BEIJING - The Communist Party of China ushered in a new, younger generation of leaders this morning by naming Hu Jintao as the party's general secretary, succeeding Jiang Zemin, and appointing Hu and eight other men as members of the committee responsible for steering the nation.
Long expected, Hu's ascension marks the first transition of leadership in Communist China without death, purges or turmoil. Jiang became general secretary in 1989 after the bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square and the purging of a reformist predecessor.
But the peaceful transition does not mean that Jiang will disappear from the scene, for he has retained a key top post as head of the military and has stacked the new leadership with loyalists. He may continue to wield ultimate power behind the scenes, as Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping did before him. The only fact that seems knowable about who will be exercising power and what course the country will take is that no one can know for sure.
Hu, 59, has been vice president since 1998 and is head of a new group of leaders vetted only by their predecessors and whose agendas are unknown even to most of the party's 66 million members. Also expected to succeed Jiang as president in March, Hu has said little in public while quietly building allegiances with liberals and conservatives in his cautious rise within the party.
"Nobody argues that they know his strongly held views on policy issues, if he has such views," said University of Michigan Professor Ken Lieberthal, who served in the Clinton administration as special assistant to the president for Asia and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council. "He holds them very closely to his vest, to the point where even his colleagues could not tell you what they are."
The party made no effort to cast Hu's election this week as democratic. More than 2,100 party delegates came to Beijing last week for the party's 16th national congress, and yesterday they elected by secret ballot the 356-member Central Committee, "choosing" from a closely guarded list believed to include only slightly more names than seats available. To ensure there were no surprises, the vote was preceded by a preliminary vote behind closed doors. The naming of the Central Committee marked the end of the party congress, with Jiang proclaiming a "smooth succession" at hand.
The newly named Central Committee then met in secret this morning to elect the 24-member Politburo and the all-important Politburo Standing Committee and general secretary. For each of these elections, the number of candidates running is believed to have matched the number of seats to be filled, and the names were chosen largely by Jiang and a few other men of his generation.
The climax of this elaborate production designed to eliminate all surprise was akin to stylized theater. Shortly after 11:30 a.m. today in the Great Hall of the People overlooking Tiananmen Square, the nine men of the Standing Committee emerged from behind a decorative screen in a nationally televised unveiling. .
The selection of Hu was orchestrated a decade ago by Deng. Despite being officially retired from all party posts at the time, Deng picked Hu to rise to the Politiburo Standing Committee, in effect anointing him as Jiang's successor.
Since then, experts say, Hu has assiduously avoided making enemies, loyally promoted Jiang's statements on party theory and wisely deferred to influential members of lesser rank, most notably Zeng Qinghong, a Jiang protege who many believe will have significant influence in the new leadership. Above all, Hu has been careful not to veer from the party line or seek attention for himself.
Hu pledged yesterday that the new leadership would follow the policies laid out by Jiang and the just-completed congress: "This collective central leadership will implement them with determination and continuity."
For all the social and economic change that China has experienced over the past quarter-century, the transition of leadership highlights what has not changed - the party's opaque, secretive decision-making, from the way the party picks its leaders to the way it governs. In a nation of 1.3 billion people, fewer than 10 men make the major decisions, including the choice of who will lead.
China specialists assume that under Hu the party will for the foreseeable future follow the course laid out by Deng and established under Jiang and his generation of leaders: free market reforms under a strict, stable authoritarian regime.
Jiang was able to hold onto one of his three jobs, as chairman of the Central Military Commission, and to fill a majority of seats on the Politburo Standing Committee with his allies, but most analysts believe that short-term continuity was assured. In a Communist Party that has all but abandoned Marx, Lenin and Mao, the governing ideology today is to develop and modernize China without losing its grip on power.
"It's not like these new guys are going to reverse his policies," said Richard Baum, a professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping.
But as Baum and other scholars note, the problem with the future is that it is not foreseeable for very long. In the coming years, China faces serious challenges to its carefully cultivated stability: rising unemployment, a widening chasm between rich and poor, the lack of an adequate social safety net, a banking system dangerously burdened with bad loans, and a public increasingly cynical about corruption and the party.
A fast-growing economy and deficit spending have kept these problems from developing into crises, but no one knows how long that can last.
"There isn't enough money out there to do what all these people would like to do on a range of issues," Lieberthal said. "It's naive to assume that everybody will have the same answers to these pressing issues. To think that this is an ongoing smooth consensus is underplaying the importance of politics in the process of governing a huge, complicated country."
Because that process is cloistered in secrecy, it is difficult to answer the most basic political question about the future leaders of China: Who will really be in control?
Speculation on this subject has reached an almost comical level, with scholars and journalists in China and abroad trying to find hidden meaning in pro-Jiang propaganda. But it remains unclear whether Jiang will remain the real power.
The makeup of the Standing Committee and Jiang's continued leadership of the military indicate, though, that Hu does not begin his tenure free from Jiang's influence.
"He will not begin to exercise real political power until after the 17th Party Congress in five years," said Joseph Fewsmith, a political scientist at Boston University and author of China Since Tiananmen, The Politics of Transition. Fewsmith and other analysts say Jiang loyalists on the Standing Committee will limit Hu's ability to govern.
The most significant of those loyalists is Zeng, Jiang's chief protege. Zeng, 63, has developed a reputation as a keen political operator, helping to oust Jiang's rivals over the years. At the same time, in contrast to his patron, Zeng stands out among his peers as apparently the most interested in political reform.
Hu's interest in political reform is almost impossible to determine. The new general secretary was born in prerevolutionary Shanghai and was educated as a hydraulic engineer.
As party chief in Tibet in the late 1980s, Hu oversaw a brutal crackdown on unrest, declaring martial law. That may indicate how willing he was to carry out orders from the top in service of political ambition. In the 1990s, as chief of the Central Party School, a training ground for the party elite, he allowed more liberal discussion of ideas, offering a glimmer of hope to pro-reform advocates.
But the rule for Hu has been to stay in the background and make no enemies. In that way, he is the natural product of a system that does not tolerate dissent.
"It is clearly the case that to get to the top position you have to have succeeded in not offending people on the way up," Lieberthal said.
But a person's actions are hard to predict once he gains power in an authoritarian system. Some analysts point to the example of Mikhail Gorbachev, another little-known consensus choice whose radical reforms led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.