Hu Firmly Takes Wheel in China

China’s top leader emerged from four days of secret Communist Party meetings Tuesday with renewed calls for a more harmonious society. But uplifting slogans aside, the real agenda for President Hu Jintao was power -- consolidating it, strengthening it and ensuring its effective use in finessing the enormous rifts bedeviling Chinese society.

Party meetings here tend to fall into two categories -- those shrouded in secrecy where real decisions are made and their carefully scripted cousins held in public view with legions of officials acting in relative unison. The just-concluded plenary session of the Central Committee was of the secret variety. The committee’s 354 members, wreathed in heavy security, holed up in the Jingxi hotel to concentrate on personnel changes, networking and endorsing the next five-year economic plan.

For Hu, 62, the meeting represents something of a milestone. There may be a few holdout cadres in the wings still loyal to his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, 79. But Hu’s solid performance in more than two years at the helm, including his steady hand during the 2003 SARS outbreak, has put him firmly in the driver’s seat.

Jiang took nearly five years to consolidate his power after Deng Xiaoping stepped aside. Hu has moved faster, and from an early position of relative weakness. Part of this reflects the personalities involved: Deng left far larger shoes to fill than did Jiang. But it also speaks to Hu’s careful determination.

A cautious man by nature, Hu has imprinted his personality on China’s domestic policy with a series of largely incremental steps devoid of surprises or bold gestures.

Many of his moves have been as much symbolic as substantive. In a country with a long history of imperious leadership, Hu and his team have spent time eating dumplings in coal mines, helping individual migrants get paid and shaking hands with AIDS patients.

Hu has also staked out a new policy direction under the “harmonious society” banner. Relative to Jiang, whose policies identified with the winners, the elite, the high-tech and the glitzy, Hu has brought his common man touch to the domestic agenda. He has primarily focused on those left behind, lowering rural taxes and easing restrictions on farmers traveling to the city for work.

“During Jiang’s time, the goal was more on developing the economy quickly,” said He Husheng, a history professor at People’s University in Beijing. “For Hu, it’s about alleviating the social conflict that’s resulted from growth.”

While compassion may be part of the rationale, analysts say holding the house together is an even larger concern so that China will not come apart at the seams.

Huge income gaps tend to spur social tension in any country, but the size and complexity of the world’s most populous nation makes pressures here more pronounced. China had 74,000 public protests nationwide last year, up from 58,000 in 2003, according to government figures.

The country has a long history of unseating rulers when local protests get out of hand, a fact not lost on the Communist Party, which recently labeled the unrest a “life or death” leadership issue.

“Politics in China is power for power’s sake,” said Minxin Pei, China director at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “They realize, if they don’t change course, they risk being booted out themselves.”

Hu’s balancing act entails trying to keep economic growth on track while diverting more resources to those most likely to join forces in political opposition.

That’s a difficult enough task in its own right. But Hu is also sitting atop a party with a cancer in its ranks: corruption. In response, he’s called for greater party discipline and adopted changes to the party’s self-policing mechanism, giving internal watchdogs greater leeway to go after improprieties. In the two years leading up to November 2004, the party’s anti-graft forces investigated 339,000 corrupt party officials, according to government figures.

Yet at times the party seems to be treading water. China’s top anti-graft official, Politburo member Wu Guanzheng, conceded shortly before this week’s meeting that the party still faced a daunting task fighting this scourge. Surveys consistently rank corruption among the public’s biggest grievances.

Analysts say Hu is in a bind, wary of going too hard or publicly against the base of his support.

Some believe China’s entire approach to the problem is flawed. Beijing has embraced competition in the economic sphere, realizing many of the benefits stemming from consumer choice. In the political sphere, however, it has resisted competition or checks and balances, fearful its citizens might choose an alternative. China’s experiments with democracy are largely limited to village elections, and even then are modest in scope.

Recent events in the Taishi township in Guangdong province provide a case in point. Villagers suspected their village chief of embezzling funds during a deal involving a large tract of land and asked for an election “recall.” When it looked as if the old guard might be voted out, however, unidentified attackers started beating villagers.

Analysts wonder whether Hu will begin to move more forcefully on political and legal reform if for no other reason than it provides another way to channel rising frustration. “But Hu will move very cautiously on democratization,” said Xiao Gongqin of Shanghai Normal University.

Hu may also target changes to China’s vast bureaucracy. Municipal officials are now promoted based on local economic indicators, leading to inflated statistics and construction boondoggles.

China is also making note of the toll its rampant economic development is taking on the environment and public health, including industrial fatalities. The five-year plan running from 2006 through 2010 will focus on more sustainable development, stronger environmental protection, health and education.

Another hallmark of Hu’s administration has been a pointed crackdown on the Internet, traditional media, nongovernmental organizations and scholars.

“Indications are that Hu has no interest in allowing freedom of the press, an important aspect of political reform,” said Cheng Li, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Some analysts read this as a desire to ensure that dissatisfied and largely uneducated workers in isolated local areas aren’t further linked to those with political savvy, mass media skills and international exposure.

“China’s leaders are in a very difficult position,” said the Carnegie Endowment’s Pei. “And so far they’ve taken a Band-Aid approach to governance. Band-Aids work, otherwise they wouldn’t sell them. But they also have their limits.”

Yin Lijin in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.