How does hu jintao run his country

In February, Wang Lijun, a former police chief, tried to defect to the U. Party leaders feared that Bo might protect himself with the security services at his command, disrupt the transition of power, and tear the Party apart. In September, Ling Jihua, the chief of staff of the outgoing President, was abruptly demoted, and he was later accused of trying to cover up the death of his son, who had crashed a black Ferrari while accompanied by two women.

Beset by crises, Xi suddenly disappeared. On September 4, , he cancelled a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and visits with other dignitaries. As the days passed, lurid rumors emerged, ranging from a grave illness to an assassination attempt. When he reappeared, on September 19th, he told American officials that he had injured his back.

In dozens of conversations this winter, scholars, officials, journalists, and executives told me that they suspect he did have a health problem, and also reasons to exploit it. They speculate that Xi, in effect, went on strike; he wanted to install key allies, and remove opponents, before taking power, but Party elders ordered him to wait. On November 15, , Xi became General Secretary. Western politicians often note that Xi has the habits of a retail pol: comfort on the rope line, gentle questions for every visitor, homey anecdotes.

On a trip to Los Angeles, he told students that he likes to swim, read, and watch sports on television, but rarely has time. In a meeting at the Great Hall of the People last year, Party officials were chatting and glad-handing during a lengthy break, but Xi never budged. Xi believed that there was a grave threat to China from within.

According to U. Xi surrounded himself with a shadow cabinet that was defined less by a single ideology than by school ties and political reliability. Members included Liu He, a childhood playmate who had become a reform-minded economist, and Liu Yuan, a hawkish general and the son of former President Liu Shaoqi.

The most important was Wang Qishan, a friend for decades, who was placed in charge of the Central Commission on Discipline and Inspection, the agency that launched the vast anticorruption campaign.

The Party had long cultivated an image of virtuous unanimity. They brought corruption charges against officials at the state-planning and state-assets commissions, which protect the privileges of large government-run monopolies. When police searched homes belonging to the family of Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, a senior logistics chief, they removed four truckloads of wine, art, cash, and other luxuries.

By the end of , the Party had announced the punishment of more than a hundred thousand officials on corruption charges. Geremie Barme, the historian who heads the Australian Centre on China in the World, analyzed the forty-eight most high-profile arrests, and discovered that none of them were second-generation reds.

In the paper, the guy cited a joke: Brezhnev brings his mother to Moscow. He proudly shows her the state apartments at the Kremlin, his Zil limousine, and the life of luxury he now lives. That fear was heightened by a surge of unrest in Tibet in , in Xinjiang in , and across the Arab world in Last September, when pro-democracy protests erupted in Hong Kong, an opinion piece in the Global Times , a state-run daily, accused the National Endowment for Democracy and the C.

When he launched the anticorruption campaign, activists—such as the lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who had served as a local legislator in Beijing—joined in, calling on officials to disclose their incomes. But Xu and many others were arrested. It was real. The influence of Western states was becoming more obvious and more powerful. He is now a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch called this the harshest suppression of dissent in a decade.

Although Vladimir Putin has suffocated Russian civil society and neutered the press, Moscow stores still carry books that are critical of him, and a few long-suffering blogs still find ways to attack him. Xi is less tolerant. He had received a phone call warning him not to proceed with publication. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, on charges of smuggling seven cans of paint.

For years, Chinese intellectuals distinguished between words and actions: Western political ideas could be discussed in China as long as nobody tried to enact them. Sealing China off from Western ideas poses some practical problems. On a personal level, he expresses warm memories of Iowa, and he sent his daughter, Xi Mingze, to Harvard.

She graduated last year, under a pseudonym, and has returned to China. Xi has been far bolder than his predecessors in asserting Chinese control over airspace and land, sending an oil rig into contested waters, and erecting buildings, helipads, and other facilities on reefs that are claimed by multiple nations.

