continues with people’s rights as masters of the house being guaranteed according to law. Direct elections are held for village committees and urban neighborhood committees throughout the country.” In October, the government released a report called “Building of Political Democracy in China” which seemed to contradict its own title by stating that “the most important and fundamental principle for developing socialist political democracy in China” was for the CPC to maintain its one-party dominance in the country. However, the report also fell in with Hu’s

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES theme of appealing to the common man by highlighting the village-level elections.

The village elections and other popular Hu moves, such as reducing taxes for rural residents, implementing new anticorruption measures, and loosening restrictions on migrant farmers, did not slow the growing tide of public protests.

Government figures showed demonstrations growing from 58,000 in 2003 to 74,000 in 2004, and people continued to demonstrate in 2005 against land seizures, unemployment, and other social problems. Corruption remained the leading cause of public dissatisfaction, according to Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times.

Magnier also reported that even the village elections might have been more democracy than the party could handle. After it appeared that residents might vote out Communist leadership in the Taishi township in Guandong Province, many of the villagers became victims of attack by unidentified assailants.

Suppressing the Press While people continued to gather on the streets, Hu cracked down on one of the cornerstones of democracy: freedom of the press. In a June 2006 article in The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof reported that China imprisons more journalists than any other country. The country ranked 159th out of 167 countries in media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders’ Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2005. One case in particular illustrates the complex situation Hu Jintao faces in trying to reconcile a free press, an open market economy, and one-party Communist rule: the case of journalist Shi Tao. Authorities arrested Shi in November 2004 after he e-mailed details from an official party message to foreign Web sites.

The message warned journalists of the social unrest that could occur with the return of certain Chinese activists from overseas for the fifteenth anniversary of the killing of protesters at Tiananmen Square, according to the Paris-based Reporters

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HU JINTAO Without Borders. Shi does not deny leaking the information, but does refute the Chinese officials’ claim that the information was a state secret. The officials were able to track him down after Internet company Yahoo! provided them with information about Shi’s e-mail account that linked him to the e-mailed message. Shi was convicted in April 2005 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Yahoo! was harshly criticized by human rights groups around the world.

With more than 110 million Internet users and counting, China is a potentially huge market for Internet companies such as Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft, which hope to cash in on the country’s relatively new friendliness toward foreign corporations. Doing business in China does not come without its price, however, as the Shi case shows. All three of these companies have also come under sharp criticism for censoring their content at the request of Chinese authorities. Google, whose motto is “Don’t do evil,” counters by saying that offering censored content is better than offering no content at all.

As of yet, no Internet companies have been willing to risk their right to do business in China by standing up to official calls for censorship or cooperation in shutting down blogs, bulletin boards, and other electronic outlets for public opinion. In March 2005, authorities closed down or restricted a number of university and commercial bulletin boards, according to Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times. That same month, a university professor lost his job after posting an article criticizing the propaganda department. China has thus been able to keep relatively tight control of Internet content while enjoying the economic boost the industry provides.

Other journalists have fallen victim to Hu’s efforts to control public opinion as well. On September 17, 2004, New York Times researcher Zhao Yan was held by authorities for allegedly reporting to his colleagues that Jiang Zemin was about to give up his position as chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), according to Reporters Without Borders.

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Hong Kong Democratic Party activists protest against Yahoo! for passing on information that led to the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist. Yahoo! endured criticism from human rights organizations from around the world for its involvement with Chinese officials who denied their citizens freedom of the press.

Jiang did end up resigning as party CMC chairman that month, and state CMC chairman the following March. Nevertheless, Zhao wasn’t formally arrested until October 20, and then was held without charge until finally he was tried on June 16, 2006.

He was charged with leaking state secrets, a crime for which he

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HU JINTAO could be put to death. His trial was held in secret, and although he was allowed to speak, no witnesses were brought forth for questioning. The trial ended without a verdict.

Philip P. Yan of the Washington Post reported in April 2005 that almost a dozen journalists had been arrested in China over the preceding months, including Shi Tao, Zhao Yan, essayist Zhang Lin, and essayist Huang Jinqui, who received a 12-year sentence for “subversion.” In February 2006, Magnier reported that newspaper editor Wu Xianghu died after police beat him up due to an article he wrote.

However, in a positive move for free-press advocates, a open letter in February 2006 by former CPC officials and scholars took government censors to task for shutting down the journal, Freezing Point, after it published a piece on a historian who criticized Chinese textbooks. As quoted by Joseph Kahn of The New York Times, the letter questioned Hu’s campaign to maintain social order by cracking down on freedom of the press, stating “depriving the public of freedom of speech will bring disaster for our social and political transition and give rise to group confrontation and social unrest.

Experience has proved that allowing a free flow of ideas can improve stability and alleviate social problems.”

Religion in an Atheist Land While Hu has been cracking down on journalists and the Internet, he has also been tackling another perceived threat to social stability. The PRC is an officially atheist country, but its citizens practice many religions. The numbers of people practicing even the country’s five main religions (Buddhism, Catholic Christianity, Islam, Protestant Christianity, and Taoism) are hard to come by, because if somebody wants to move up in the party, he or she is unlikely to admit to a religious affiliation.

The U.S. State Department, however, offers some estimates in its 2005 International Religious Freedom Report. While

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES it admits to the various difficulties in coming up with exact numbers, such as the fact that Buddhists do not belong to congregations, it says that the population of China is about 8% Buddhist, 3.7 to 4% Protestant, 1.5% Muslim, and 0.8 to 1% Catholic. There are perhaps several hundred thousand Taoists as well.

The People’s Republic of China has had an uneasy relationship with religion, particularly during the Cultural Revolution when thousands of religious buildings and sites were destroyed.

The PRC wrote freedom of religion into its constitution in 1978, but the government still destroys unregistered places of worship, according to the U.S. State Department.

Although the country no longer lists the five main religions as “official” state religions, those faiths for the most part enjoy greater freedom than the smaller religions that the PRC calls “cults.” The most famous of these in China is the Falun Gong, a sect that caught the government off guard when 10,000 of its members marched on Beijing in 1999. The government cracked down hard, banning the religion and sending many of its members to “re-education camps” without a trial, according to Jim Yardley of The New York Times.

Since the CPC sees religion and party membership as incompatible, it views the Falun Gong and other “cults” as threats to the party itself. The CPC Central Committee formed the 610 Office in 1999 for the sole purpose of pursuing Falun Gong members. In 2004, the agency was given the task of going after other sects as well, such as Three Grades of Servants and Eastern Lightning, two Christian sects. Joseph Kahn of The New York Times refers to a 610 Office document, which sums up the goal of stopping smaller religious movements from growing in popularity. The document said, “The threat posed

by Falun Gong has been superseded by organizations in the countryside that are vying with the party for people’s hearts.

Some are even the spearhead of a movement to seize power from the Communist Party.”

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Falun Gong is a popular meditation group in China that the government sees as a threat to Communist rule. In the photograph above, officials shred Falun Gong publications in 1999.

DOMESTIC CHALLENGES By some measures the country has allowed more religious freedom under Hu. New regulations that took effect in March 2004 allowed some room for religions to publish literature, own property, and collect donations. Beijing got its first two Christian churches since the founding of the PRC. And, although the Hu government hopes that economic prosperity in the countryside will stop peasants from turning to religion, the opposite could prove to be true. As U.S. president George Bush said in a November 2005 speech calling for more religious freedom in China, “men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will eventually insist on controlling their own lives and their future.”

Developing the Autonomous Regions Buddhists have not fallen victim to state crackdowns on the “cults,” and more people in China belong to this religion than any other. In February 2004, a Tibetan Buddhist nun who was jailed in 1989 after calling for independence for Tibet was released. Buddhists remain without their main spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, however, who is still in exile in India.

Talks between Chinese officials and representatives of the Dalai Lama broke down in July 2006 when the officials accused the Dalai Lama of seeking independence for Tibet, according to news agency Reuters. In public, the Dalai Lama, seeking more freedom of worship for those in Tibet, had called for autonomy but not independence for the TAR. Many in Tibet hoped that the time Hu spent there as party secretary would make him more sympathetic to the conditions of its citizens. Instead of allowing for more religious freedom in the TAR, Hu has taken the same tack as in the rest of China, that is, trying to avoid social upheaval by lifting the region economically. In July 2006, he attended the opening of a 710-mile railway line linking Tibet with Qinghai Province. The hope is that the rail line—at more than 16,000 feet above sea level, the

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HU JINTAO highest in the world—will bring development to the TAR, still one of the poorest regions in the country.

The situation in Xinjiang is similar but even more complicated. This poor western region (the official name is Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) is mainly Muslim, with Islamic Uyghurs making up more than 45% of the population and Muslims of all ethnicities accounting for about 60%. Tensions between Muslims and Han have risen as the Han population in Xinjiang has grown from 6.7% in 1949 to more than 40% by the end of 2002, according to Colin Mackerras of Asia Times Online.

The region has seen several movements by Muslims hoping to break Xinjiang away from China to form its own country.

China has used the military to put down separatists movements here since the early nineteenth century. Today, Islamic separatists remain a concern for Hu, and the U.S. State Department says that religious activity by Muslims there is subject to more control than elsewhere in China. People under 18 in Xinjiang are not allowed to enter mosques, for example, or to receive religious education. In August 2002, China got the United States to recognize one of the region’s main Islamic separatist groups as a terrorist organization.

