WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- UPI presents the second in a three-part series on China's new leader and where he may lead the world's largest nation:
Who is Hu? And where will he lead one-fifth of the human race.
When Hu Jintao succeeded State President Jiang Zemin as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party on Friday, commentators hailed his takeover as the most orderly in the nation's modern history. But looks can be deceiving, especially in communist totalitarian political systems.
The more-than-half-century history of Chinese Communist rule strongly suggests that Hu's real struggle to establish his power against previous General Secretary Jiang's own still well-entrenched loyalists is only beginning, not ending.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was actually hailed by many in the West, including Winston Churchill, as a "moderate" when he beat out the far more famous Leon Trotsky to become his nation's leader in the 1920s.
And for the first five years of his rule, Stalin appeared relatively moderate benign, maintaining a New Economic Policy. But he went on to become the greatest state killer in human history with a toll of victims that exceeded in number even Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's.
And in the 53-year history of Communist rule in China, past transitions have always had their own surprises for both good and bad.
Chinese Communist Founding Father Mao Zedong handpicked loyalist and fellow hardliner Hua Guofeng to succeed him after his death in 1976, and in those first months, the handover appeared to be a smooth one.
But veteran prominent party figure Deng Xiaoping by 1978 had ousted Hua and led China with astonishing success to embrace free market capitalism and long-term conventional economic growth instead.
Deng handed over the reins smoothly, if not overly enthusiastically to Jiang towards the end of his own long life and Jiang retained the general economic direction that Deng had set. Hu, China's new leader, was Deng's man, but not Jiang's.
But gradually over the years, Jiang also broke away from Deng's reliance on the United States as a strategic partner and protector against a threatening neighboring Soviet Union. After the Soviet system collapsed, the far weaker Russia that emerged was no significant threat to China. Instead, under Jiang, the United States started to loom as strategic enemy and potential threat number one.
As we have warned before in UPI Analysis, it appears very likely that this trend will intensify very significantly under Hu. Indeed, if the 1990s proved to be China's equivalent of America and Germany's 1920s Jazz Age, there is the very real possibility that China's coming decade may parallel the rise of nationalist fascism in 1930s Germany.
Already, in full view of the world, China is moving steadily towards militarized confrontation with the United States and forging close strategic ties with Russia and Iran. And now that Hu has taken the reins of effective power, this process could well intensify.
It was the great economic collapse of 1931 that proved a mortal blow to the democratic Weimar Republic in Germany. Now an equally huge collapse of China's fragile banking sector remains threatening in the coming years.
Any new crash of the Shanghai and Shenzen stock markets with their combined capitalization of $550 billion would transform the politics and economy of China, inflicting immense -- and unexpected -- hardship on perhaps half a billion people out of China's total 1.2 billion population. It would also discredit the free market, pro-Western policies of the last two decades launched by late Paramount Leader Deng and still championed by septuagenarian Prime Minister Zhu Rongji.
Hu has fostered nationalist, confrontational policies with the United States in recent years. He has been a driving force in the long term vast military build up the People's Liberation Army has been carrying out to prepare for a possible future conventional air-sea conflict with the United States over Taiwan.
It therefore appears quite feasible that Hu could use extreme, aggressive nationalism to try and discredit the "New Gang of Four" Jiang loyalists who cramp his style on the newly appointed Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
They are: Wu Bangguo, Hu's most natural rival and the new Party Number Two, Jiang political strategist Zeng Qinghoing and the party secretaries who run the two biggest, crucial cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China's political and economic hearts.
The lurch towards anti-free market, regulatory and repressive policies that would surely follow would not be a gentle or humane one.
President Jiang in recent years has backed Premier Zhu in his efforts to integrate China into the world economy. But China's remorselessly accumulating domestic economic woes and the Chinese government's failure to reform its chronically unstable Shanghai-based banking and investment sectors make continued growth and prosperity increasingly unlikely.
Once again, China may be ripe for dramatic change in both its foreign and internal policies. But today, China is no longer weak, divided and isolated but the fastest rising major power in the world. It has the world's largest army and on current growth rates, may have a larger economy than the United States in a quarter of a century.
Dramatic changes that sweep domestic China will, therefore, no longer be limited in their effects to within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. They will rock the entire world.
Next: Shock swings shake China.
