A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel (39 page)

Over the past decade, the youth leaguers have formed a relatively cohesive political force within the party. They do not have a set political platform or agenda, but they are bound together by shared experiences working in the same organization or on projects in the field. When one is promoted, he or she will normally create opportunities for others.

The princelings feel entitled and believe they are China’s political elite. While princelings are more pro-business and pro-development—Bo Xilai might be considered something of an aberration—youth leaguers tend to advocate social and economic equality, and see themselves as representatives of the interests of the masses. They are supportive of equal opportunities in education and are more likely to advocate the interests of the weaker social groups. Because they have worked with high school and college students, most youth leaguers are excellent community organizers and are ideologically driven.

Most of the youth leaguers Hu Jintao promoted were born in the 1950s and grew up together during the Cultural Revolution. More than 80 percent have advanced degrees. Hu Jintao and many of his contemporaries majored in natural sciences, though a large number of the youth leaguers studied law, economics, finance, philosophy, and education. Because they start very young at different levels of youth league organizations and gradually move up the party hierarchy, they are commonly referred to as professional bureaucrats. Hu Jintao might be a true follower of Maoism, but Gao Falin, a former youth league official, said many other youth leaguers treat Communist ideology as a tool to help advance their careers and will bend with the winds of change.

Whereas the princelings are closely connected with the business community—their families have amassed huge fortunes through their political connections—Kang Xiaoguang, a researcher at Qinghua University’s China Study Center, said most youth leaguers are relatively “clean” and possess a stronger sense of justice when it comes to handling party corruption cases. Kang said many youth leaguers, including Hu Jintao and Li Keqiang, the former party chief of Henan and Liaoning and China’s premier-in-waiting for the spring of 2013, were promoted largely on the basis of their untainted records. Kang attrib
uted uncorrupted youth leaguers to the nature of their former jobs at the China Youth League, which seldom involved financial dealings. That albeit simplistic characterization fits with Hu Jintao, who insisted on having simple meals and refused extravagant food and drinks during his visits. Li Keqiang, a known workaholic, is said to slurp on instant ramen noodles while working during the weekends. Still, a series of scandals involving high-profile youth leaguers, such as Hu’s chief of staff Ling Jihua, prove that factional lines are no obstacle to corruption, which has infected virtually every single official.

During Hu’s reign, the other youth leaguer to burst onto the national scene besides Li Keqiang was Wang Yang, who worked for a youth league organization in Anhui province before becoming the party chief of Chongqing in 2005 and Guangdong province in 2007. Like Bo Xilai, he was a strong contender for the Politburo Standing Committee. Hu’s efforts to elevate youth leaguers, who shared his experiences, values, and political vision, illustrate his concern about the tremendous challenges he faced during his rule. Economically, the country benefited from the efforts of Hu’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and former premier Zhu Rongji, whose bold reforms ushered in a period of rapid growth. In the Jiang Zemin era, the government emphasized GDP growth, believing that if the pie could be made bigger, everyone could have a piece and be happy. In this way, the party’s ruling status would be secure. By the time Hu came to power, segments of society were notably wealthier than before—China produced more millionaires than at any other time in history—while the reemergence of significant inequality did little to legitimize the Communist Party’s founding ideals. But the country faced increasing social unrest as disgruntled urban residents and migrant workers staged wave after wave of large-scale demonstrations, protesting against forced relocation, striking over unpaid wages and pensions, and coming together over rampant government corruption. In the pursuit of higher economic growth, China was consuming resources such as land and the environment without any consideration for future generations. And the vast hinterland was being left behind.

Hu realized that something had to be done to bridge the widening economic gap and ease social conflict. He also knew that overly
ambitious political reforms could disrupt the power balance, offending the political elite. If not prudent, he could trigger an implosion of pent-up conflict. The party and the country could easily slip away from him. Hu drew lessons from his predecessors, notably former party general secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. Hu Yaobang was known for his courageous efforts to reform the Chinese political systems and Zhao for his refusal to suppress the peaceful Tiananmen demonstrations with force. Both were ousted before their tenures had expired.

Instead, Hu came up with a political philosophy that combined Mao Zedong’s totalitarian maintenance of one-party rule at all cost with Confucian “pro-people” values. The result was the well-known “developing a harmonious society” mantra or the three “pro-people principles” by which the government should “use power to help people, use compassion to care for the people, and use welfare to benefit people.”

Under Hu, the party switched from the country’s previous focus on “development is the hard truth,” or making the cake bigger, focusing instead on how to divide the cake equally and fairly for each social group so everyone might benefit from the economic boom. Under Hu and his premier Wen Jiabao, agricultural taxes were eliminated for farmers, more flexible policies were promulgated to improve the living and working conditions of migrant workers living in cities, more investment was made to cultivate China’s inland regions, minimum-wage laws were enforced in cities, and the government subsidized affordable housing developments. Generally speaking, these policies have been well received by the Chinese public. Ironically, Bo Xilai further expanded those programs in Chongqing but was accused of “straying from party lines” by his political foes after his downfall.

Hu rejected any drastic ideas to revamp the political system, but he implemented cosmetic changes. He wanted the party to be more open and started by publishing details of some Politburo Standing Committee meetings. He urged the state newspapers and TV stations to reduce coverage of party leaders’ activities and focus more on
ordinary people, and he banned lavish send-off and welcome-back ceremonies of Chinese leaders when visiting abroad. For the public, the new policies represented a welcome trend.

Commentators were not persuaded, however. One said, “Improving the people’s livelihood can stabilize the economy, but the practice proved that for every one-yuan increase in welfare Hu gave the poor, the money the bureaucrats placed in their own vaults increased by ten yuan, or even more.” Dissidents within and outside China believed that without fundamental political change, the political system in China could not guarantee governance that was compassionate about people’s welfare and that respected the people’s will.