Hu has also tried to bring development to Xinjiang as a way of keeping people happy with the party. He has stepped up investment in the region under the China Western Development Program, and has even sought outside help, such as building highways and upgrading rural roads with loans from the World Bank and, more recently, starting a poverty-relief program with help from Germany. In general, Hu has followed Jiang Zemin’s lead in opening up to the rest of the world as a means of keeping the economy growing.

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Foreign Affairs Hu Jintao’s tour of Western Europe, Russia, and the United States

shortly before becoming general secretary and president was meant in large part to give him the exposure to foreign heads of state, a necessary step in order to take control of the People’s Republic of China. During the early years of Mao Zedong’s rule in particular, the PRC was isolated from much of the rest of the world. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms built upon the opening up of the country that began in large part with the Shanghai Communiqué, an agreement Mao and U.S. president Richard Nixon signed in 1972, promising to work toward more cooperation between the two countries.

Under Jiang Zemin, the PRC increased its trade with and therefore ties to many countries, especially the United States.

The result was much warmer relations with the United States than during Mao’s or Deng’s days. As Hu came into office, the pressure was on him to keep the economy rolling by

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“In today’s world, countries are increasingly interdependent, and the destiny of their people is more connected than ever before.”

—Hu Jintao

maintaining good ties with China’s neighbors and major trade partners. He has done so by pushing the concept of China’s “peaceful development.” In a speech given in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 2006, Hu assured his American audience that “China adheres to a path of peaceful development. It is firmly committed to promoting development domestically, and maintaining world peace and promoting common development internationally.” He continued, “In today’s world, countries are increasingly interdependent, and the destiny of their people is more connected than ever before.

A peaceful environment is the prerequisite for development.”

A history of troubled relations with countries such as Japan, Russia, and the United States would complicate matters for him, however.

A Longtime Enemy China’s history with Japan is perhaps more troubled than that with any other country. Though the first major war occurred between the two nations in 1894, it is Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 and some of the events that occurred during World War II that remain fresh in the minds of many Chinese officials even today.

Japan at that time was an empire bent on expanding its control of Asia. It invaded Manchuria in 1931 before taking on China in 1937. China was then known as the Republic of China and was led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (also known as the Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek. In 1941,

FOREIGN AFFAIRS the war between China and Japan became part of World War II. Chinese citizens as well as soldiers came under brutal treatment at the hands of the Japanese invaders. The most famous incident is the Rape of Nanking, during which Japanese soldiers killed an estimated 300,000 Chinese men, women, and children in addition to committing other war crimes such as theft, rape, and arson.

Nanking and other Japanese atrocities during the war remain an open wound in China. The situation was not helped by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The memorial pays tribute to many Japanese civilians and soldiers killed in various wars, but includes the names of convicted war criminals who committed their offenses against China. In 2004, when the two met at a conference in Chile, President Hu demanded that Koizumi stop visiting the shrine, according to Raymond Bonner and Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times.

Koizumi did not agree to this demand (though he did not directly refuse, either), leading to an increase in anti-Japanese feelings in China.

Oil and natural gas have also been a trouble spot between Japan and China. In 2004, China passed Japan to become the world’s second largest consumer of energy, trailing only the United States. Later that year, a Chinese People’s Liberation Navy nuclear submarine entered Japanese territorial waters in the East China Sea. Though China claimed it to be a mistake and apologized for the incident, Japan viewed it as China’s attempt to make a play for the area’s oil and gas resources.

In January 2005, Japan stoked China’s anger when Russia announced that it would build an oil pipeline along a route requested by Japan. Russia, the second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, had originally said it would build the pipeline overland to Daqing in northeastern China, but then Japan said it would finance much of the pipeline if Russia instead built it out to Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan.

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Japan and China have a long and troubled past. In this 1937 photograph, Chinese gunners practice their shooting in preparation for their battle with the Japanese. That year the Japanese invaded China, beginning a war between the two countries.

Further tensions rose in February 2005, when Japan announced an agreement with the United States that claimed Taiwan to be a “strategic objective.� China considers Taiwan to be part of China, and in 2004, Hu threatened to use force against Taiwan if it tried to claim independence. China

FOREIGN AFFAIRS interpreted the language of the U.S.-Japan agreement as a threat by those two nations to defend Taiwan against China.

The final straw for many in China came when Japan approved new junior-high textbooks that downplay Japan’s aggression against China and other Asian countries during the early twentieth century. This, along with efforts by China to stop Japan from joining the United Nation Security Council, spiked anti-Japanese sentiment in China and led to demonstrations against Japan in April 2005, Bonner and Onishi say.

Thousands of Chinese took to the streets in Beijing in legal protests that saw demonstrators throw rocks toward the Japanese embassy and call for boycotts of Japanese goods. Officials in China allowed the protests to go on for several days and build into more violent demonstrations against Japanese offices and businesses before ordering them to end.

Later in April, President Hu met with Prime Minister Koizumi at an Asian-African summit in Indonesia. During the summit, Koizumi again apologized for his country’s aggression against other Asian nations during World War II. Hu again demanded that Koizumi stop visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, but once more Koizumi refused to make such a promise.

The meeting marked the start of an easing of tensions between China and Japan, however. Though Koizumi would never be invited to China as long as he continued to visit the shrine, the countries held several meetings to negotiate jointly exploration of the East China Sea and tapping its resources.

Wenran Jiang of the Jamestown Foundation reported in June 2006 that support for Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine is waning in Japan, with seven former prime ministers calling on Koizumi to halt the visits. Koizumi stepped down as prime minister in September 2006, and his successor, Shinzo Abe, has continued the shrine visits. Like Koizumi, Abe insists these visits are personal, not official, business.

China is also now Japan’s largest trading partner, taking over that title from the United States in 2004. The countries

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HU JINTAO now do about $212 billion in annual trade with one another, according to Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post. This provides extra incentive for both Hu and Prime Minister Abe to reach common ground on the issues that separate them.

Communist Rivals Japan is not the only close neighbor with whom China has had a difficult history. Although the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union were the dominant Communist countries during most of the twentieth century, for many years the two were bitter rivals.

In February 1917, a revolution occurred in Russia, which saw the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. Another revolution took place in October in which Vladimir Lenin led the Marxist Communists in seizing power. Lenin’s Red Army was challenged by the anti-Communist White Army in the Russian Civil War. Following the Red Army’s victory in 1922, the Soviet Union—made up of Russia and many other countries of the old Russian empire—was founded as the world’s first Socialist nation.

The Soviet Union, then led by Communist Party general secretary Joseph Stalin, initially supported the Communist Party of China when the CPC was fighting Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in China’s Civil War. The Soviet Union supplied the CPC with weapons it seized from Japan in World War II. When Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Soviet Union had an ally for a neighbor, one also based upon Marxist-Leninist theory. The Soviets sent engineers and other professionals as well as equipment to China to help the country update its infrastructure.

The close ties did not last long, however. Mao grew unhappy with the direction the Soviet Union took under Nikita

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The relationship between China and Russia, the two major Communist countries during the twentieth century, has been both peaceful and tumultuous. (Top) Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin are photographed at Stalin’s birthday celebration in 1957. (Bottom) Mao Zedong appears with Nikita Kruschev in Moscow in 1957.

Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor. Khrushchev spoke out against many of Stalin’s practices and, as far as Mao was concerned, steered the Soviet Union away from true Marxism-Leninism.

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HU JINTAO Relations between the countries worsened during the 1960s as the Soviet Union pulled advisors from China, refused to help China develop nuclear weapons, and supported India in its border war against China, among other things. The armies of the two countries actually exchanged fire in a series of skirmishes along a section of the border in 1969.

Things calmed down in the 1970s as China emerged from the isolationist years of the Cultural Revolution and implemented economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Ironically, the PRC and its neighbor did not actually become friendly toward one another again until after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991 and Russia was no longer a Communist country. The two nations found themselves growing closer as a result of their attempts to expand their economies, China’s need for Russia’s oil and gas resources, and the fact that the United States was now the world’s only superpower. In 2001, they, along with some other former Soviet Union member states, formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for security from terrorists and separatist movements. Later that year, China and Russia signed a treaty for economic and diplomatic cooperation.

Despite the closer links between China and Russia, the Chinese leadership, including Hu Jintao, have stressed that they have no intention of going the way of the old Soviet Union and abandoning Communism altogether. According to Philip P. Pan of the Washington Post, Hu said in a 2005 speech before the Central Committee that the Soviet Union broke up because its leaders, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in particular, allowed too much “openness and pluralism”—in other words, they gave the citizens too many freedoms and were too tolerant of ideas that did not coincide with Marxism-Leninism.

This further explains Hu’s clamp-downs on media, including his continued support of a media blackout on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Pan reports that Hu placed the blame on

FOREIGN AFFAIRS Gorbachev for allowing the United States and others to spread these destabilizing ideas in the Soviet Union.

Hu has, however, sought to continue Jiang Zemin’s efforts to put aside many of China and Russia’s past differences that arose during the Soviet era. Much as trade is serving as an incentive for Hu to form peaceful relations with Japan, so are both trade and oil playing similar roles in his dealings with Russia. Hu chose Russia for his first foreign tour as president in May 2003. Before leaving, Hu emphasized the growing trade between the two countries over the preceding four years in particular. The People’s Daily said that Hu told Russian media that the “further enhancement of economic and trade cooperation is of great importance to consolidating the Sino [Chinese]Russian strategic partnership of cooperation.”

