By Clifford Coonan
One of the many things we don’t know about China’s President Hu Jintao is whether or not he is a fan of Hollywood movies. Showing his populist credentials, Hu went on record last year to say he was closely watching the denouement of the blockbuster South Korean soap opera Jewel in the Palace, but it’s a fair bet that he’s unlikely to be watching the DVD of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom anytime soon.
The man who presides over 1.3 billion people in the world’s fastest growing major economy and emerging global power, one which is due to host the 2008 Olympic on 8 August, remains an unknown quantity, both inside and outside China, with his permanent public grin masking a well-honed sense of political cunning. The test now becomes whether he can make his formidable political skills count internationally.
There is steel behind the grin – as Communist Party chief in Tibet he was the first to congratulate Deng Xiaoping for his success in crushing the democracy demonstrators in Beijing in June 1989, and there was real fire in his speech backing anti-US protests after the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
The decision by Spielberg, director of the Indiana Jones franchise, to withdraw as artistic adviser to the Olympic Games is the first sign that China’s international honeymoon since it was awarded the games back in 2001 may be drawing to a rather rapid end. While much of the coverage since has focused on the remarkable advances made in China under Hu’s leadership, the next few months will provide Hu with his first major international diplomatic balancing act.
The message from this political conservative has always been about the importance of constructing a “harmonious society” and promoting “win-win” solutions to problems as they emerge. The 65-year-old has supported the economic reforms of his predecessor Jiang Zemin, who in turn inherited the reforming ethos installed by Deng Xiaoping 30 years ago when the country started to open up. On social issues, his gut reaction is to ban, to censor and to use propaganda wherever possible, and he is no fan of press freedom at home.
This could prove challenging given that his leadership will have to deal with international media coverage that is likely to contain a strong negative element on subjects such as China’s failure to do enough to stop the slaughter in Darfur, on issues such as press freedom, human rights for those who complain about losing their homes to make way for Olympic progress, for Tibetans calling for greater autonomy, for the Uighurs of Xinjiang who want better treatment in the remote west and for bloggers who dare to whisper bad words like democracy.
Hu has ruled out western-style democratic reforms and is clamping down on popular protests to avoid the kind of revolutions that toppled the Soviets in 1989 and led to various velvet revolutions in Central Asia since then. Journalists and dissidents have been arrested and he has introduced regular party ideology study systems across the country.
Hu’s insistence on cracking down on dissent, particularly online outpourings of opinion, shows that he is well aware of the dangers the internet poses to his party’s rule. China has hundreds of millions of webizens and is tipped to become the world’s biggest web user any time now – these 210 million people need to be kept in line. Hu has orchestrated the erection of the Great Firewall of China, and repeatedly says the internet has excellent commercial uses but needs to be kept on a tight lead when it comes to way it can shape political opinion.
What does Hu think of the Olympics is a key question. The Games have done much to galvanise national sentiment and promote pride in China, but Hu’s priorities do not lie on the sport field of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed “Bird’s Nest” stadium which will host the games. It would be a mistake to think that the communist leadership would ever put the games ahead of its goal of unifying with Taiwan or keeping a tight grip on single-party rule. Tough diplomacy backed up by military might is the way China, and Hu, likes to do business.
And yet, Hu is keenly aware of the propaganda value of a successful Olympics and has repeatedly called for China’s “national cultural soft power” to be boosted, which refers to China’s influence in culture, sports and other spheres outside the army and the party. Under Hu’s stewardship, the party has presented a kinder face to the world during the build-up to the Olympics – US journalism departments and the PR firm Hill & Knowlton have been teaching Chinese publicists how to do deal with pesky journalists, the BOCOG organisers can boast a slick and attentive Olympics Media Centre. They will have their work cut out for them dealing with the coming weeks’ work.
Hu has displayed the resolve and stamina of the Olympic athlete in the way he has negotiated the upper reaches of the Chinese Communist Party to get to the top. His politics are as difficult to pin down as his personality, but Hu is best understood as a Brezhnev figure rather than a Gorbachev, a leader whose task is to consolidate power and bed down the changes of the past two turbulent decades of Chinese history.
Since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution unleashed all kinds of horrors on the country in the name of the Great Helmsman, the cult of personality is disliked by the Communist Party. This is probably why there are few personal details known about Hu, except he likes to foxtrot and play ping-pong, and has a photographic memory.
