Hu’s Great Gamble
Hu Jintao is a gambler. Not just any old gambler, but the man who has just committed one of the biggest wagers in history. It’s a bet on which the fate of his country, and the rest of the world, depends. It carries almost incalculable risks, but if Hu is right China will be the dominant power of the coming century.
Like most gambles, this was a simple one. In 2004, the Communist Party’s central committee met for its annual plenary sessions. The talk that year was of shifting from the party’s traditional objective of the previous two decades of taking economic growth and lifting people into prosperity as its key aim to addressing the more complex issues that lay beyond just pumping out G.D.P.… Seguir leyendo »