Hu and Russian president Vladimir Putin met twice in 2004, first at the fourth Summit Meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan, then at the twelfth APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Chile. In October of that year, Hu and Putin attended the signing of an agreement settling the last of the border disputes that almost led to all-out war in 1969.

Relations then hit a speed bump when Putin decided that the 1,500-mile pipeline across Siberia would end at the Sea of Japan rather than Daqing. Putin’s administration sought to soften the blow to China, however. In January 2005, Russian energy minister Viktor B. Khristenko announced that the state-controlled Rosneft Oil Company may sell 20 percent of its Yuganskneftegaz oil production subsidiary to China National Petroleum Corporation, as reported by Chris Buckley of the New York Times. The two countries also left open the possibility of building a branch off the pipeline into China.

Besides oil, China also depends heavily on Russia for equipping its military. The European Union, under pressure

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Hu Jintao and Russian president Vladimir Putin toast at the end of the signing ceremony that settled border disputes in 2004. The two Communist powers, Russia and China, have had a rocky past, but in 2006, Hu Jintao stated that Russia is one of China’s most important partners.

by the United States and Japan, said in 2005 that it would continue its arms embargo against China, forcing China to rely more upon Russia for weapons. Matthew Oresman of the China-Eurasia Forum says that Russia has not provided China with all the military equipment it has requested, but

FOREIGN AFFAIRS it still remains a major arms supplier to China. In October 2004, they agreed to hold their first large-scale joint military exercises in nearly 50 years. Furthermore, Oresman says, Russia has provided key political support to China, for instance by being the only country to stick by China’s side after Tiananmen. The two countries have come a long way since their split in the 1960s.

In his pre-trip interview with Russian media in May 2003, Hu stated a goal of bringing Chinese-Russian relations to a new high. In May 2006, the Xinhua News Agency reported a speech

by Hu in which he said that the two nations had achieved that goal. Russia is now, he said, “one of China’s most important strategic and cooperative partners,” with the two maintaining “effective consultation and cooperation on international and regional issues.”

The Friendly Enemies China’s relations with the United States are even more complicated than those with Russia or Japan. China and the United States are major trading partners, yet the United States consistently speaks out against its huge trade deficit with China.

China depends on the United States as a market for its goods but is fearful of the influence of U.S. culture in China, particularly in relation to human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The United States counts on China as an ally in the war on terrorism, yet is concerned about China’s increasing investment in its military. When the Soviet Union collapsed, observes Arthur Waldron of The Wall Street Journal, the United States and China no longer had the common enemy that brought them together.

Still, as he has done with Russia and Japan, President Hu has made stable relations with the United States one of the goals of his administration. This is a far cry from some of the speeches Hu made before becoming president, such as his strong words after the NATO bombing of the Chinese

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HU JINTAO embassy in Belgrade. In his book China’s Leaders: The New Generation, Cheng Li points out three other speeches in 1999 in which Hu played upon the nationalist feelings of Chinese at the time by telling people to beware of efforts to Westernize China.

Hu continued this theme after becoming general secretary and president, for instance with his 2004 address to the Central Committee in which he spoke of a “strategic plot to Westernize and split China.”

Hu strikes a friendlier tone when speaking to U.S. audiences and media. In his April 2006 speech in Washington, D.C., for example, Hu said, “China-U.S. exchanges in cooperation in culture, education, and in science and technology serve as a bridge for enhancing friendship between our two peoples.

Both countries share a keen interest in important issues like environmental protection, public health, climate change and humanitarian assistance, and have conducted effective cooperation in these areas.”

Also in this speech, Hu touched upon one of the stickier issues in U.S.-China relations: The question of Taiwan involves China’s core interests. The principles laid down in the three joint communiqués should be strictly observed. This is crucial for the sound and stable growth of China-U.S. relations. We will continue to make every effort and work together with our Taiwan compatriots with every sincerity to ensure the peaceful and stable development of cross-straits relations and China’s peaceful reunification. But we will never allow the Taiwan independence/secessionist forces to split Taiwan from China under any name or in any form.

The issue of Taiwan continues to hang like a dark cloud over U.S.-China relations.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS The Taiwan Question When the Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang in China’s Civil War in 1949, the Nationalists fled across the Taiwan Straits to the large island of Taiwan, which had been held by Japan during World War II. The Kuomintang set up the new capital of the Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei, Taiwan’s biggest city.

Because of the Civil War, neither the Republic of China nor the People’s Republic of China was invited to sign the postWWII San Francisco Peace Treaty between Japan and the Allies in 1950. Thus, a second treaty was necessary in 1952. This was the Taipei Treaty, in which Japan admitted it had no rights to Taiwan, but the treaty did not directly say that Taiwan belongs to the ROC. Thus, to this day both the PRC and the ROC claim that they are the true government of Taiwan. The PRC claims a one-country, two-systems model for Taiwan, just as it has with Hong Kong, but the ROC says it is an independent country.

Chiang Kai-shek continued to run a dictatorship in Taiwan until his death in 1975. The government gradually introduced democratic reforms, and in 2000, the Kuomintang lost power when Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party was elected president. He was reelected in 2005 by a narrow margin.

In both elections, he ran a pro-independence campaign, much to the dismay of the PRC. Before the 2000 election, China said it would respond with military force if Chen were elected. It did not take such action after the election, but China’s effort to modernize its armed forces in recent years has been a worry for the United States, which has committed itself to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. When China started putting more ballistic missiles in position on its side of the Taiwan Straits, the United States said it would sell Taiwan an advanced missile defense system.

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HU JINTAO When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he promised to back Taiwan as an independent country. In 2001, he declared that the United States would do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself,” according to Paul Reynolds of BBC News Online. However, Bush has also said that Taiwan is not an independent country and should not seek independence. In a press conference held with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in December 2003, Bush was asked about a proposal in Taiwan to hold a referendum on independence the following March.

Bush said, “the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose.” Wen said in response, “we very much appreciate the position adopted by President Bush toward the latest moves and developments in Taiwan—that is, the attempt to resort to referendum of various kinds as an excuse to pursue Taiwan independence.”

Military Tensions Despite President Bush’s and Premier Wen’s words in December 2003, strains continued to arise between the two nations over military matters. In July 2004, when the United States was negotiating an $18 billion deal to sell missiles, submarines, and aircraft to Taiwan, Hu phoned Bush personally to warn him against such a move, according to BBC News. In February 2005, it was the United States’ turn to express concerns about China’s military. Speaking at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the United States was worried about an intelligence report stating that China’s Navy could pass the U.S. Navy in size within a decade. At the same hearing, an intelligence official said, “Beijing’s military modernization and military buildup could tilt the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. Improved Chinese capabilities threaten U.S. forces in the region.”

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

A growth in China’s power projection understandably leads other nations to question China’s intentions.

At the Asian Security Summit in Singapore in June and again at China’s Central Party School in October of that year, Rumsfeld identified the United States’s main concern with China’s military buildup as the secrecy with which it was being conducted. At the Central Party School he said, “A growth in China’s power projection understandably leads other nations to question China’s intentions, and to adjust their behavior in some fashion. The rapid, non-transparent nature of this buildup contributes to their uncertainty.”

However, the sheer size and growth of China’s military worries the United States as well. Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times reports that even though China cut more than 200,000 military jobs over two years, it still had 2.25 million active-duty personnel at the end of 2005, giving it the largest armed force in the world. The United States is second with 1.63 million. China also increased its reported military budget 12.6 percent from 2004 to around $30 billion in 2005 (compared to $420.7 billion for the U.S. in 2005).

In his New Year’s Day 2006 address, Hu reaffirmed China’s commitment to “adhere to the fundamental policy of ‘peaceful reunification and one country, two systems,’ . . . never give up efforts on promoting peaceful reunification, . . . never compromise on opposing ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionist activities.” In his own New Year’s address, however, President Chen raised the stakes. Under the right conditions, he said, the country could hold a referendum on a new constitution by 2007, according to Caroline Gluck of BBC News. China’s fear is that the new constitution would declare

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HU JINTAO Taiwan independent. Then in February, Chen declared that guidelines on reunifying with China, adopted in 1991, had “ceased to apply,” and the National Unification Council set up at the same time had “ceased to function.”

In the meantime, the United States maintains its policy of recognizing Taiwan as part of China, while being prepared to defend the island against a Chinese invasion. On the other hand, Hu sticks by the Anti-Secession Law he signed in March 2005, which states that China will fight a declaration of independence by Taiwan with (as a last resort) “non-peaceful means and other necessary measures.”

Nuclear Concerns Taiwan might be China’s priority in the Asia-Pacific, but it has not been the only potentially volatile issue in the region for the Hu Administration. On February 10, 2005, North Korea confirmed what its enemy the United States and others had long expected—it was in possession of nuclear weapons. The country also said it was pulling out of the disarmament talks hosted by China and which also involved Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States. This left China in a tricky spot: It is North Korea’s closest ally and economic investor, yet it claimed it was uncertain whether or not North Korea actually had nuclear weapons.

