Chinese Premier the Ultimate Survivor
Wen's Decision to Take Risks at Right Time Catapulted Him Into Leadership
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 7, 2003; Page A25
YIXINGFU, China -- The house where China's premier was born is gone now, burned to the ground more than a half-century ago during the civil war. But the alley named after his family is still here, just around the corner from a peddler of cheap pots and pans, off a dust-choked street where unshaven men grumble about unemployment and rising crime.
Wen Jiabao was only 6 years old when his family fled this hardscrabble town 50 miles east of Beijing in 1948. Communist rebels were approaching, and the Nationalist army had set fire to the village to slow their advance. Older residents here still remember loading carts with grain and bedding, then joining panicked crowds fleeing the village. Months later, Wen's mother came back and wept over the ashes of the family's home, neighbors said. But her son never returned.
Today, Wen is one of a handful of men at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party as it attempts to complete China's long, fitful transformation from an impoverished country crippled by revolution and foreign invasions to a prosperous and respected world power. Wen's is a story of survival, and it offers a glimpse into the character of a man who has emerged as the most dynamic of the new leaders who took office nine months ago.
Wen, 61, arrives in New York on Sunday for his first visit to the United States as China's premier. He is expected to press President Bush to take a tougher stand against Taiwan's plan to hold an island-wide referendum in March, which Beijing views as provocative step toward independence and has warned could lead to war.
Wen also will be trying to convince Bush -- and the U.S. public -- that China's rising power is not a threat, and that its new leaders, though not elected, can be relied on to work with the United States on issues such as the North Korean standoff, trade and the war on terrorism.
When he was named to the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee a year ago, moving up to No. 3 in the party's hierarchy, Wen was seen as a cautious and skillful technocrat with an uncanny ability to adapt to fast-shifting political winds and maintain the trust of different party factions. Insiders described him as the ideal deputy, an official who could serve any party leader effectively but perhaps was too careful and too timid to pursue his own agenda.
Yet Wen has been willing to take risks at key moments in his career. In 1989, he visited students protesting for democracy in Tiananmen Square days before the military's crackdown. In 1998, he ignored central government guidelines and saved hundreds of thousands of farmers from floods by refusing to blast a dam to divert the waters away from the city of Wuhan, said Li Antian, a retired water official.
"He has what it takes to be a leader," said one party official who worked closely with Wen during the late 1980s and early 1990s and asked not to be identified. "He's pragmatic, but he dares to make decisions and take responsibility."
Since taking office in March, Wen has moved quickly to assert himself as premier, launching an ambitious restructuring of government ministries, limiting police detention powers and teaming with President Hu Jintao to end the coverup of the SARS epidemic and contain the disease.
He has also set himself apart from the drab leadership lineup, building a populist image by making regular forays into the country's poorest regions. He shared dumplings with coal miners in a shaft during the Chinese New Year. He visited a hospital treating SARS patients at the height of the panic over the epidemic. And he became the first senior Chinese leader to shake hands with AIDS patients, calling on the nation to treat people with AIDS with "care and love."
Yet the soft-spoken former geologist does not leave an impression of grandstanding.
Chinese analysts and officials say Wen has forged a strong partnership with Hu, and despite being surrounded by allies of former President Jiang Zemin, the pair have been gradually consolidating their hold on power. Three powerful provincial party secretaries have been detained on corruption charges since the leadership handover.
Ma Lin, a Beijing journalist who has published sympathetic biographies of Hu and Wen, said the two men understand that China's rigid political system needs to change if it is to adequately address problems that have accompanied the country's embrace of capitalism, including corruption, growing income inequality and environmental damage.
"They are looking for innovation of the system," she said. But how fast and how far they are willing to go remains uncertain.
One former colleague of Wen's said any action the premier takes would be the result of two sometimes competing impulses that have driven him his entire life: to survive and to help society's weak.
In a televised news conference after taking office, Wen spoke of his ordinary roots in the countryside and the lasting impact of his tumultuous childhood. "The untold suffering in the days of old China left their indelible imprints on my tender mind," he said.
Wen's family was far from the poorest in Yixingfu. Both his parents were schoolteachers, and his grandfather was the headmaster of a private school for young rural girls, an unusual concept in traditional Chinese society. The family stood out in a village where most labored in corn and sorghum fields.
After losing their home, the family resettled in Tianjin. Wen graduated from one of China's most distinguished high schools, then enrolled at the Beijing Institute of Geology. During the summers, he traveled to remote mountain areas to put his mining studies into practice, often staying with local peasants, according to Ma.
By the time Wen earned his master's degree in geology in 1968, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution was in full swing, and Wen was assigned to work in western Gansu Province, one of the country's most remote and impoverished regions. He worked on a team prospecting for mining deposits near the city of Jiuquan.
"That experience taught me how hard life could be," Wen said during his March news conference.
During the Cultural Revolution, Wen was sent to do farm labor for a year because he resisted denouncing colleagues at political meetings, Ma said. But he was later promoted to an administrative position because two competing factions could not agree on any other candidate.
Wen met his wife, also a geologist, while working in Jiuquan. She later served as head of China's national gem-testing office. The couple has two children, a son who studied business at Northwestern University and founded an Internet company in Beijing and a daughter who reportedly works for a Western financial services firm.
After 11 years in the field in Gansu, Wen finally won a promotion to the provincial geological bureau in 1979. Mao had died, the Cultural Revolution was over, and China's new paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, had ordered the party to begin promoting younger, better-educated officials.
Senior government ministers traveled across the country in search of talent, and Wen was discovered. Chen Guangqing, 72, a colleague of Wen's in Gansu, said Wen impressed a visiting official from Beijing with his ability to process information quickly and summarize it clearly.
Later, Wen was asked to accompany the minister of geology and natural resources, Sun Daguang, on a tour of the region, and he again performed well. After years in obscurity, Wen's career suddenly took off in a series of what the Chinese call "helicopter promotions." Sun transferred him to Beijing in 1982 and a year later appointed him a deputy minister.
Two years later, Hu Yaobang, the Communist Party chief, picked him from a large pool of candidates and assigned him to the Party Central Office, which serves the most senior leaders. A year later, Hu named Wen the director of the office, essentially his chief of staff.
Wen held that job for seven years and three party leaders: Hu, Zhao Ziyang and Jiang Zemin. His ability to survive the purges that follow the appointment of new party chiefs earned him the nickname "bu dao weng," a Chinese doll that bounces back up after being pushed down.
Wu Jiaxiang, a former party official who served under him during the late 1980s, said Wen survived in part because he made himself invaluable to senior leaders. "He came in before 8 a.m. and didn't leave until 11 p.m. or midnight," Wu recalled. "Back then, his face was very haggard."
But, equally important, Wen was careful to treat all senior leaders with respect regardless of their political views. Though he was a member of the party's reformist wing, Wen never sought to withhold documents from leaders from other factions, Wu said.
"He was seen as loyal to the office, not to any single leader," Wu said.
That perception helped Wen survive the purge that followed the Tiananmen Square crackdown even though he had accompanied his boss, party chief Zhao Ziyang, on an emotional visit with the students on May 19, 1989. Zhao had just lost an internal party power struggle after arguing against martial law. Bao Tong, Zhao's secretary and the most senior official jailed in the crackdown, said Wen must have known that Zhao was in trouble and that any display of support for him or the students could be dangerous.
"So I was moved when he accompanied Zhao Ziyang to the square," Bao said in a telephone interview from his home, where he remains under house arrest. "I think he decided on his own initiative to do that. He was definitely taking a risk."
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