The Hindu : Hu takes over as party chief

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Nov 16, 2002

International

International

Hu takes over as party chief

By P. S. Suryanarayana

BEIJING Nov. 15. China today scripted a crisis-free political succession with poise and precision. The Central Committee of the governing Communist Party of China (CPC) elected the 59-year old Hu Jintao as its new General Secretary.

Jiang Zemin gave up this post on Thursday to facilitate an orderly change of leadership on the basis of a political consensus within the party. Mr. Jiang, who will retain his status as China's President until perhaps the end of his present term within the next few months, had become the CPC's General Secretary in the tumultuous circumstances that characterised the ``June 4 incident'' or the "Tiananmen Square crisis'' in 1989.

As China's Vice-President at the present juncture, Mr. Hu is expected to succeed Mr. Jiang as President in due course and in accordance with the country's current constitutional practices. Mr. Hu's election, as also that of eight others as members of the CPC's nucleus of power, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, signalled a smooth political transition towards a new generation of leadership in China where the Government and the party with a political monopoly remain in a state of symbiotic relationship.

The political transition was laced with the significant re-election of the party's outgoing General Secretary to the pivotal post of Chairman of the CPC's Central Military Commission. As China's President, Mr. Jiang will remain the ex-officio Chairman of the country's overall Central Military Commission too. This critical aspect of today's political denouement in Beijing is viewed, in the informed circles here, as either a sign of Mr. Jiang's undiminished political authority or as a goodwill gesture towards him from Mr. Hu and his new team of collective leadership within the party.

Mr. Hu's career graph in politics has, for the most part, remained on the upward trajectory since his rise to prominence in October 1992 as the youngest ever member of the CPC Politburo's Standing Committee. His talent as the potential leader of Communist China's "fourth generation'' was detected by none other than Deng Xiaoping, the patriarch of China's post-Mao politics of reform and modernisation. Mr. Hu, a technocrat, has served the CPC's cause in Tibet among other places. With Mr. Jiang having acquired the reputation of "China's Mikhail Gorbachev'' without the latter's political failings and tragedies, Mr. Hu's credentials as a reformist are bound to come under the microscope both at home and abroad.

Wu Bangguo and Wen Jiabao, who rank next only to Mr. Hu in the CPC's new executive line-up, and Zeng Qinghong, considered close to Mr. Jiang, are among the more prominent new leaders.

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