North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is one of China’s few remaining Communist neighbors in Asia. Like Taiwan and much of the rest of Asia, the entire Korean Peninsula was occupied by Japan during World War II. After the war, the Soviet Union controlled the peninsula north of the thirty-eighth north parallel (latitude line) while the United States held everything south of the thirty-eighth parallel. The two wartime allies could not agree on how Korea would be run and as a result two competing governments arose. The Communist North Korea began the Korean War on June 25, 1950, when it invaded South Korea in

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Hu Jintao shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in 2005. In 2006, China joined the United Nations Security Council when it condemned North Korea for its missile testing. China’s failure to bring North Korea to the negotiation table has strained its relationship with the United States.

an attempt to unify the two countries. Although a cease-fire was signed on July 27, 1953, a peace treaty was never signed and the Korean War officially continues to this day.

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HU JINTAO North Korea has had only two leaders in its nearly 60 years.

The first was Kim Il Sung, who reigned as a dictator until his death in 1994. His son Kim Jong-il officially took power in 1997. Under these two, the country has remained one of the most secretive and isolated in the world, with few friends outside of China. It has opened up somewhat under Kim Jong-il, but the nuclear issue has strained relations even with its large Communist neighbor.

China, a nuclear power itself, is worried both about having an unstable government with nuclear weapons on its border and about all the refugees that would flee to China if the North Korean government collapsed, according to James Brooke and David E. Sanger of The New York Times. Yet, it has resisted the U.S. government’s pressure to try to influence North Korea politically and economically to give up its nuclear program. China’s position is complicated by the fact that North Korea wants to negotiate directly with the United States, but the United States refuses, wanting instead to resume the six-party talks.

The situation grew more tense on July 5, 2006, when North Korea test-fired six missiles, including a long-range missile which failed shortly after launch. Hu resisted calls for sanctions against North Korea, but after nearly two weeks of pressure from the United States and Japan, China joined the rest of the United Nations Security Council in passing a resolution condemning the missile tests and calling for North Korea to “suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile program,” the Washington Post reported.

After the resolution passed, Hu struck a diplomatic tone, saying, “Both sides agreed to continue their efforts to move forward with the six-party talks so that at the end of the day the entire Korean peninsula can be denuclearized in a peaceful way through dialogue and negotiation.” Yet China’s failure to bring North Korea back to the table for negotiations represented a

FOREIGN AFFAIRS diplomatic failure for China and remained a sore spot in its relations with the United States.

Business Before Politics The North Korean crisis, though it may have caused a strain in U.S.-China diplomacy, never really threatened what had become the most important factor in relations between the two countries under President Hu and President Bush: trade.

According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, the two countries did more than $280 billion in trade in 2005, though the United States imported more than $201 billion from China than it exported to China, the largest-ever U.S. deficit with any country. The first half of 2006 showed a similar trend, with the United States running a $101 billion trade deficit with China during those six months.

Bush has often spoken out against China on human rights issues, particularly freedom of religion, but in meetings between Bush and Hu, trade has always been at the top of the agenda.

In November 2005, Bush met with the Dalai Lama before embarking on a trip to China. The meeting drew sharp criticism from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao who said, “We urge the U.S. Government to stop interfering in China’s religious affairs under the guise of the religion issue.”

But the day before the meeting, Bush did not list freedom or democracy among the topics he planned to discuss in China, according to Peter Baker of the Desert News.

When he arrived in Kyoto, Japan, on the way to China, Bush, who relies heavily upon Christian conservatives in the United States for political support, said that “the people of China want more freedom to express themselves—to worship without state control and to print Bibles and other sacred texts without fear of punishment.” When he taped his weekly radio address in Beijing a few days later, however, he made no mention of religious freedom or other human

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HU JINTAO rights, according to Peter Wallsten and Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times. Instead, his main topics were trade and economic issues.

While in China, Bush did make an effort to please his religious supporters back home by attending an official Protestant church in Beijing. Afterwards he said, ‘’My hope is that the government of China will not fear Christians who gather to worship openly.’’ But in meetings with Hu, the two leaders focused on trade and business, with Hu promising to reduce the huge trade gap between the two countries. “Economics is the main thing now,” said former ambassador to China, James Lilley, as reported by Peter Baker. “Democracy for China? Don’t hold your breath.”

Leading up to Bush’s visit, Hu refused to address any of the human rights cases on a list Bush presented to Hu earlier that year, say Sanger and Joseph Kahn of The New York Times. Bush gave Hu the same list in April 2006, but still with no results. For his part, Hu said during Bush’s November 2005 visit that “the Chinese people are exercising their right of democratic elections [and] democratic decision-making.”

Despite Hu and Bush not seeing eye-to-eye on the matters of human rights and democracy, they agreed not to let their differences get in the way of expanding economic relations.

When Hu visited the United States in April 2006, Bush started off his welcome speech with these words: “The United States and China are two nations divided by a vast ocean, yet connected through a global economy that has created opportunity for both our peoples.” He went on to say, “Our two nations share an interest in expanding free and fair trade, which has increased the prosperity of both the American people and the Chinese people.” Hu echoed these sentiments, saying, “In particular, mutually beneficial and win-win China-U.S. economic cooperation and trade benefit our two peoples and promote the economic growth in the Asia[-]Pacific region

FOREIGN AFFAIRS and the world at large. Indeed, they have become an important foundation for China-U.S. relations.”

Turning to the future, Hu vowed to “continue to pursue the strategy of boosting domestic demand and ensure fast and balanced economic and social development in China.” Those looking ahead to a second term for President and General Secretary Hu would be either disappointed or pleased by this stay-the-course statement, depending on how they viewed Hu’s first term.

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The Future for Hu and China Many observers of China have long believed that Hu Jintao would

not be able to run the country the way he really wants until after he secured a second term as general secretary at the seventeenth National Party Congress in 2007. In 2001, even before Hu was appointed general secretary, journalist Yao Jin guessed in the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief newsletter that “Hu will show himself as a force for faster political and economic changes in the second five years of his rule when Jiang and other party elders are too old to exert their influence.” CNN’s Willy Wo-Lap Lam echoed this in 2002, when he said that Hu would probably have to wait until a second term before he “will feel comfortable enough to thrash out his new ideas and programs in economic and political reform.”

Both of these predictions were made at a time when it seemed Jiang Zemin might try to hang on as Central Military Commission Chairman until 2007. Since Jiang gave up the

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THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA

Chinese leaders stand during the opening session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, in March 2007. Many people believe that Hu Jintao (second row, third from the left) will become a more effective leader during his second term as leader, further concentrating on the policies that he focused on during his first term.

party and state CMC posts in 2004 and 2005, he has not exerted as much influence behind the scenes as many thought he might, and there are no evident threats to Hu’s leadership from other party members.

Yet, the idea of the “real” Hu emerging in a second term persists. For example, Robert Marquand of the Christian Science Monitor quotes a party source who said in April 2006, “We won’t see Hu’s real face until 2007.” According to Marquand,

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HU JINTAO “As China prepares for the 2008 Olympic games, Hu is expected to get his main team in place, and begin to address how a oneparty system might adjust to global complexities.”

General wisdom says that, having established himself during his first term, Hu can now concentrate on the policies that really matter to him in a second term. Based on his April 2006 comments in Washington, D.C., however, it seems that the issues that Hu will choose to focus on in a second term will not stray far from what he focused on in his first term. Many of the challenges that Hu and China faced when he came to power in late 2002 and early 2003 remain, and Hu has indicated that he will continue to tackle them the same way. Working in Hu’s favor, however, are some expanded opportunities as well as new ones that he and his country did not have five years earlier.

Lingering Problems Hu’s primary concern heading into a second term is stability, with the goal of keeping control of the country solely in the hands of the Communist Party. His primary way of dealing with that concern is economic development. Hu’s decision to focus energies on developing some of the poorest regions of the country such as Xinjiang and Gansu has been popular and has yielded results. Despite this, he is still faced with growing unrest among laid-off workers, peasants who have had land seized from them without what they consider fair compensation, decommissioned soldiers, and others.

China’s Dongbei region in the northeast presents a particularly challenging situation for Hu. Once the economic powerhouse in the country, Dongbei used to account for 16% of China’s industrial production in the early 1980s, even though it only had 8% of the nation’s population, according to Brook Larmer of National Geographic. Since then, its share of industrial output has fallen to less than 9%.

Although many other parts of the country have benefited from large amounts of foreign investment, particularly from

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA Japan, Dongbei still relies on state-owned enterprises for more than 70 percent of its industrial production. Because of this, Larmer says, the region is more prone than most to the very problems at the top of Hu’s list: high unemployment, corruption, a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, and a high potential for social unrest.

The country is trying to address the problems here and elsewhere by investing money in the situation. Larmer reports that China has spent $7.5 billion in Dongbei so far. Much of this money has gone toward urban centers, for instance to retrain workers for high-tech jobs. In other parts of the country, the government is concentrating its efforts on rural regions. As part of China’s Five-Year Plan from 2006–2010, Premier Wen Jiabao said that starting by the end of 2007 no rural students would have to pay fees for nine-year compulsory education, according to Fu Jing of the China Daily. This will cost the government more than $27 billion over the course of the plan.

Even with the Five-Year Plan, however, Jing said the government does not expect the gap between urban and rural income levels to improve. Furthermore, the very economic development that was designed to deal with the main social woes has led to another problem: pollution. Linfen in Shanxi Province is the world’s most polluted city, according to a May 2006 World Bank report. In fact, the report placed 16 of the 20 most polluted cities on the planet in China.

