BEIJING - In his characteristically low-key fashion, President Hu Jintao has put his stamp on China's direction, sidelined key rivals, taken over as head of the military and emerged as pre-eminent leader after months of infighting.
In an address Monday after being re-anointed as Communist Party leader, Hu struck a typically humble note, thanking ordinary Chinese for their confidence while never mentioning the bruising effort that brought him the crowning moment.
In the past five years, "Hu was certainly first among equals. Now there are no such clear equals," said Cheng Li, a watcher of elite Chinese politics at Washington's Brookings Institution. "Hu Jintao is doing very well."
Hu's victory was far from unconditional. With the towering figures of the communist revolution long gone, no Chinese leader commands respect across the party, government, military and society at large to rule single-handedly. Rather the party's top ranks must manage collectively, fashioning consensus and coalitions.
As the price of getting a rival power-broker to retire and bringing a favored protege into the leadership at the just-concluded party conclave, Hu was forced to promote another young technocrat -- a move that could make governing collectively difficult should the potential successors fall to infighting.
Together they face a China transformed by capitalist reforms that have raised standards of living while unleashing a populace more demanding of its government and a society fracturing across a widening rich-poor gap. Their main source of legitimacy is an economy that has on average grown yearly at double-digit rates for most of the last quarter century.
The turmoil of China's juggernaut economy intruded soon after the new leadership was inaugurated. A fire that killed 37 people broke out Sunday night in an unlicensed shoe factory in an export-manufacturing town -- one of the first pieces of bad news reported by the state-controlled media since high-level party meetings opened in Beijing nine days ago.
Hu's prescription for dealing with the welter of problems -- continued fast growth, reforms to make the government more responsive but not democratic, and increased social spending to bolster the urban and rural poor -- has now become party writ.
Soon after taking office in 2002, Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao paid visits to herders on the bleak Mongolian grasslands and chatted with coal miners. Those encounters, tossed off as symbolic photo opportunities, in fact presaged policy shifts.
Hu and Wen began trying to redirect nearly two decades of policy that favored letting coastal areas flourish while the interior lagged. They loosened rules to make it easier for migrants from the countryside, whose labor has underpinned China's export and construction booms, to move to cities. They improved urban social welfare networks to help pensioners and workers displaced by state industry restructuring and rolled out pilot programs for rural Chinese.
Resistance arose from officials in coastal areas and the businesses who support them and whose tax revenues have swelled the government treasury. A year ago, Hu sent corruption investigators from Beijing to detain Shanghai's influential party secretary, who criticized the central government's attempts to rein in torrid growth and bring the party in line.
On Sunday, the communist elite adopted Hu's policy program, "the scientific outlook on development," into the party's charter. An associate of the ousted Shanghai party chief, Vice President Zeng Qinghong, retired, depriving the grouping of a potent operator inside the party.
In presenting his vision to congress delegates earlier this month, Hu exhorted them to be more law-abiding and suggested the government needed to invite entrepreneurs and other influential Chinese into the party's big tent, lest they become a nascent opposition. Yet he made it clear the party's control must remain unchallenged.
Hu called on the party's 73 million members to prepare for "unremitting efforts by several, a dozen, or even dozens of generations."
Ultimately, however, Hu may have arranged his own political exit. In getting Zeng to retire, Hu hardened an unwritten rule that senior leaders should step down if they are going to reach their early 70s during the usual five-year terms. Zeng was 68. Hu will be 69 in five years time.
