Jintao is the man of the hour

HONG KONG: Chinese President Hu Jintao is associated with a certain dourness of personality, but when he steps onto the red carpet on Monday at the start of his first visit to India and Pakistan, observers may well detect a jaunty spring in his step. 

Hu’s visit to the subcontinent comes at a particularly defining moment in his leadership of the emerging superpower. In the past two months, Hu is perceived to have decisively strengthened his grip on power within the Communist Party of China following the removal — or, worse, detention on corruption charges — of “Shanghai faction” party leaders who are close allies of Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin. The latest developments signal Hu’s first bold steps to define his political identity, which until then had been characterised by a lack of definitiveness or the stamp of authority.

When Hu took over as President in 2002, the world didn’t quite know who he was — or what he stood for. That, in large part, was because his rise into the inner circle of China’s top leadership, facilitated by former leader Deng Xiaoping, had been meteoric. A student of the leading Qinghua University, Hu, joined the Communist Youth League (CYL), a sort of training camp for Communist Party leaders, and was active in campus politics. Graduating in hydraulic engineering in 1965, Hu took up a job in indoctrinating students in Marxist theory. 

When Chairman Mao Zedong unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Hu was assigned to Gansu province — the Bihar of China. In Gansu, Hu was “spotted” by a provincial party leader, and in 1982 was elevated to the post of CYL vice-president in Beijing, where he came under the mentorship of liberal-minded Politburo member Hu Yaobang. In 1985, he was assigned as party secretary of Guizhou province. It was the beginning of a troublesome time in China’s history. Hu Yaobang’s political reform movement started a prairie fire of pro-democracy demonstration by students across the country, which would culminate in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. In Guizhou University, Hu defused a crisis by persuading students to disperse, an early indication of his ability to negotiate his way out. But as a consequence, Deng Xiaoping dismissed Hu Yaobang; in order to insure his future, Hu Jintao quickly denounced his mentor and the “spiritual pollution” he’d introduced. 

It was during Hu’s next assignment — as party secretary of Tibet — that he was “blooded”. Hu responded to an uprising by monks by clamping martial law and ordering a bloody crackdown in March 1989. Hu’s handling of the crisis so impressed Deng that in 1992 he installed him as the youngest member (at age 49) of the Politburo’s seven-member Standing Committee, to be groomed into a future party secretary. Hu Jintao had taken the fast elevator to the top. 

In the four years since Hu became President, he has given more than an inkling of his social agenda, with emphasis on building a “harmonious society” and “yi ren wei ben” (putting people’s interests ahead of economic development). 

In many ways, Hu is China’s man of the hour. Having served in some of the poorest provinces in China, Hu perhaps has a greater empathy with the poor. His predecessor Jiang was a suave urbanite, but Hu has made a virtue of his nose-to-the-grindstone, wooden image. Hu has also been consciously trying to balance Jiang’s US-centric foreign policy by reaching out to other regional powers.

Hu’s upcoming visit to India and Pakistan is also part of this effort to strengthen China’s bonds in the region.By emphasising stronger trade ties, Hu, the dour leader who has subsumed his passion for the foxtrot, is perhaps hoping that the two Asians can do the tango fluidly.