Coal has powered most of China’s industry. The dirty energy source produces sulfur dioxide, which results in approximately 400,000 premature deaths annually in China, reports Keith Bradsher and David Barboza of The New York Times.

China’s coal use is also expected to add more global-warming gases to the atmosphere over the next 25 years than all industrialized countries combined, they say.

The pollution from coal plants contributes to acid rain, which in turn pollutes rivers. Acid rain falls on more than a third of China, and most of the rivers in the country are

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Coal is a key contributor to China’s industry. Although coal is a pollutant and has contributed to approximately 400,000 premature deaths annually, it continues to fuel a majority of the country’s energy consumption. In the photograph above, coal miners work outside of a mine in China’s northern Shanxi province.

polluted, according to Ching-Ching Ni of the Los Angeles Times. All of these byproducts of China’s industrial complex as well as direct cases of pollution—such as a 2005 chemical spill into the Songhua River that left millions without drinking water for days—have resulted in more protests against environmental problems. Ching-Ching quoted State

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA Environmental Protection Administration director Zhou Shengxian as acknowledging that, “The issue of pollution has become a ‘blasting fuse’ of social instability.”

The country is starting to take measures to combat pollution, such as implementing automobile fuel efficiency standards that exceed those in the United States, requiring sulfur-removing devices on smokestacks at coal-fired plants, encouraging conservation, and developing alternative energy sources. Premier Wen has taken on the environment as one of his pet projects and called for pollution control inspections for local officials, says Chris Buckley of Reuters.

However, according to Buckley, in August 2006 Zhou said that the economy was still growing so fast that the country could not meet its emissions and energy usage reduction goals.

Pollution is, thus, expected to get worse before it gets better, and so the anti-pollution demonstrations could likely continue.

Hu is, thus, not counting on economic development alone to solve the problem of social unrest. He shows no signs of letting up on crackdowns on the press and public demonstrations. To this end, two senior generals described a plan in a Central Committee publication in January 2006 to bolster the People’s Armed Police (PAP), Mark Magnier of the Los Angeles Times reports. The PAP is a paramilitary force responsible for tackling domestic threats such as terrorists, separatists, and “large-scale mass incidents”—in other words, large protests.

While no reliable numbers are available, Magnier reports that the PAP is believed to have more than doubled in size since 1991 to more than 1.2 million members.

Echoing statements by Hu himself (for example when addressing the Central Committee in September 2004), the generals also used the article to attack “Western hostile forces [who] have never abandoned political plots to Westernize and divide our country,” and to warn security forces to place their loyalty with the Communist Party above all others, Magnier

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China has been seeking to position itself as a major player on the global diplomatic scene. says. Building up paramilitary forces will thus accomplish another goal—it will free up the military for a possible conflict with the United States.

China is worried about the United States not only because it backs Taiwan but also for what China views as America’s attempt to assert its influence over all of Asia and beyond.

It sees the Bush administration’s disregard for international laws and institutions as part of a United States effort to control trade, energy, and foreign policy not only in Asia but all over the world. Many observers of China, such as Joseph Kahn of The New York Times, Jephraim P. Gundzik of Asia Times Online, and John Tkacik of the Heritage Foundation, have written about the country’s and Hu’s desire to counter U.S. global hegemony, or single-handed political and military domination.

New Opportunities Although providing a counterbalance to the United States poses a challenge for China, it also presents an opportunity for Hu. No longer the isolationist country it was under Mao Zedong, China has been seeking to position itself as a major player on the global diplomatic scene. Hu’s desire to stay in the center of the North Korean nuclear negotiations is one example of this.

Besides establishing more trade and friendlier relations with old enemies Russia and Japan, China has also been forming closer ties to other neighbors, particularly in the oil- and gas-rich region of Central Asia. In March 2004, China reached an agreement with Kazakhstan for a 1,900mile railway from China to Western Europe. In May 2004,

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA

A woman covers her face to protect herself from the fumes and pollution caused by passing vehicles. Rapid industrialization and coal-produced energy consumption have caused a great increase in pollution in China. The government has begun to implement many policies to combat the harmful effects on the natural environment.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan visited China and signed several economic and trade deals including the $3 billion, 1,800-mile Atasu-Alashankou oil pipeline. Following a meeting with Hu on the visit, Nazarbayev said “the purpose of his visit is to make China Kazakhstan’s closest partner,” according to a television report cited by John C.K. Daly of the Jamestown Foundation.

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HU JINTAO China is banking on its security arrangements with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to help fight the threat of Islamic terrorists and separatists in China’s border provinces, especially Xinjiang. By establishing strong economic and military ties with these countries, China also hopes to win more influence in Central Asia than rivals India, the United States, and others.

In a March 2004 article in The New York Times, Howard W. French reported on several measures China has taken to win friends in the region. Besides the pipeline and railway deals with Kazakhstan, China has conducted joint military operations with Kyrgyzstan, sent a large number of officials to the region on diplomatic missions, and in general pushed the concept of China’s “peaceful rise” in relation to its Central Asian neighbors. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in particular have turned to China as a model of combining strict political controls and economic growth, French said.

Many of these problems and opportunities come together in perhaps the highest profile opportunity of Hu’s second term, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. China was turned down for the 2000 Olympics in large part due to its record on human rights. In March 2001, a U.S. congressional committee said that human rights abuses should keep China from getting the 2008 Olympics as well. Leading up to the 2008 games, however, Hu has continued his crackdowns on protests and the media and dashed hopes for extensive democratic reforms. He has, for example, prevented workers and farmers from organizing independent trade unions as well as various groups from starting political organizations.

Instead, he has focused on maintaining stability, developing poor regions, repairing some of China’s widespread environmental damage (in large part thanks to Premier Wen’s policies), and fighting corruption, including firing the vice

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA mayor of Beijing, who was heading up preparations for the Olympics. Through these measures, Hu hopes to present the 2008 Olympics as a shining example of China’s “peaceful rise” and gain respect for the country.

The Fifth Generation Even if Hu is able to achieve China’s “peaceful rise,” many observers of China such as Willy Wo-Lap Lam and David Shambaugh believe the Communist Party of China might be a victim of its own success. Writing in China’s Leadership in the 21st Century (edited by David M. Finkelstein and Maryanne Kivlehan), Lam and Shambaugh both suggested that as the Chinese people become more prosperous they will demand more democratic and other freedoms, making a continued CPC monopoly on power impossible.

Whether or not this happens will depend in large part upon the Fifth Generation of leaders, loosely defined as those born between 1950 and 1965. Although these leaders most likely will not take power until the eighteenth National Party Congress in 2012, many of them will rise to prominence before that, much as Hu did before the sixteenth Party Congress.

Fifth Generation members generally share some things in common, such as the fact that they were young during the Cultural Revolution, went to college in China, spent their early careers during Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, and have had more exposure to the United States than have their predecessors. Despite this, Lam identified several factions within the Fifth Generation that could vie for power, including some conservatives who would try to slow down or even reverse the pace of market reforms. A rise of nationalists within the Fifth Generation leadership would threaten to set back relations with the United States and other Western countries. In his second term, Hu will try to counter these forces and set his desired course for the Fifth Generation through both his policies and his personnel appointments.

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HU JINTAO

President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev (left), shakes hands with Hu Jintao after the two leaders signed agreements in December 2006, the fifteenth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two nations.

With these ties, China hopes to win greater influence in Central Asia.

As A. Lyman Miller of the Hoover Institution writes in the China Leadership Monitor, “Soon after consolidating his position at the top of the PRC political order, Jiang moved more

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA quickly to promote his associates in the central party apparatus.

Now that Hu has completed a comparable transition, he may move more assertively to do the same, especially as 2007 and the 17th Party Congress approach.” Hu has no obvious protégé to promote through the ranks as Jiang Zemin had with Zeng Qinghong. Instead, he may take a broader approach and try to build up alliances with many rising leaders at different levels.

Lam, writing for the Jamestown Foundation in January 2006, reported on Hu’s promotion of dozens of former Communist Youth League members to positions in both the state government and the party. These appointees are expected to gain even more power at the seventeenth Party Congress. Hu has also used promotions to exert more influence over the last branch of power he took control of: the military. Hu used his role as chairman of the Central Military Commission to make a series of military appointments at the end of 2005. Lam wrote, “Hu has resorted to mainly two tactics to build up his credentials as a commander-in-chief that passes muster. The first is to elevate the sons of First- and Second-Generation revolutionaries to senior PLA slots.” The second tactic has been to build up support among the navy and air force by appointing officers from those branches into top PLA posts normally reserved for generals from the ground forces.

Control of the military is essential for Hu not only in dealing with a potential showdown with the United States over Taiwan or in dealing with domestic problems such as protests and separatists but in discouraging any political rivals—either within his own Fourth Generation or from the Fifth Generation—from trying to unseat him. In consolidating his hold over the PLA, Lam said, Hu Jintao is seeking to avoid following in the footsteps of Hu Yaobang, whose purging from the party was made easier by the fact that he had no influence over the People’s Liberation Army. The unlikelihood of such a fate for Hu Jintao can be credited to the job the Communist Party has done in reducing internal power struggles as well as

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HU JINTAO Hu’s accomplishments in promoting stability—by force if necessary. Whether or not the Fifth Generation leaders follow Hu’s examples or take a more liberal, or perhaps even more hardline, approach to domestic problems in particular will depend heavily upon how much influence Hu has over the makeup of the Fifth Generation leadership.

