China's New Generation of Leaders Keep A Low Profile as They Push for
Reforms
By CHARLES HUTZLER  Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BEIJING -- Hidden behind high metal gates, the Chinese Communist Party's
Central Party School has long been seen as a graveyard for political
ideas and political careers.

But under Hu Jintao, the party's premier training academy is reaching
out, teaching Western management, inviting in foreign lecturers and
engaging in a once unthinkable debate: how to prepare the party for a
more-democratic future.

More than academic, the changes under way at the party school provide
crucial insight into the direction Mr. Hu may take China if, as
expected, he becomes leader of the Communist Party late this year, and
state president a few months later. Almost as much of a mystery inside
China as abroad, the 59-year-old Mr. Hu has long worked behind the
scenes from obscure positions deep inside the party apparatus, and now
serves as a state vice president. But a close look at his career reveals
a solid record of reformist accomplishments. And he is surrounded by
like-minded technocrats expected to accompany him into the inner circle.

As a group, these leaders are likely to follow their elders' recipe for
economic liberalization: dropping barriers to foreign investment and
allowing creeping privatization, while still trying to retain state
control over certain strategic industries. But it's in the political
realm where some of the biggest problems lie. The bureaucratic,
authoritarian government is wrestling with guiding a dynamic economy and
diverse society. And it's there that Mr. Hu and his colleagues have left
intriguing clues to possible change. They've initiated programs to bring
more-responsive government, if not democracy, by building a professional
civil service and encouraging greater transparency.

Despite those signs, there is no indication that the new leadership will
ease suppression of political critics, ethnic minorities and other
dissident groups. Mr. Hu himself is notoriously remembered for imposing
martial law to quash independence protests in Tibet in 1989.

None of the key figures would grant interviews for this story. And their
ascent to power isn't guaranteed, given the closed-door bargaining that
is Chinese politics. Still, this new generation appears to command a
greater consensus of support than any presumptive leaders in recent
decades. President Jiang Zemin and the other septuagenarians who have
guided China's stunning economic rebirth over the past decade are
expected to step aside at a party congress next fall, in favor of Mr. Hu
and others in their 50s and 60s. That transition could mark a rare
peaceful transfer of power and could also give China its most reformist
government in over a decade.

The generational changeover raises questions about how the new guard,
relatively inexperienced in public life and in dealing with the West,
will govern China's increasingly close and complex relationship with the
rest of the world. None of the leading candidates has lived abroad,
unlike the generation of President Jiang, who studied in the Soviet
Union and still delights in singing "Moscow Nights" in Russian. Mr. Hu
has a daughter who lives in the U.S. under an assumed name, pursuing
graduate studies, according to Western diplomats and others familiar
with her story. But he himself has never been to America and has visited
the West just once, with a two-week debut tour this fall in which he
conferred with the leaders of Russia, France, Germany and Britain.

What can be read from this group's background, however, is notable. They
are accustomed to experimentation in which many groundbreaking policies
are first floated as test balloons. Having come of age in a time of
successful economic liberalization, "they owe their careers to the
reforms," says Fred Hu, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
in Hong Kong who knew Hu Jintao 20 years ago when both were in the
Communist Youth League. The two aren't related.

Born in Shanghai to a struggling tea merchant and raised in a well-off
provincial city nearby, Mr. Hu gained entry to Beijing's prestigious
Tsinghua University in 1959 to study engineering. He entered the
capital's political circles as secretary to a Youth League dance troupe,
where he learned a credible fox-trot. But his career stumbled during the
chaotic Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, when radical Maoists took
over the school and Mr. Hu was consigned to the impoverished hinterland
province of Gansu.

Then as now, Mr. Hu bided his time. He built houses for a dam project
and rose through the provincial construction bureau ranks until, a
decade later, reforms came and with them a Youth League leadership post
and a transfer to the capital. His rise identified him as a political
comer: At age 39, he became the youngest member of the party's
348-strong Central Committee and, within a few years, the youngest
provincial party leader, first in Guizhou province and then in Tibet.

Evident even then were signs of pragmatism and independence. In 1982, he
used Youth League newspapers to beat back a conservative campaign that
sought to criticize Western ideas as "spiritual pollution." In
chronically poor Guizhou, he invigorated agriculture sectors by
encouraging farmers to grow cash crops before such policies became
popular.

Back in Beijing, Mr. Hu began distinguishing himself as someone willing
to tackle difficult portfolios that touched on the privileges of party
rule. Named to the Politburo Standing Committee, China's top
decision-making body, in 1992, and put in charge of party affairs, he
targeted vested interests that had frustrated reforms and contributed to
public dissatisfaction. He set up rules prohibiting nepotism and
established education and performance standards for promotions.
Competitive exams for some government jobs were tested during his
tenure, so successfully that they are now being expanded from the county
to the provincial level. Still, their use for party and
central-government posts remains limited.

This penchant to quietly redraw the foundations of the system is nowhere
more evident than at the Central Party School. Set behind the gentle,
tree-covered hills and ornate pavilions of the imperial Summer Palace,
the school -- first set up in a communist guerrilla base before moving
with the revolutionary victors to Beijing -- has long indoctrinated
cadres in Marxist dogma. Its campus is typically socialist -- boxy
six-story buildings with no elevators and outdated facilities.

