| CHIEN-MIN CHUNG/REUTERS |
| Although he operates mostly in the background, Hu has had his share of photo-ops like this one with Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin in 1992 |
Cover Story: Taking the Helm
Hu Jintao scaled China's treacherous political heights by playing it safe. Now that the presidency is in his grasp, will he reveal his true colors?
Viewpoint: Big Country, Small Changes
China's next leader may not have what it takes to effect political reform
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Do you think Hu Jintao can effect meaningful reform in China?
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Taking the Helm
Hu Jintao scaled China's treacherous political heights by playing it safe. Now that the presidency is in his grasp, will he reveal his true colors?
By MATTHEW FORNEY Beijing
The next decade or two will belong to China. Its buoyant economy will produce microchips and jumbo fridges for the world. Chinese astronauts will raise a red flag on the moon and Chinese Olympians will rise to the top of the medal tally at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. A confident government will liberate the press and introduce elections. That's one scenario for the world's most populous country. Here's another, just as plausible: picture gray-haired retirees from bankrupt state enterprises rioting in the streets. A hundred million peasants humping their bedrolls into cities looking for jobs that don't exist. Fractious Beijing despots, clinging to power as society comes unhinged and lawlessness spreads, send goon squads to snuff any sign of civil disobedience. Chinese fishermen deplete world fish stocks, dust from China's expanding deserts blankets San Francisco and a paranoid People's Liberation Army menaces all of Asia.
It could go either way, or in an incalculable number of other directions. China is a country on the cusp, and the decisions its leaders make in coming years have universal implications, affecting the goods the world buys, the air the world breathes, the wars the world fights. That's why it's so disconcerting that the main thing people seem to know about Hu Jintao, the man expected to soon run the country, is that he is a good dancer. After spending the past decade as understudy to President Jiang Zemin, Hu is about to replace his boss and step into the global limelight. But outside his inscrutable circle of Communist Party Elites, Hu's personality and his politics are a cipher. Until three years ago most Chinese had never even heard his voice on the radio or seen him speak on TV. "Hu Jintao is an inkblot test with a record so carefully managed that it's easy to present any view you want for his future," says Scot Tanner, a political scientist at Western Michigan University.
You can say this about the waxy 59-year-old technocrat with the perfect jet-black hair: he is light on his feet. During his rapid rise to the top of the CCP—Hu has set records for being the youngest leader in nearly every post he has held—he has secured patrons occupying all bands of the political spectrum. He has taken both hard and soft political stances on charged domestic issues such as civil unrest. It's impossible to climb the ladder of China's bureaucracy without leaving fingerprints, though. The company Hu has kept, and the progressive policies implemented by institutions under his control, offer tantalizing hints that he is a closet reformer with relatively liberal leanings. Most inspiring for China watchers, his stewardship of the Communist Party's most important training ground, the Central Party School, reveals a willingness to experiment with Chinese politics' unmentionable third rail: democracy.
Mostly he has avoided controversy by keeping any dangerous opinions he may hold to himself. He has sidestepped potentially embarrassing situations, largely avoiding high-profile meetings with foreign dignitaries. Though he has a prodigious memory and a firm grasp of issues—Hu recently impressed French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac with an impromptu riff on Japan's economy—it is rarely on public display. When he traveled to Western Europe for the first time last autumn with stops in Germany, Britain and France, he hewed so closely to the party line that "you get the sense he's reading from notes even when he isn't," recalls one European diplomat.
His profile, however, is rising so fast that the rest of world now expects something more than wonky answers to canned questions. In the next few weeks, Hu is scheduled for his first trip to the U.S., a maiden voyage that for past Chinese leaders has served as both coming-out party and defining moment. Just don't expect Hu to do or say anything defining or even personable. He has yet to secure his promotion and his power base and can't allow hard-liners at home to think he's jollying Americans at a time when Washington's growing military ties with Taiwan have enraged Beijing. He would rather look wooden than rile his opposition. "The best Hu can hope for on this trip is to survive," says Joseph Fewsmith, a political scientist at Boston University.
That's really the best hope for many a Chinese leader. The country's treacherous political reefs are littered with the ruined careers of once-promising apparatchiks who strayed from the marked channel. During Hu's rise to power in the 1980s, communist patriarch Deng Xiaoping purged two chosen successors for pushing political reform faster than an aging generation of revolutionary leaders could bear. The first casualty was Hu's own mentor, Hu Yaobang (the two are unrelated). If he can avoid the snares that destroyed his predecessors, Hu stands to complete the first transition of power in communist China's 53-year history without backstabbing or blood in the streets. He's got about six months to go before the twice-a-decade Party Congress that should crown him. Plenty of time to goof up.
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