Conclusion Although Hu Jintao may have been a big mystery to Western observers in particular before he became president and general secretary, his first term in office has turned out just as many predicted it would. In fact, it has in many ways mirrored his career path before he took power.

This has proven to be a positive thing for many who might have been worried about what type of leader Hu might turn out to be. The state leadership got a man they could trust to continue Deng Xiaoping’s and Jiang Zemin’s economic reforms. The party got a leader who was committed to maintaining the CPC’s monopoly of power in the country and to suppressing dissent and calls for greater freedoms. China’s poorer citizens and regions found in Hu a man who would pay more attention to them and their plight than past leaders had done. Neighboring nations got someone who they could count on to keep the country stable, which would provide them with a reliable market for their oil and gas exports, as well as a security partner in fighting separatists and other extremist groups.

And, the United States got a friendly rival who would not push to challenge the United States too quickly either economically or militarily, as well as an ally in the “war on terrorism.”

None of this would be surprising to those who followed Hu’s career through his various posts in the provinces and up through the ranks of the CPC and PRC. He was always cautious not to push too hard, challenge too much, or grab for power too early. He may not have been inspirational, but he was willing to change the status quo—for instance by fighting

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA

In his second term as leader of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao continues to provide stability for a country that has experienced great upheavals.

Only time will tell how Hu Jintao fares as a leader of one of the world’s most powerful nations.

corruption or investing more money in development—as long as he did not threaten the party’s power in any way.

Those who were disappointed in Hu’s first term were those wishing for more freedom of the press, more human rights, and more democracy. While some might still be holding out

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HU JINTAO hope that Hu will feel more secure during his second term and therefore confident enough to introduce social reforms, his speeches all seem to indicate his commitment to maintaining Communist Party rule. Indeed, the CPC does not seem to be fading away just yet. A May 2005 article in Newsweek said that 2 million new people joined the party since 2003.

And yet there are those who believe that the decline of the CPC is bound to happen, and there are already some signs of change. China’s new high school history books that came out in September 2006 pay much less attention to Communism than past books. Joseph Kahn of The New York Times reported, “Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once—in a chapter on etiquette.” Today’s high school student will therefore be learning more about capitalism than about Marxism, Leninism, or Maoism.

Could this be a sign that Hu is relaxing his view on the CPC’s continued dominance? Perhaps keeping China on pace to become one of the biggest, if not the biggest player in the global economy is his only real goal. As Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune suggested in April 2006 when Hu visited the United States, “That’s why he started his visit with the chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, and Bill Gates of Microsoft. Perhaps a half-century from now a visiting Chinese leader will dispense entirely with the White House, knowing where the real power lies.”

Although Hu the president and general secretary might stay the course and remain predictable on the political front, his personal life remains a mystery. He never talks about his family, and although his wife Liu Yongqing has accompanied him on foreign tours, she is very seldom heard from. In an October 2003 Sydney Morning Herald article titled “Well travelled—but

THE FUTURE FOR HU AND CHINA not very well known,” Kristy Needham reported that wives of politicians in China say little in public out of fear of saying the wrong thing and getting their husbands in trouble.

Hu’s two children—one son and one daughter—also stay out of the public spotlight. His daughter is rumored to have moved to the United States and gotten a job at a financial company under a made-up name, but this has never been confirmed.

While Hu’s personal life might be interesting to the media and China’s common citizens, the only thing that matters to his political counterparts both foreign and domestic is that he keeps China running along as smoothly as possible. In his speech at the White House in April 2006, Hu encouraged the powers-that-be when he said, “The 21st century has entrusted people around the world with a lasting historic mission: That is to maintain world peace, promote common development and create a brighter future for mankind. Let us work together with the international community to build a world of enduring peace, common prosperity and harmony.” What these promising words will mean to the people of China, only time will tell.

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Chronology Born December 21 in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, or Jixi, Anhui Province.

1942

Mother dies; Hu Jintao and his two sisters move in with a pair of aunts in Taizhou.

1950

1959

Enters Tsinghua University in Beijing.

1964

Receives engineering degree.

Becomes full member of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

1965

1966

Cultural Revolution begins.

Employed by Ministry of Water Conservancy’s Liujia Gorge Engineering Bureau, in Gansu Province.

1968

1968

Hu Jintao’s father, Hu Jingzhi, imprisoned.

Transfers to Ministry of Water’s No. 813 Sub Bureau, Fourth Engineering Bureau, as technician and secretary.

1969

Secretary of the Ministry of Construction’s Gansu Provincial Construction Committee.

1974

1975 Gansu Provincial Construction Committee’s Project Design Management Division deputy director.

1978

Hu Jintao’s father, Hu Jingzhi, dies.

Gansu Provincial Construction Commission vice chairman.

1980

Alternate member of the CPC Central Committee at the twelfth Party Congress; secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China.

1982

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First secretary of the Communist Youth League Central Committee.

1984

1985

Party secretary of Guizhou.

1988

Party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

1989

Tiananmen Square massacre.

Member of Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee; member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee in charge of personnel.

1992

1993

President of the Central Party School.

1997

China reassumes control of Hong Kong.

Vice president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

1998

Vice chairman of the PRC and CPC Central Military Commissions; addresses nation on TV following NATO/U.S. bombing of Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.

1999

Makes first trip to Europe; Beijing Awarded 2008 Olympics.

2001

Named general secretary of the CPC at the sixteenth National Party Congress; makes first trip to United States.

2002

Elected president of the PRC at the First Session of the tenth National People’s Congress; SARS crisis.

2003

Chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission; China becomes world’s largest consumer of energy; government reports 74,000 demonstrations during the year.

2004

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Chairman of the PRC Central Military Commission; thousands of Chinese participate in anti-Japanese protests; China’s trade with United States tops $280 billion.

2005

2006

Reaffirms peaceful reunification and one-country, two-systems policy for Taiwan; Linfen in Shanxi Province named world’s most polluted city; China joins United Nations Security Council in condemning North Korean missile tests; Five-Year Plan sets goals for economic growth, new jobs, and energy conservation.

112

Bibliography Books

Finkelstein, David M., and Maryanne Kivlehan. Introduction to China’s Leadership in the 21st Century: The Rise of the Fourth Generation. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003.

Lam, Willy Wo-Lap. “The Generation After Next in Chinese Politics.” Chap. 12 in China’s Leadership in the 21st Century: The Rise of the Fourth Generation. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003.

Li, Cheng. China’s Leaders: The New Generation. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Nathan, Andrew J., and Bruce Gilley. China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files. 2nd rev. ed. New York, N.Y.: New York Review of Books, 2003.

Newspaper Articles

Bonner, Raymond, and Norimitsu Onishi. “China and Japan Leaders Pledge to Improve Relations.” The New York Times, April 24, 2005: International 20.

Bradsher, Keith, and David Barboza. “Pollution From Chinese Coal Casts Shadow Around Globe.” The New York Times, June 11, 2006: A1.

Bradsher, Keith. “Beijing Asserts New Control Over Election Laws in Hong Kong.” The New York Times, April 6, 2004: A5.

Brooke, James, and David E. Sanger. “North Koreans Say They Hold Nuclear Arms.” The New York Times, February 11, 2005: A1.

Brooke, James. “Japan’s Ties to China: Strong Trade, Shaky Politics.” The New York Times, February 22, 2005: A8.

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Buckley, Chris. “At a Crucial Oil Juncture, a Russian Calls on China.” The New York Times, July 12, 2005: C4.

———. “Beijing Leaders Speak of Force to Keep Taiwan ‘Chinese’.” The New York Times, March 8, 2005: A10.

“Churches Since 1949.” The New York Times, February 5, 2004: A6.

Crane, Sam. “Hu’s Delicate Power Trip.” Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2003: M3.

Eckholm, Erik. “China’s Inner Circle Reveals Big Unrest, Lists Causes.” The New York Times, June 3, 2001: International 14.

Fewsmith, Joseph. “Generational Transition in China.” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4, Autumn 2002: 23.

French, Howard W. “China Tightens Restrictions on Bloggers and Web Sites.” The New York Times, June 8, 2005: A6.

Hutzler, Charles. “China’s Hu Faces Test Over U.S. Ties.” The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2003: A13.

Kahn, Joseph, and Chris Buckley. “China Gives a Strategic 21-Gun Salute to Visiting Uzbek President.” The New York Times, May 26, 2005: A5.

Kramer, Andrew E. “Russia’s Energy Roadshow Is Taken for a Spin in China.” The New York Times, March 22, 2006: C5.

Kristof, Nicholas D. “A Clampdown in China.” The New York Times, March 17, 2005: A21.

Nakashima, Ellen. “Koizumi, Hu Meet to Address Tensions.”

Washington Post, April 24, 2005: A14 available online.

The New York Times, “North Korea Is Defiant Over U.N. Council Nuclear Resolution.” July 17, 2006: A4.

The New York Times, “World Briefing/Asia: China: Beijing Getting First Churches Since 1949.” February 5, 2004: A6.

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Ni, Ching-Ching. “China Hands Off Powers to Next Generation.” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2003: A3.

Onishi, Norimitsu. “Mollified by China’s Move to End Protests, Japan Urges Talks.” The New York Times, April 21, 2005: A4.

