As Hu Jintao visits Australia for the APEC meetings, The Australian runs a profile of the President and his policies:
Mao Zedong’s class struggle is over. So is Deng Xiaoping’s “to get rich is glorious”. Confucius, whose philosophy praises harmony and who was earlier in the communist era denigrated as a feudalist, is back with a bang.
In their first term, the rhetoric of Hu and Wen made clear they wanted to maintain China’s open, reformist economic profile and to keep growth, and thus living standards, rising palpably. This, after all, is the key source of the party’s legitimacy to most Chinese people.
But they are shifting the priorities within that framework towards humanising the great greased machine the Chinese economy has become. They want to spread the wealth between cities and countryside, between the rich coast and the poor inland provinces, and within communities too. [Full text]
