China PM takes Pride in "Man of the People" Image
03/04/2005
Scott Hillis,
Reuters
BEIJING (Reuters) - He has braved SARS wards, commanded earthquake relief efforts, engineered China's economic cooling and celebrated the Lunar New Year festival with impoverished AIDS patients.
In two years as China's premier, Wen Jiabao has burnished his man-of-the-people image and has driven that home with pledges to help those left behind by the country's economic boom.
Wen revisited those themes in his annual address to parliament on Saturday, championing the plight of the downtrodden while offering reassurances that Beijing would guide the world's seventh-largest economy to avoid overheating, and pledging to strive for peaceful reunification with Taiwan.
Wen, 62, has a reputation for loyalty and subtlety that helped him weather political crises to rise in 2002 to number three in the ruling Communist Party. His style contrasts sharply with his brash predecessor and mentor, Zhu Rongji, who presided over China's emergence as a major world economy.
"Wen is universally regarded as a responsive and highly adaptable individual," wrote Barry Naughton, an expert on China's economy at the University of California, San Diego.
On a high-profile visit to the United States in 2003, Wen quoted from the Gettysburg Address and told touching tales of growing up in war-ravaged China.
For many, Wen's loyal character is summed up in a black and white photograph taken two weeks before the bloody military crackdown that ended the Tiananmen Square protests in June 1989.
The picture shows a wooden-faced Wen standing next to then Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang as he made an emotional appeal to students to leave. Zhao was purged days later and lived under house arrest until his death in January.
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As his career progressed, Wen built a network of patrons. His administrative skills and loyalty attracted Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Zhao as party chief.
"Jiang certainly saw the picture and the rumours said that he was actually impressed by the way Wen Jiabao handled that crisis," said Cheng Li, an expert on Chinese politics at Hamilton College in New York.
Wen also has close ties to Hu Jintao, Jiang's successor as party chief, state president and head of the military, dating back to when they worked together in the impoverished northwestern province of Gansu.
A geologist by training, Wen worked in the geology ministry before joining the party general office in 1985. Elevated to vice premier in 1998, he was given charge of financial and agricultural reforms, development of the lagging western hinterland and environmental protection.
"He's had some extremely important portfolios. This gives him a great depth and breadth of experience in government," said Peter Batey, chairman of government relations consultancy Batey Burn.
Wen has presented himself as a working-class champion. Pictures of him taking a meal of dumplings with coal miners below ground early in his tenure were splashed across state newspapers.
