Hu Jintao belongs to the new generation of Chinese leadership not burdened with Maoist or cold war baggage — yet at the same time, he inherits all the skills of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin in playing the international balance of power politics. He was spotted by Deng Xiaoping and designated in the succession line.

Deng was able to raise China from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to the fastest growing economy in about two decades and his successors have continued his policies of market economy and integration with the globalised system. Now it is widely expected that in the next three decades China will overtake the US in terms of gross domestic product calculated on purchasing power parity. The Chinese leadership has not flinched from its relentless drive towards building its economic power even if it means tens of millions of unemployed citizens, widening inequalities and a total repudiation of the ideology of communism as espoused by China in the first three decades of communist rule.

In their pursuit of economic and technological power, Chinese leaders have often stooped to conquer. In 1950 Mao Zedong signed an unequal treaty dictated by Stalin and surrendered the Xinjiang uranium mines to get massive Soviet industrial and military assistance. Subsequently they had no qualms about allying themselves with the US, against whom they had fought a bitter war in Korea, costing hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives, including that of Mao’s son, a MiG pilot. They gave monitoring bases to the US and conducted themselves, in the words of Admiral Norton, the British chief of defence staff, as the eastern NATO. They launched an attack on Vietnam immediately after Deng’s visit to the US and went along with the US supporting Pol Pot’s representation in the UN general assembly and in supporting the Afghan mujahideen.

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