As the party promoted Hu’s new “harmonious society,” the public security apparatus stepped up efforts to silence any voice that was not “in harmony” with that of the party. Under Hu Jintao, the government designed a nationwide surveillance system and planted plainclothes policemen all over China. Police could have people disappear, detain them indefinitely, or beat them up. Dissidents were not the only targets. Party officials were not ignored. Their cars and homes were bugged and, during political power struggles, officials could be taken away and interrogated in the name of anticorruption. Authorities invested heavily in censoring the Internet to isolate China from the rest of the world by restricting free flow of information. Many websites were blocked by firewalls and authorities tried to monitor personal computers by preinstalling filter software. Many journalists and bloggers were abducted and imprisoned for writing that criticized the government. Shi Tao, a former editorial director at the Changsha-based newspaper
Modern Business Daily
, was sentenced to ten years in jail in April 2005. He was charged with “providing state secrets to foreigners” after sending an e-mail on his Yahoo account to Democracy Forum, a US-based website. The e-mail detailed instructions issued by the local propaganda department on how to restrict coverage of the government-banned Falun Gong group and the fifteenth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest. Such heavy-handed measures made the public highly cynical: they called Hu’s politics “selling dog meat under the label of a goat head.”

Netizens in China interpreted the concept of “building a harmonious society” as demanding “be obedient, do what I tell you and shut up if you don’t like it.” If the government shut down a website or censored online posts, skeptics would say, “The website has been
harmonized
.”

In 2008 and 2009, when the global financial crisis ravaged virtually every economy in the world, Hu was credited with helping China survive the meltdown by delivering a surge in GDP from a low of 6.8 percent in fourth-quarter 2008, to a full-year 9.2 percent for 2009. A large stimulus package helped boost urban infrastructure spending, and authorities in Beijing stepped up support for state-run enterprises with financial subsidies and favorable fiscal policies, reversing a trend initiated by Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin to encourage private enterprises and allow them to grow, while letting inefficient state enterprises fail. In 2008, state enterprises, with the injection of government funds, emerged as leaders in steel and iron, coal, chemistry, aviation, food, and real estate. Enterprises under the control of the central government—
yangqi
in Chinese—associated with inefficiency and loss a decade before had by 2009 become the symbols of rising fortune.
Yangqi
(yang-chee) became a buzz word, embodying a new Chinese economic model. Many Chinese economists began to question the direction of the country’s market reforms and wonder if the rapid growth of state enterprises would suppress the development of private enterprises, eventually stifling the budding market economy in China.

The global financial crisis boosted the status of China, which played the unexpected role of a “white knight” riding to the rescue of the world’s economies whereas the US was blamed for causing the world’s economic woes. The universal values of democracy and freedom lost their attractiveness. Hu began to see the capitalist world in a different light. As Western governments toned down their criticism of Beijing’s human rights abuses in exchange for more business opportunities for their countries, Beijing became emboldened and started to tout the superiority of a limited market economy under a tough totalitarian rule. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009, where China was guest of honor, an official declared, “We are not here to be taught a lesson in democracy. Those times are gone forever.”

In the Jiang era, China would occasionally release some political prisoners and send them abroad in exile as “goodwill” gestures or bargaining chips to extract concessions from Western governments on other issues that could benefit China. The practice stopped under Hu. Many dissidents or civil rights advocates remain imprisoned and, despite condemnation from the international community, he did not grant any high-profile releases. Instead, the government went all out to defend its bottom line, arresting and imprisoning anyone who dares to challenge one-party rule. In 2009, the government arrested and imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo for his role in the drafting of “Charter 08,” a manifesto calling for political change in China. During the Arab Spring in 2011, public security forces picked up writers, artists, and human rights activists, including Ai Weiwei, and detained them for weeks without notifying relatives of their whereabouts.

Jiang Zemin used to recite Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and would go out of his way to explain to the media that he was not a dictator. Hu never bothered. Human rights activists castigated him as a truly evil Maoist dictator.

In January 2011, Hu Jintao paid his third and last visit to the US as the president of China. At the welcome ceremony on the south lawn of the White House, US president Barack Obama’s beaming smiles exuded confidence as the leader of the world’s largest superpower. In contrast, the Chinese president, leader of the second-largest superpower, looked stern and menacing. After nearly nine years in office and ten years as the president-in-waiting, Hu still found it hard to relax. Whether he was the host or the honored guest, he carried the same facial expression—constrained and cautious. As the number one of China, former guerrilla leader Mao Zedong had the flair of a lawless rebel. Party veteran Deng Xiaoping radiated experience and power. English-speaking Jiang Zemin demonstrated the showiness of a performer. But Hu Jintao was a stiff.

In the Hu era, politics moved from social to economic—different economic groups control and manipulate decision-making. The economy under Hu was a power economy. Political power and businesses banded together to form strong interest groups that control the market and monopolize the profit.

The scale of corruption during Hu’s rule was unprecedented. Power and money bred greed. Rampant corruption wormed its way into the ranks of police, taxation, court, auditing, quality control, and petition handling. Though Hu launched one campaign after another to purify the ranks of the party, nothing worked. He might have gotten rid of one corrupt official, but thousands more emerged. Corruption and social disparity created a volcano of widespread social discontent that could erupt at any time. Hu tried to save the system, but his efforts were superficial—a case of too little, too late.

Before the end of his rule, the state media heaped praise on Hu, calling his ten years in office China’s “golden age,” but insiders say many in the party, including retired officials, characterized Hu’s tenure as “a decade of stagnation” and “a decade of inaction.” Some princelings, who consider Communist China a “big house” their parents built with Mao, called Hu “an incompetent housekeeper” and a “failed student of Mao.”