But, as war in Ukraine has dragged on, Xi has become less complimentary of Putin. The Obama Administration has declined to adopt the phrase. Xi and Obama have met, at length, five times. American officials describe the relationship as occasionally candid but not close. We want to have a conversation. For years, American military leaders worried that there was a growing risk of an accidental clash between China and the U.

As China ejects Western ideas, Xi is trying to fill that void with an affirmative set of ideas to offer at home and abroad.

Recently, I rode the No. Near the station, at a Starbucks, I met Zhang Lifan, a well-known historian. At sixty-four, he defies the usual rumpled stereotype of the liberal intelligentsia; he is tall, with elegant hints of gray hair, and he wore a black mandarin-collar jacket and a winter cap covered in smooth black fur.

I asked him what message Xi hoped to promote from China around the world. Zhang writes about politics, and he is occasionally visited by police who remind him to avoid sensitive subjects. They followed me here. In remote areas, where police are unaccustomed to the presence of foreigners, authorities often try to prevent people from meeting reporters.

I suggested we postpone our discussion. He shook his head. For years, the government tacitly allowed people to gain access to virtual private networks, or V. Keeping them open, the theory went, allowed sophisticated users to get what they wanted or needed—for instance, researchers accessing Google Scholar, or businesses doing transactions—while preventing the masses from employing technology that worries the Party.

But on January 23rd, while I was in Beijing, the government abruptly blocked the V. Overnight, it became radically more difficult to reach anything on the Internet outside China. Before the comments were shut down on the Web site Computer News, twelve thousand people left their views. A decade ago, the Chinese Internet was alive with debate, confession, humor, and discovery. Month by month, it is becoming more sterilized and self-contained. Voice-over-Internet calls, viral videos, podcasts—the minor accessories of contemporary digital life—are less reachable abroad than they were a year ago.

How many countries in have an Internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago? In response, Chinese auto executives stopped having lightly clad models lounge around vehicles at car shows. Online, people joked that it seemed implausible: since taking office, Xi has acquired heavy bags under his eyes and a look of near-constant irritation. For a generation, the Communist Party forged a political consensus built on economic growth and legal ambiguity.

Liberal activists and corrupt bureaucrats learned to skirt or flout legal boundaries, because the Party objected only intermittently. It is difficult to know precisely how much support Xi enjoys. It comes from two areas: one is the anticorruption policy and the other is foreign policy. After economic growth of, on average, nearly ten per cent a year, for more than three decades, the Party expected growth to slow to a sustainable pace of around seven per cent, but it could fall more sharply.

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Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. Other options. Analysts agree that during his time in power, Mr Hu tried to give more consideration to the plight of ordinary people. He has repeatedly promoted the importance of attaining a "harmonious society", which would bridge the yawning gap between China's rich and poor.

Hu Jintao's speeches also call for "scientific development", a push for policies balancing the importance of social welfare in addition to economic growth. Nonetheless, during Mr Hu's time at the helm of the Chinese government, China's wealthy coastal provinces continued to develop at a much faster rate than the country's interior regions. Mr Hu's dream of fostering a large Chinese middle class has yet to be realised. When Mr Hu assumed the presidency, he worked to make the party elites seem more accessible, for example, by eliminating the elaborate ceremonies saluting China's top leaders when they travelled overseas.

On Chinese New Year, he was often pictured sharing simple meals with Chinese peasants instead of enjoying grandiose banquets in Beijing. Mr Hu promised to tackle government corruption, but there are few signs that he was able to do so. The last two years of Mr Hu's presidency were overshadowed by revelations that many top Communist Party members had enriched themselves at the hands of the state, including disgraced populist leader, Bo Xilai.

Though Mr Hu may have lost some internal political battles, he has always been a faithful follower of the party line. Deng Xiaoping promoted Mr Hu to the party's ruling Politburo in , thereby earmarking him to succeed Jiang Zemin as the "core" of the Communist Party's fourth generation of leaders. Hu Jintao was born in , and he is the first leader whose party career began after the Communist takeover in