Wen Jiabao

Wen Jiabao, born in 1942 in the east coast city of Tianjin. Wen studied geology at the undergraduate and graduate levels from 1960 to 1968 in Beijing, and joined the Party while a student in 1965. His subsequent work as a geologist and low-level politician in Gansu Province, lasting until about 1981, overlapped with time Hu Jintao spent there. He became a full member of the Political Bureau in 1997 at the 15^th Party Congress, a position he holds today.

Wen’s rise was in part due to his association with reform-minded leaders, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, but he has apparently avoided trouble in the wake of their downfalls in the late 1980s. He concurrently holds a position as a Vice Premier under Zhu Rongji, and is the youngest of his colleagues at that post. Some analysts expect that he will take his reformist credentials to the Premier post, succeeding Zhu in 2003.

Prediction: Premier 2003

UPDATE - from the Far Eastern Economic Review

THE PREMIERSHIP
Wen Jiabao Is No New Zhu

The front runner in the contest to take over as prime minister from combative Zhu Rongji next year, Vice-Premier Wen Jiabao is his own man and a true survivor with a very different leadership style.

By Susan V. Lawrence/BEIJING
Issue cover-dated March 14, 2002

WEN JIABAO, the man seen as most likely to take over as China's premier in a year's time, is no clone of Zhu Rongji. After four years weathering Zhu's powerful personality, many in the bureaucracy and economic circles see that as largely a good thing. Foreign investors and other outsiders with an interest in the economy are not so sure. Winning them over and keeping China as one of the world's top destinations for foreign direct investment will be among the biggest of the new premier's challenges.

Unlike Zhu, Wen, 59, currently one of China's four vice-premiers, does not dress down his subordinates in front of their underlings. He is not known for one-man crusades against inefficiency, tax evasion and false statistical reporting-though he shares Zhu's frustration with all three. And he has not contributed any pithy quotes to the national lexicon, such as Zhu's "tofu engineering," a term for the shoddy construction of everything from flood-control embankments to department stores.

Wen's public pronouncements are less catchy. "First save water, then move water," he told officials involved in a massive project to divert water from the south to the north last September. "We must give more to farmers and take less from them," he told agricultural officials the same month.

What Wen does have is a reputation for being a quiet conciliator and consensus builder, someone who prefers listening to talking. As one acerbic Western diplomat puts it, unlike Zhu, "Wen doesn't feel that it is necessary to scare people, and believes that there is an inconsistency to calling for the rule of law and then acting like a dictator." With Wen as premier, says the diplomat in Beijing, "you won't have as many fists pounding on tables. You will have a more consensual, collegiate style" to government.

That's very much in keeping with the style of Hu Jintao, the man expected to become general secretary of the Communist Party later this year. Wen would also bring to the job a strong track record as a competent manager on many of the issues that most worry the party, including agriculture, poverty alleviation, finance and the environment.

The most colourful item in Wen's past: a black-and- white photograph showing him by the side of then- Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang visiting student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on May 19, 1989. Published on the front page of the party mouthpiece, People's Daily, the next day, the photo signalled Zhao's support for the students, and by association Wen's support too. Within days, Zhao was purged and the party ordered a violent crackdown on the demonstrators. Exactly how Wen overcame the political damage of the photograph has never been explained.

Zhu, 73, will hand over power at the next session of the National People's Congress, or NPC, in March 2003 after serving a full five-year term in the post. The job of state president, now held by Jiang Zemin, will also change hands then. The decisions about who will take those jobs, however, will almost certainly be made long before then-in September or October at the party's 16th congress.

An entire generation of top Communist Party leaders is due to hand over their party posts to younger successors at the congress in the most sweeping leadership change in more than two decades, with Jiang expected to lead the way by giving up his position as party general secretary to Hu. The 11-day NPC session that began on March 5 in Beijing is the last major set-piece political meeting before the political transition.

Going into the home stretch, Beijing is awash with rumours about how the jockeying for power will play out. The biggest speculation is over what happens to Jiang and the party's second-ranking official, Li Peng- the man who signed the order imposing martial law on Beijing the day the photo of Zhao and Wen was published. Will Jiang give up all three of his major posts to Hu, or just one or two? Might he and Li give up their titles but keep seats on an expanded Politburo Standing Committee? Might Li take Jiang's state presidency?

In the race for the premiership, three men are most commonly seen as contenders: Wen; another vice- premier, Wu Bangguo; and Li Changchun, the party secretary of Guangdong province. Wen is the front runner, in part because he has worked closely with Zhu and is by all accounts Zhu's choice for the job. Foreign diplomats say Zhu melodramatically threatened at a meeting of finance officials late last year to lock himself in a room and not come out if the job went to Wu, who has handled-or many say, mishandled-the state-owned enterprise portfolio since 1998.

