That means the world knows next to nothing about the man slated to take control of the world’s most populous nation at one of the most crucial moments in its modern history. Next fall, as five of the standing committee’s members step down, Hu will replace Jiang Zemin, 75, as president and head of the Communist Party. (Prime Minister Zhu Ronghi is scheduled to retire in the spring of 2003.) Yet Hu remains an enigma even to longtime Sinologists. “There are a lot of question marks about Hu, and that’s the most striking thing we can say about the man,” says David Shambaugh, a China specialist at George Washington University. Like several other top leaders, Hu studied engineering at prestigious Qinghua University. He served as head of the Communist Youth League from 1982 to 1985–where he developed the core of his support–and then as party secretary of remote, backward Guizhou province. His rise is the result of his association with Song Ping, a provincial official he worked under in Gansu. Song later became a party elder in Beijing and brought Hu to the attention of the central leadership.
Hu is best known for his stint as party secretary in Tibet, where he presided over a harsh crackdown on local Buddhists in the late 1980s. Yet even here his role remained opaque: suffering from altitude sickness, he spent little time in Tibet. Recently a conciliatory Dalai Lama said he thought that Hu had never expressed his true opinion of the repression–and that the two men could eventually reach an agreement on Tibet.
To forgive may be divine, but more than one observer is tempted to give Hu the benefit of the doubt. Some Chinese intellectuals are convinced that sunzi, as they call him (grandson, a synonym for “yes man”) is a closet liberal. The Central Party School, a think tank and training ground for up-and-coming cadres that Hu has run since 1993, actively studies political and economic reform. Last month the school’s newspaper ran a front-page article headlined the tide of democracy is vast and mighty–something that had to be at least vetted by Hu. On a six-nation tour of Europe in November, Hu even exchanged pleasantries with Lin Xiling, a prominent Chinese dissident who has lived in Paris for the last 20 years. It was a footnote to Hu’s trip, but grasped by liberals in China as a harbinger of things to come.
Hu himself remains leery of taking a stand. “He seldom expresses his own opinions; he allows people below him to express [theirs],” says a retired high-ranking Chinese media official. Unfortunately, such willful indirection is better suited to Beijing court politics than to the world stage. Over the next decade, when Hu is expected to reign, the People’s Republic is set to emerge as an economic superpower and potential military rival to the United States. Yet before November he had rarely traveled abroad. Experts say he has little experience in international affairs or trade. He will have to come out of his shell quickly: some China watchers believe Jiang will try to cling to power as chairman of the Central Military Commission or behind-the-scenes.
The optimists say it’s better if Hu remains a low-key leader. “Hu is progressively weaker than Mao, Deng and Jiang,” says a Beijing analyst with close ties to the party. “But this means that society will have a stronger voice.” The pessimists fear the man will be proven too small for the job. Says Shambaugh: “Hu will become leader of the world’s largest country at a time of great changes. I’m just not sure that he’s up to it.” Neither is anyone else.