Pan, Philip P. “Hu Tightens Party’s Grip on Power.”

Washington Post, April 24, 2005: A1.

Priest, Dana, and Anthony Faiola. “North Korea Tests LongRange Missile.” Washington Post, July 5, 2006: A1.

Sanger, David E., and Joseph Kahn. “Chinese Leader Gives President a Mixed Message.” The New York Times, November 21, 2005: A1.

Schmitt, Eric. “Rumsfeld Warns of Concern About Expansion of China’s Navy.” The New York Times, February 18, 2005: A9.

Shanker, Thom. “Rumsfeld Issues a Sharp Rebuke to China on Arms.” The New York Times, June 4, 2005: A1.

August, Oliver. “China Admits Unrest May Jeopardize Party’s Rule.” The Times (London), June 6, 2001: 13.

Waldron, Arthur. “Guess Hu’s Coming to the White House.”

The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2002: A18.

Wallsten, Peter, and Mark Magnier. “It’s Mostly Business As Bush Meets Hu in China.” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2005: A11.

Washington Post, “North Korea Rejects Latest U.N. Resolution.” July 17, 2006: A12.

Weisman, Steven R. “Europeans Said to Keep Embargo on Arms to China.” The New York Times, March 22, 2005: A1.

Yardley, Jim. “Issue in China: Many in Jails Without Trial.”

The New York Times, May 9, 2005: A1.

115

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“China Remains World’s 3rd Largest Trader.” Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America.

Available online. URL: http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/ gyzg/t230765.htm. Updated on January 12, 2006.

“China-Russia Relations Reach ‘Unprecedented’ High: President Hu.” People’s Daily Online. Available online. URL: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200605/31/eng20060531_ 269833.html. Updated on May 31, 2006.

“Chinese Communist Youth League Congress Scheduled.”

People’s Daily Online. Available online. URL: http://english .people.com.cn/200307/09/eng20030709_119769.shtml.

Updated on July 9, 2003.

“Falun Gong: A Brief but Turbulent History.” CNN.com.

Available online. URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ WORLD/asiapcf/east/07/24/china.fg.overview/index.html.

Updated on July 24, 2002.

“President Hu Jintao’s Interviews with Russian Media.”

People’s Daily Online. Available online. URL: http://english .people.com.cn/200305/23/eng20030523_117127.shtml.

Updated on May 23, 2003.

“Profile: Hu Jintao.” BBC News. Available online. URL: http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2404129.stm. Updated on September 16, 2004.

“Russia Approves Pacific Oil Pipeline.” Taipei Times. Available online. URL: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives /2005/01/02/2003217712. Updated on January 2, 2005.

“The Communist Youth League of China.” CYCNET.com.

Available online. URL: http://www.cycnet.com/chinayouth/ organs/ccyl.htm. Downloaded on July 1, 2006.

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“The Dalai Lama’s Biography.” The Office of Tibet. Available online. URL: http://www.tibet.com/DL/biography.html.

Updated on September 7, 1997.

“Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2005.” Reporters Without Borders. Available online. URL: http://www.rsf.org/rubrique .php3?id_rubrique=554. Downloaded on August 1, 2006.

Altman, Lawrence K. “China Provides Information on Deadly Health Threat.” The New York Times. Available online. URL: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res =9503EFDC1731F934A25750C0A9659C8B63. Updated on March 17, 2003.

Cheng, Li. “Hu’s Followers: Provincial Leaders With Background in the Communist Youth League.” China Leadership Monitor Vol. 3. Available online. URL: http://www.hoover .org/publications/clm/issues/2906756.html. Downloaded on July 1, 2006.

Forney, Matthew. “Taking the Helm.” Time. Available online.

URL: http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/hu_jintao/.

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Gluck, Caroline. “Taiwan Warns of China ‘Threats’.” BBC News. Available online. URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ asia-pacific/4573066.stm. Updated on January 1, 2006.

Jiaxuan, Tang. “Vigorously Promoting China-US Constructive and Cooperative Relations in the New Century.” The USChina Business Council. Available online. URL: http://www .uschina.org/public/documents/2005/07/tangjiaxuan_ speech.html. Updated on July 27, 2005.

Lam, Willy Wo-Lap. “Who Is Hu Jintao?” CNN.com. Available online. URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/ east/11/01/china.hubio/. Updated on November 7, 2002.

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Lim, Benjamin Kang. “China Accuses Dalai Lama of CIA links,” Reuters. Available online. URL: http://today.reuters. com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=20 06-07-26T124655Z_01_PEK119409_RTRUKOC_0_USCHINA-TIBET.xml. Updated on July 26, 2006.

Liu, Melinda, and Jonathan Ansfield. “Life of the Party.”

MSNBC.com. Available online. URL: http://www.msnbc .msn.com/id/7937214/site/newsweek/. Updated on May 23, 2005.

Marquand, Robert. “China’s Hu: Well Liked, Little Known.”

Christian Science Monitor. Available online. URL: http:// www.csmonitor.com/2006/0419/p01s02-woap .html?s=widep. Updated on April 19, 2006.

Miller, Alice. “China’s Leadership Transition: The First Stage,” China Leadership Monitor Vol. 5 (Winter 2003). Available online. URL: http://www.hoover.org/publications/clm/ issues/2906396.html. Downloaded on July 1, 2006.

Sisci, Francesco. “Democracy With Chinese Characteristics.”

Asia Times Online. Available online. URL: http://www .atimes.com/atimes/China/GK09Ad01.html. Updated on November 9, 2005.

Spencer, Richard. “Tension Rises as China Scours the Globe for Energy.” Telegraph.co.uk. Available online. URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ news/2004/11/19/wchina19.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/19/ ixworld.html. Updated on November 19, 2004.

Vogel, Ezra F. “Hu Jintao: China’s Presumptive Next Leader.”

The National Committee On United States-China Relations.

Available online. URL: http://www.ncuscr.org/Publications/ hujintaobroadcast.htm. Updated on April 23, 2002.

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Xiangren, Xia. “Hu Jintao and His Bitter Banquet of Injustice.”

Asia Times Online. Available online. URL: http://www .atimes.com/atimes/China/FH27Ad02.html. Updated on August 27, 2004.

Yu, Wen. “Zeng Qinghong: A Potential Challenger to China’s Heir Apparent.” China Brief Vol. 1, Issue 10 (November 21, 2001). Available online. URL: http:// www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_ id=17&issue_id=638&article_id=4589. Downloaded on June 14, 2006.

119

Further Reading Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Forney, Matthew, and Andrew J. Nathan. “Hu’s Up Next.”

Time. Available online. URL: http://www.time.com/time/ asia/features/hu_jintao/.

Li, Zhisui. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. New York, N.Y.: Random House, Inc., 1994.

Mackerras, Colin. “Why Terrorism Bypasses China’s Far West,” Asia Times Online. Available online. URL: http://www .atimes.com/atimes/China/FD23Ad03.html. Updated on April 23, 2004.

Nathan, Andrew J., and Bruce Gilley. China’s New Rulers: The Secret Files. 2nd rev. ed. New York, N.Y.: New York Review of Books, 2003.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1990.

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56: AFP/Getty Images 61: AP Images 67: AFP/Getty Images 70: AP Images 76: AP Images 79: AP Images 82: AP Images 89: Reuters/ Korea News Service/Landov 95: AP Images 98: AP Images 101: AFP/Getty Images 104: Getty Images 107: AP Images

Cover: AFP/Getty Images

121

Index China Investigation Report 2000– 2001, 53–54, 55–56 China National Petroleum Corporation, 81 China Western Development Program, 72 Chinese Embassy bombing, 46, 48 Chinese National Party (Kuomintang), 74–75, 78, 85 Chinese Socialist Youth League, 29 Churchill, Winston, 7 coal, 97–98, 101 The Communist Manifesto (Marx), 39 Communist Party of China (CPC), 13, 14, 18–20, 108 Communist Youth League (CYL), 22, 27, 28–30, 36–37, 105 Congressional Human Rights Caucus, 33 corruption, 65, 97 CPC Central Committee, 12, 16–17, 27 CPC Central Military Commission.