Wen's qualifications include 17 years at the top levels of the party, the first eight coordinating the bureaucracy and the last nine focusing on agriculture and finance, though also handling other portfolios such as poverty alleviation, flood control and environmental protection. Since 1998, he has headed the Central Committee's Financial Work Committee and the party's Leading Small Group for Rural Work. The fact that an agricultural policy expert is the leading candidate for premier is widely interpreted as a sign that leaders may finally be serious about tackling rural economic stagnation.

A geologist by training, Wen is regarded as a skilled administrator. If he gets the job, analysts say, the requirements of China's World Trade Organization membership will drive his policies. His chief task will be to implement China's commitments while minimizing damage to domestic economic interests.

Reaching that goal is all about reforming and restructuring industries to make them more competitive globally. In that, though, Wen will inevitably be constrained by the fact that the answers to China's economic challenges are primarily political-relating to the Communist Party's role in the economy-rather than economic. They are thus largely beyond the reach of whoever is premier in the state bureaucracy, because its role is to implement, while the Communist Party apparatus takes all the big decisions and sets the broad directions.

LOOKING FOR THE TRUTH
If, as many believe, a key stumbling block to successful reform of state-enterprises and the banks is the party's refusal to give up control over both, that is a political issue-on which the premier has only limited clout. What influence he does have derives from his concurrent position on the party's top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee. Zhu's predecessor as premier, Li Peng, held the No. 2 spot on the seven-man standing committee. When Zhu took over the premiership, he only got the No. 3 party spot, after Jiang Zemin and NPC Chairman Li Peng. Zhu's successor will likely keep the No. 3 ranking.

The broad support for Wen's candidacy, however, has less to do with his likely policies, which few in China have the information to judge him on, than with popular perceptions of his work style. He is seen as hard- working, honest and someone who tries harder than most to get at the truth. One Chinese official who has seen him operate on trips outside Beijing says he makes a point of stopping his motorcade at unplanned places and plunging off the road to talk to people who are not on his official itinerary.

He has also developed a reputation for gently shaking up the official culture in China, where meetings consist of officials reading aloud written reports full of statistics, instead of engaging on the issues at hand. At a meeting of mayors in Shanxi province last November, Wen set off shockwaves by declaring at the start: "Can we please not read our reports? Mayors should be sufficiently qualified to talk extemporaneously for 20 minutes about their local situations." Someone who was there said the first mayor to take the podium quaked and sweated his way through his presentation, pretending not to read his script but being unable to help himself from doing so.

Overall, though, Wen's style is to avoid confrontation, which suits many in the Chinese elite just fine. After four years of Zhu, many people seem ready now for a premier with a less forceful personal style. A Chinese financial journalist professes "respect" for Zhu, but echoes a common complaint when he says "his personal charisma has covered up a lot of problems" with his policies.

Among Zhu's more controversial ideas were his disastrously misconceived ban on private grain sales and largely unsuccessful measures to try to turn around state-owned corporations, including debt-for-equity swaps. Critics complain that Zhu's powerful personality has silenced those around him who might otherwise have spoken up against such ill-thought-out initiatives.

That is not entirely fair to Zhu. He can claim genuine achievements. He strengthened the fiscal basis for the central government by cracking down on smuggling and tax evasion. He got the military out of the economy. He has kept growth rates high through huge infrastructure spending-though many in China now wonder if running up deficit-spending introduced new weaknesses to the economy. And, of course, Zhu used all his charisma and political skills to win support for China's entry into the WTO.

Zhu has always been particularly popular among foreigners. With them, his charisma has often mattered more than his policies. In countless meetings with foreign chief executives and government officials, Zhu used straight talk and self-deprecating humour to persuade the outside world he was sincere in tackling the challenges facing China's economy. The sheer force of his personality made them believe that he would succeed, and foreign direct investment poured in.

SOME QUESTIONS AND CARE
Meeting foreign investors, Wen is not always as reassuring. One foreign businessman who met Wen last year credits him for "asking questions," but criticizes him for "not asking the right questions." The businessman adds: "The question he was asking is how can we get foreigners to invest, not how we can get foreigners to be successful investors in China."

Inevitably, the style of the meeting was very different from one with Zhu. "He was dignified," says the businessman of Wen. "But there was nothing special or surprising or noteworthy. It wasn't like a Zhu Rongji encounter where he does his five tricks: correcting the interpreter, stepping in, spewing out a sentence in English, pointing ominously at the 'relevant authority' guy and criticizing him in front of the foreigners."

All is relative, though, and Wen gets credit for having more of a personal touch than his colleague, Hu Jintao. With Hu, says the diplomat, "you don't feel there is any attempt to create personal chemistry." Someone who took part in a September 12 group meeting with Wen recalls how he sought out an American in the group, took her hand, and delivered what appeared to be heartfelt condolences on the loss of life in the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. "There was a person there," the participant says. "He did seem caring."

http://www.feer.com/articles/2002/0203_14/p028china.html