Even his birthplace is a mystery – the official biography says he was born in 1942 in Jixi in Anhui province, although in other versions he was born to tea merchants in Taizhou in Jiangsu, and his grandfather came from Anhui. And nobody knows for sure where he lives, although it is presumed he lives in the Zhongnanhai leadership compound beside the Forbidden City in Beijing. He gives the occasional stage-managed press conference and has granted only one interview since he ascended to the leadership in 2002. The grin is omnipresent.
Like many of the new generation of leaders, he studied engineering at Tsinghua University. His wife, Li Yongqing, is an urban planner and they have two children, one son and a daughter, who went to university in the US under an assumed name to avoid attracting attention.
The public profile he has cultivated is that of a man of the people, very much in the communist tradition. This has seen him join Mongolian herdsman in a tent in freezing weather, shake hands with coal miners and dock workers during the dreadful blizzards of recent weeks and also even ride his bicycle to work on occasion. His frugal lifestyle – he once spent just 30 yuan, or two quid, on two days of meals on an official trip – goes down well with the general populace, particularly at a time when the widening gulf between rich and poor is putting such pressure on the government.
Purged at the start of the 1966-76 ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution, Hu went to remote, impoverished Gansu province, which gave him first-hand experience of the wealth gap. It was to prove a brief resettlement, and Hu was anointed as future ruler by Deng Xiaoping and catapulted to the standing committee in 1992, aged just 49, making him by far its youngest member. He had never served on the party’s powerful politburo. As the first cadre with no military experience to be leader of Tibet, he brutally suppressed a rising by monks in 1989, showing a steely resolve that impressed his elders.
Hu is politically agile. Although he became Communist Party chief in 2002 and state president in 2003, he was almost two years into his mandate as party chief before he swooped to replace his predecessor Jiang Zemin as chairman of the central military commission. This gave him China’s top three posts and completed the leadership succession. His success in consolidating his power within the army and the party has been blinding.
Hu has expanded his power base through the appointment of protégés to top posts and cultivated allies in the top echelons, culminating in last October’s unveiling of the new-look politburo standing committee which was packed with his allies.
Early hopes that he might prove to be a liberal reformer were dashed within months of his appointment as leader. He has constructed an image of himself as a man of the people, a champion of the poor, despite presiding over the yawning wealth gap between the rich cities of the eastern and southern coasts and the impoverished hinterland. He has cut taxes on farmers and made education available to poor rural areas, while also trying to implement a limited kind of health-care reform.
He showed his domestic political nous with the way he handled the Sars outbreak in 2003, when he ended a government cover-up, ordered more open reporting and sacked the minister for health and the mayor of Beijing. A key move this week was the appointment of his protégé and likely successor, Xi Jinping, to oversee preparations for the Olympic Games. This was decided before Spielberg pulled out, but it shows that he is serious about keeping the Olympics at the top of the country’s agenda.
Late last month, Hu told his fellow cadres to crank up their efforts on the propaganda front, to put fresh emphasis on the publicity war ahead of the Games.
He was speaking at a major party gathering and his comments reflected the Communist Party’s strong tradition of controlling information and guiding public opinion, even as the policies of Marxist-Leninism lose their relevance in New China.
Cadres must “perform well the task of outward propaganda, further exhibit and raise up the nation’s good image”, Hu said. “The only way to thoroughly win over the people, to thoroughly become the forerunner of social advancement is to … feel the pulse of the era and reflect the spirit of the era.”
A Life in Brief
Born 21 December 1942 in Jixi in Anhui province (official version) or Taizhou in Jiangsu (other versions).
Family Married to urban planner Li Yongqing, one son, one daughter.
Education Joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in April 1964 and began to work in July 1965. Graduated from the Water Conservancy Engineering Department of Tsinghua University, studied hydroelectric power stations.
Career Fell foul of the Cultural Revolution, banished to Gansu. Joined the standing committee, 1992. Former Communist Party chief in Tibet, overall Communist Party chief, 2002, state president, 2003, chairman of the central military commission, 2005.
He says Told Bill Gates: “You, Mr Bill Gates, are a friend of China, and I’m a friend of Microsoft.”
They Say “I believe the decisive hour for Darfur is now. There must be meaningful and measurable progress on the ground for Darfuris within the next few weeks. The world needs China to lead here. So many lives are at stake.” – Steven Spielberg’s letter to Hu
