Hu Jintao entpuppt sich als kleiner Diktator

Der chinesische Präsident agiert mehr und mehr wie ein Autokrat, kritisiert der Economist:

IN THE nearly three years since Hu Jintao assumed the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, his image has changed markedly. Mr Hu was once seen by many as a potential liberal reformer—admittedly an assessment drawn from limited evidence. Now, he is widely regarded as a conservative authoritarian. Many Hu-watchers had seized on signs that he might be determined to open up China's secretive bureaucracy. Now, he is said to be holding up Cuba and North Korea as examples of how the party should keep its ideological grip. While Mr Hu has probably changed far less than his mercurial portrayal might suggest, it is increasingly clear that China under his leadership has wavered over economic reform and shunned political liberalisation. Mr Hu's (in fact, fairly consistent) conservatism has been evident in his belief that the Communist Party, riddled with corruption and other abuses of power, is quite capable of cleaning up its own act without the need for any checks or balances. This year, for instance, he has ordered millions of party officials to take part in many hours of mind-numbing ideological training designed to tighten party discipline (known as the “education campaign to preserve the advanced nature of Communist Party members”). More seriously, advocates of bolder economic reform have worried about a campaign against “neo-liberal” economic theories that sputtered into life early last year. This apparently stemmed from the worries of party leaders, including Mr Hu, that the cause of free markets and small government could, if given too free a rein, cause an economic meltdown in China similar to that seen in some Latin American countries. ... Publicly, Mr Hu's comments have been moderate in tone. But he has been tougher at closed-door gatherings, such as during a meeting of the party's Central Committee last September. The plenum was of crucial symbolic importance for Mr Hu. It appointed him as the supreme commander of China's armed forces, thus completing his takeover of the country's three top positions, following his appointment as party leader in November 2002 and president in March 2003. The contents of Mr Hu's maiden speech have not been published in full. In the still secret portion, Mr Hu reportedly railed against “Western hostile forces” and “bourgeois liberalisation”. It was a worrying throwback to the paranoid language that suffused official rhetoric in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Yu Jie, a dissident writer in Beijing, says the authorities have stepped up harassment of liberal intellectuals in recent months. Dissidents who have expressed their views online have been particular targets. Mao Yushi, a liberal economist, says public discussion meetings held by his privately run public-policy think-tank, Unirule, have been banned, as have his writings. Unirule has been stripped of its official registration.