See Central Military Commission CPC Central Organization Department, 35, 44–45, 53–54 CPC Propaganda Department, 47 Cultural Revolution, 17, 18–24, 69

Abe, Shinzo, 77, 78 acid rain, 97–98 All-China Youth Federation (ACYF), 29 Anhui, 17 Asian Security Summit, 87 atheism, 68–71 autonomous regions, 71–72 ballistic missiles, 85–86 Basic Law, 60 Beijing, 34, 35, 102–103 Beijing University, 47 Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 46, 48 birthday of Hu Jintao, 17 birthplace of Hu Jintao, 16–17 border disputes, 82 bourgeois liberalism, 29, 47 Bryce, James, 9 Bush, George W., 49, 86 capitalism, 20, 29, 63 Central Committee, 12, 16–17, 27 Central Military Commission as chairman of, 42, 43, 47–48 Hu Jintao and, 13 Jiang Zemin and, 50, 94–95 military appointments and, 105 Central Organization Department, 35, 44–45, 53–54 Central Party School, 27, 39–41, 50, 87 Central Planning Commission, 27 Chen Shui-bian, 85 Chen Shunyao, 26–27 Chen Xitong, 43 Cheney, Dick, 49 Chengdu Military Region, 34–35 Chiang Kai-shek, 18, 74–75, 78, 85 children of Hu Jintao, 109

Dalai Lama, 28, 32–33, 71, 91 Dapu Elementary School, 17 Daquing, 75, 81 democracy, 9, 10, 63–65, 85 Democratic Progressive Party, 85 Deng Xiaopeng Cultural Revolution and, 20, 21 death of, 43 Hong Kong and, 60

122

Gansu Provincial Revolutionary commission, 26 Google, 66 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 80–81 Great Britain, Hong Kong and, 60 Great Leap Forward, 20 Guangdong, 57–58, 65 Guizhou, 30–32 Guizhou University, 31, 32

manual labor and, 23 reforms of, 14, 73, 80 Second Generation and, 38, 40 socialism with Chinese characteristics and, 50 support of, 15, 17, 35 Three Stresses campaign and, 44 Deng Xiaopeng Theory, 29 determinism, 7 diseases, 55–59 Dongbei region, 96–97 Down to the Countryside movement, 22

Hamilton, Alexander, 10 Han Chinese, 25, 30 health crisis, 55–59 hegemony, 100 history, leadership and, 8–9 Hitler, Adolf, 7 Hong Kong, 59–63, 64 Hsein, Lee, 41 Hu Jingzhi (father), 17, 21 Hu Jinlai (sister), 17 Hu Jinrong (sister), 17 Hu Yaobang, 27, 29–31, 36, 47, 105 Huang Jinqui, 68 human rights, 65–68, 83, 91–92, 102

Eastern Lightning, 69 economic development, 96–100.

See also trade education, 17–18, 27 Électricité de France, 41 environmental issues, 97–99 equality, Tocqueville on, 9 Falun Gong, 69–70 famines, 20, 33 Fifth Generation, 103–106 First Generation, 38 First Opium War, 60 Five Point Peace Plan, 33 Five-Year Plan, 97 Fourth Generation, 38–39, 45, 49, 51, 54 freedom, determinism vs., 7 freedom of press, 65–68, 83 freedom of religion, 91–92 freedom of speech, 83 Freezing Point, 68 Gansu Province, 22–26, 96 Gansu Provincial Communist Youth League, 27 Gansu Provincial Construction Committee, 26, 27

India, 80 individuals, 6, 10 industrialization, 20 International Religious Freedom Report, 68–69 international trade Japan and, 77–78 neighbors and, 100–101 peaceful development and, 73–74 United States and, 83–84, 91–93 international travel, 48–49, 58, 73, 81 internet, 65–66 Islamic separatists, 72, 102

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jail, 17, 21 James, William, on leadership, 7–8 Japan, relationship with, 14, 74–78, 85–86 Jiang Nanxiang, 27 Jiang Zemin Central Military Commission and, 52, 94–95 Communist Party of China and, 51 as leader of China, 12, 13 Politburo Standing Committee and, 17 purges of, 42–43, 44–47 reform and, 14 Third Generation and, 38, 40 Three Represents and, 50 trade and, 81 Jiangsu Provincial Taizhou Middle School, 17 Jixi, 16–17 journalism, 65–68 Kang Xi, 32 Kazakhstan, 100–102, 104 Keynes, John Maynard, 8 Khristenko, Viktor, 81 Khrushchev, Nikita, 20 Kim Il Sung, 90 Kim Jong-il, 90 Kissinger, Henry, 41 Koizumi, Junichiro, 75, 77 Korean War, 88–89 Kruschev, Nikita, 78–80 Kuomintang, 74–75, 78, 85 Kyrgyzstan, 102 leadership, Arthur Schlesinger on, 6–11 Lee Hsein, 41 Lenin, Vladimir, 7, 78 Leninism, 29, 50, 78

Lincoln, Abraham, 11 Linfen, 97–98 Liu Jianchao, 91 Liu Shaoqi, 20, 21 Liu Yongqing (wife), 18, 108–109 Liujia Dam Project, 26 Liujia Gorge, 25, 26 Lu Yuegang, 29 Manchuria, 74–75 Mandelson, Peter, 41 manual labor, 22–24 Mao Zedong Cultural Revolution and, 18–24 foreign relations and, 73, 78–79 Three Stresses campaign and, 44 Mao Zedong Thought, 29, 50 martial law, 34–35 Marxism, 7, 29, 39, 50, 63, 78 meditation, 70 Meng Xuenong, 59 Microsoft, 66 military, 81–83, 86–91, 105–106 Ministry of Construction, 26 missile testing, 88–89 Mongolia, 54 Nakhodka, 75 Nanjing, Treaty of, 60 Nanking, Rape of, 75 Napoleonic Wars, 6–7 National Party Congress, 27 National Peoples’ Congress, 15, 27 natural gas, 75, 80 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 101, 104 nazism, 7 nepotism, 44 Nicholas II (Tsar of Russia), 78 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 10 Nixon, Richard, 73 North Korea, 14, 88–91 nuclear weapons, 88–91

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oil industry, 75, 80, 100–101 Olympics, 102–103 Organization Department, 35, 44–45, 53–54

Roussely, Francois, 41 Rumsfeld, Donald, 41, 86 Russia, 74, 75, 78–83 Russian Civil War, 78

Panchen Lama, 33 peaceful development, 74 People’s Armed Police (PAP), 99 People’s Liberation Army, 32, 34, 36, 105 Politburo Standing Committee appointment to, 35, 37 birthplace of Hu Jintao and, 16–17 Hong Kong and, 64 Jiang Zemin and, 52 nepotism and, 44 SARS and, 59 Shanghai Gang and, 45 Zeng Quihong and, 50 pollution, 97–99, 101 population of China, 14 power, leadership and, 10–11 prefectures, defined, 18 press, freedom of, 65–68, 83 princelings, 30, 43 prison, 17, 21 proletariat, 29 Putin, Vladimir, 81, 82

SARS, 55–59 Second Generation, 38, 40 sects, 69 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), 55–59 Shanghai, 16 Shanghai Communiqué, 73 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 80, 81, 102 Shanghai Gang, 44–45 Shanxi Province, 97–98 Shi Tao, 65–66, 68 socialism with Chinese characteristics, 50–51 Song Ping Guizhou and, 30 as mentor, 24, 26–27, 37 Politburo Standing Committee and, 35 Tibet and, 32 Songhua River, 98 Soviet Union, relationship with, 74, 78–83 Special Administrative Regions (SAR), Hong Kong as, 60–61 speech, freedom of, 83 Stalin, Joseph, 78, 79 Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC. See Politburo Standing Committee State Council, 54 state secrets, leaking of, 67–68 submarine incident, 75 Summer Palace, 39

Qiao Shi, 43 Qinghua University, 18, 20, 22, 26–27, 37 Quinghai Province, 71–72 railroads, 71–72, 100–101 Rape of Nanking, 75 Red Guards, 20–21, 22 re-education camps, 69 religion, 68–71, 72, 91–92 Reporters Without Borders, 65–66 Rosneft Oil Company, 81

Taipei Treaty, 85 Taiwan, 76–77, 84, 85–86, 100

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vice presidency, 45, 46–48 Vogel, Ezra, 41

Taizhou, 16–18 Tang Jiaxuan, 64 tea merchants, 17, 31 Tenet, George, 46 terrorism, 14, 106 textbooks, Japan and, 77 Third Generation, 38, 40, 45 Three Grades of Servants, 69 Three Represents, 47, 50, 63 Three Stresses campaign, 44 Tiananmen Square, 34–37, 43, 65–66, 80 Tibet, 28, 32–35, 71–72 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9, 11 trade, international Japan and, 77–78 neighbors and, 100–101 peaceful development and, 73–74 United States and, 83–84, 91–93 Treaty of Nanjing, 60 Tsinghua University, 18, 20, 22, 26–27, 37 Tung Chee-hwa, 60–61, 62 Turkmenistan, 102

War and Peace (Tolstoy), 6–7 Wen Jiabao, 22–24, 54–55, 97, 99 Wen Yu, 44 Wilson, Woodrow, 8 World Trade Organization (WTO), 63 World War II, 74–75, 77, 85, 88 Wu Jinghua, 32 Wu Xianghu, 68 Xibaipo, 54 Xinjiang County Tractor Factory, 23 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 72, 96 Yahoo!, 66, 67 Yang Baibing, 42 Yang Shangkun, 42 Yasukuni Shrine, 75, 77 Yellow River, 25

unemployment, 97 United Nations Security Council, 77, 90 United States Jiang Zemin and, 46–47 military tensions and, 86–88, 100 peaceful development and, 74 relationship with, 83–84 trade with, 91–93 war on terrorism and, 14 Uyghurs, 72, 96 Uzbekistan, 81, 102

Zeng Quihong Central Organization Department and, 44–45, 53–54 network of, 43 support from, 50 as vice-president, 51–52 Zhang Lin, 68 Zhang Wenkang, 58, 59 Zhao Yan, 66–68 Zhou Shengxian, 99

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About the Authors DANIEL K. DAVIS is a freelance writer who lives in San Francisco with his wife Carrie, their son Cai, and their dog Bella. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in English.

was the leading American historian of our time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his books The Age of Jackson (1945) and A Thousand Days (1965), which also won the National Book Award. Professor Schlesinger was the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York and was involved in several other Chelsea House projects, including the series Revolutionary War Leaders, Colonial Leaders, and Your Government.

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

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