Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1987 he was appointed to the Party's Central Committee, and in 1988,
as party head over Tibet, he made his bones by suppressing
pro-independence marches in Tibet and imposing martial law. By 1992
he had risen to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, and by 1999
he was a member of the Central Military Commission. In 2002 he
became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. The next
year, Hu became the President of the People's Republic of China when
Jiang Zemin stepped down from the position. Hu's accession to
supreme power was complete in 2004, when he succeeded Jiang Zemin
as Chairman of the Central Military Commission. As president, Hu is
nominally China's head of government, but his leadership over the
Party and the Chinese military assure that he is China's key strongman.
The accession of Hu Jintao and his cohorts to supreme power marks
the consolidation of the “fourth generation” governing China. Wen
Jiabao (born 1942), a native of Tianjin who by profession is an engineer
and geologist, is currently China's Premier, or nominally its head of
government. (Even so, Hu is without question the more powerful of
the two men.) Together, their rule over China is sometimes called the
“Hu-Wen administration.”
Over the past decade, then, leadership over China has passed from
Jiang to Hu. Remarkably, the term jianghu in Chinese, in all but one
of the constituent components for Hu's surname, means something
like “tough guy from the 'hood” or “slick and worldly-wise.” But per-
haps not surprisingly, there does not seem to have been any comment
on this singular coincidence in the Chinese press.
CHINA'S FUTURE CHALLENGES
Will the synergistic effects of intense, convergent crises produce a
“perfect storm” that leads to the overall collapse of China? We cannot
know for certain, but several crises or challenges, each unprecedented
in all of human experience in its magnitude, loom ominously on the
horizon of China's future.
The Natural Environment
First-time international visitors to urban China today are almost
uniformly impressed with the country's economic accomplishments
and development, but virtually all of them are also aghast at the spec-
tacular environmental pollution they see all around them. China today
is one of the most grossly polluted countries in the world, and in 2007
an official report by the World Bank stated that 750,000 people die
