BEIJING -- The enigmatic new boss of China was once seen as a potential Gorbachev: a youthful leader who had the energy and charisma to drag a stagnant Communist regime into an era of liberal reforms.
But after almost three years as China's leader, the dreams about Hu Jintao have faded into disillusionment. As he arrives in Ottawa today to receive full Canadian honours on his first state visit, he is in the midst of one of the biggest crackdowns on human rights in China in years.
Despite his mild manners and boyish charm, the 62-year-old President is revealing instincts of political ruthlessness that have shattered the fantasy that he might lead China into the same kinds of reforms that Mikhail Gorbachev introduced in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The man in charge of one-fifth of the world's population is probably the most mysterious and least known of all global leaders. Even his hobbies and personal interests (if any) are unknown. Behind the mask of his bland exterior, it seems, is another mask.
Those who meet him describe a cautious and polite man who seems unfailingly serious and focused.
One visitor was surprised to see not a single book on the bookshelves of his office.
He is careful to avoid displays of ego or self-aggrandizement. He seems to dislike excessive formality, and he cancelled the grandiose airport ceremonies that accompanied every senior official on a foreign trip. He avoids the flamboyance of his predecessor, the karaoke-singing Jiang Zemin, who loved to cozy up to Western leaders at social events.
Mr. Hu, the son of a family of tea merchants near Shanghai, struggled to overcome his ideologically dangerous bourgeois background by joining the Communist Youth League as a young student. He worked his way up through the Party as a technocrat who obeyed orders and kept his head low.
Rivals have often made the error of underestimating him. Even when he became general secretary in 2002 and President in 2003, many analysts predicted Mr. Hu would be overshadowed by his predecessor, Mr. Jiang, who had stacked the Politburo with his own supporters.
But Mr. Hu has proven a surprisingly steely survivor in Beijing's power struggles. Last year Mr. Jiang resigned from his last official post on the central military commission and has largely disappeared from the Chinese political scene, handing a key victory to Mr. Hu.
"When Hu Jintao first took the helm, there were a lot of doubters about whether he could consolidate power over the Politburo," said Yuen Pau Woo, president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. "But he has been more successful than people expected."
In his crackdowns on dissidents and the media, analysts say, Mr. Hu is seeking to bolster his authority and strengthen the Communist Party as the main mechanism for controlling Chinese society. With the dramatic growth of China's private sector and the decline of state control of the economy, he believes that he needs to centralize power in the party to maintain a grip on the country.
"He was raised in the party system, and he's a party man," said Jing Huang, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "He is trying to reinforce the system and keep the system going."
Rather than embracing Gorbachev-style reforms, Mr. Hu has moved in the opposite direction, explicitly rejecting the path taken by the Soviet Union in the 1980s. According to a report in a Hong Kong magazine, he believes that China must prevent Western democratic ideas from infiltrating the Chinese media if it wants to avoid the fate of the former Soviet Union.
"Enemy forces inevitably take public opinion to be their point of attack," he reportedly warned his Communist colleagues in a private speech last September. "The Soviet Union disintegrated under the assault of their Westernization and bourgeois liberalization. This is the fundamental reason why problems appeared internally in the Soviet Union."
Prime Minister Paul Martin is anxious to build closer relations with China, aware that Canada's exports and investment flows to China are below expectations. He sees China's voracious appetite for natural resources as crucial for Canada's economic future. Yet he must grapple with the reality of Mr. Hu.
The President's latest crackdown on dissent has included the arrest of writers and journalists, tougher controls on the Internet, tighter police surveillance of activists, a clampdown on non-governmental organizations, forced propaganda education classes and verbal attacks on the "bourgeois" system of Western democracy.
Hou Wenzhou is a young woman who provides legal help to Chinese peasants when their property is seized illegally. Like many activists, she had high hopes that Mr. Hu would open up and reform the Communist system when he became Communist general secretary. She knew he was the youngest leader of China in decades, and that he had reportedly allowed the Communist Party's central school to conduct studies of Western democratic ideas.
Today her hopes have crumbled. She has been detained several times, and last week the police prohibited her from leaving her neighbourhood to meet Louise Arbour, the UN human rights chief who was visiting Beijing.
"A lot of us are very disappointed and even scared," Ms. Hou said in a telephone interview from her Beijing apartment.
"We had hoped for a lot. There was talk that Hu Jintao was going to promote constitutionalism and openness in the party. But I think he is not really in favour of political reform. I think he is rather a Maoist type. All the signs are that China is crushing human rights in every sphere -- media, civil society, property rights, courts, the forced demolition of homes."
Mr. Hu is to attend a state dinner today with Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson and has meetings with federal leaders, followed by a day of activities in Toronto and Niagara Falls. Next week, after several days at the United Nations and Mexico, he is to spend two days in Vancouver on his way back to Beijing. It is his first visit to Canada -- and only the third by a Chinese Communist president since diplomatic relations began in 1970.