But inside these walls over the past five years under Hu Jintao's
guiding hand, the curriculum has been revised to resemble masters
programs that U.S. universities offer midcareer professionals. About
1,500 students attend each year, from local party secretaries to state
industry executives and provincial governors. Alongside the theories of
Marx and Mao, this elite bunch also takes a hard look at the rest of the
world, studying economics, politics, legal systems, military affairs and
science and technology. The theories of Nobel Prize-winner Paul
Samuelson, whose guides to capitalist economics are staples of American
universities, are required reading. So, too, is Harvard University
professor Jeffrey Sachs' prescriptive "shock therapy" for dismantling
the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union. "This used
to be a school for Communist Party activists. Now it's a school for
administrative professionals," says one veteran party school professor,
who wouldn't speak for attribution.

The school now has its first foreign-policy institute and a revived
center of comparative politics that explores such concepts as separation
of powers and other tenets of Western liberal democracy. Its lively
weekly newspaper, the Study Times, has become a must-read for the
capital's intelligentsia, with articles on technology and the rising
tide of democracy around the globe. The case study, that epitome of the
Harvard MBA program, is becoming a preferred teaching method in a system
that has long favored rote memorization.

Even more striking, the school is seeking help from foreigners, who were
forbidden from entering the grounds until a few years ago. Joint
research projects on the Cold War and the impact of World Trade
Organization membership are being carried out with Harvard University
and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Francois Roussely,
president of Electricite de France, recently lectured on how the French
state utility competes with private companies. British Parliament member
Peter Mandelson explained how the Labor Party captured the political
mainstream. Such talks are feeding a surprising amount of ideological
ferment. "There is lots of open discussion and debate," says Harvard's
Ezra Vogel, an East Asia expert and a former Clinton administration
official who has lectured at the school.

Though Mr. Hu isn't involved in the day-to-day running of the school,
professors say he confers closely with the school's chief administrator,
Zheng Bijian, an aide to four previous communist leaders.

One of their bolder projects touches on the future direction of the
Communist Party itself. At the leadership's behest, the school has begun
studying the collapse of the Soviet Union and one-party regimes in
Mexico and Indonesia, alongside the successful transformation of
Germany's Social Democratic Party and the decades-long dominance of
Japan's Liberal Democratic Party. "Whether the party should reform used
to be such a major issue we were forbidden from discussing it," says one
professor. "Now that's mostly what we talk about."

One of Mr. Hu's likely allies will be current Vice Premier Wen Jiabao, a
skillful technocrat and the leading candidate to replace Zhu Rongji as
premier, with day-to-day responsibilities for managing the government.
Like Mr. Hu, Mr. Wen early in his career worked in poor, rural Gansu
province. The two men share a political patron, a conservative economic
planner who helped get them to Beijing. In the early 1990s, Messrs. Hu
and the two men worked together in handling day-to-day affairs for the
party's Central Committee.

Under Premier Zhu, Mr. Wen took on the difficult areas of rural
development and finance. With no financial background, he invited in
specialists who helped formulate policies to try to rescue a banking
sector foundering in debt. In 1998, he coordinated a major effort to
contain China's worst flooding in 50 years.

Like Mr. Hu, Mr. Wen has proven himself a political survivor. He has
worked under three consecutive party leaders and avoided the purges that
followed the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy
movement, a testament to his competence but also the basis for
occasional criticism that he lacks backbone.

Another figure in a likely Hu administration is Zeng Qinghong, the son
of a revolutionary veteran close to Mao Tse-tung. Mr. Zeng began
political life as an aide in the late 1970s to a revolutionary general
before joining Mr. Jiang in Shanghai and accompanying him to Beijing.
Along the way, he ended a few careers, earning a reputation as Mr.
Jiang's henchman.

But Mr. Zeng has quietly staked out a reform agenda that dovetails with
Mr. Hu's work. In 1998, he persuaded President Jiang not to ban
"Crossing Swords," a popular and controversial book written by two
Chinese journalists that pleaded for liberal political change. The
following year after taking over the party's powerful Organization
Department -- a position he still holds -- he allowed experiments to
make government more responsive. His department supervised test
elections in some villages for leadership posts. Local governments were
urged to become more transparent by holding public hearings, setting up
hotlines and opening their legislative sessions to the public. Such
measures are intended to quell rising mistrust between the government
and the public -- the subject of a book-length report that Mr. Zeng's
department issued this year that lambasted official ineptness and
corruption for helping feed unrest.

Most of these projects go entirely unheralded, and that too is by
design. Chinese leaders throughout history have cashiered heirs-apparent
when they appeared too independent. Mr. Hu seems to have taken to heart
the advice that a failed successor of Mao Tse-tung's once gave: "Be
passive, passive and passive again." Mr. Hu is known for scrupulously
thanking those around him for their help. He doesn't write the
dedications or inscriptions for public monuments as President Jiang and
others in the leadership like to do. It's Mr. Jiang's calligraphy -- not
Mr. Hu's -- that graces a stone marker in front of the party school.
"His essential survival kit is to be low-key," says Goldman Sachs' Mr.
Hu.

Mr. Hu left a perplexing wake in his travels to Western Europe this
fall. Before setting out, he ordered aides to tone down already anodyne
foreign ministry-prepared speeches and meeting notes. Mr. Hu impressed
foreign leaders with his ability to speak without notes, but he didn't
deviate from the government line nor offer up his own views. "You don't
have the feeling you touched something personal," says a Western
diplomat.