President Hu Jintao may still be an enigma, but his administration is clearly coming into its own. You don't need to be a palace-watcher to realise this; just try doing business in the capital, and judge the quality of the people you will meet. In the two years since the handover of power to the so-called 'fourth generation', it has been improving steadily.
It was only on a recent trip to Beijing, however, that it struck me how quickly young, overseas-educated people are being pushed up the ranks of the bureaucracy, appointed to run state-owned companies, and emerging in the semi-private sector as bridges to the mainland market - and what a difference they are making.
It began while travelling business class on China Southern Airlines. As we stretched out in fully reclining seats on a new Airbus A330, the flight attendants were clearly not far from the standards of Dragonair. It was a far cry from the last time I flew on the airline, when we waited half an hour on the runway in scorching heat without air conditioning. General manager Sun Jianhua, who has an MBA from England, later told me the airline had recently ordered six new A380s from Airbus.
The next day, the manager of an international five-star hotel described to me how Shanghai-based Jin Jiang, the mainland's biggest domestic hotel group, was sending their most promising managers overseas to gain three to five years of experience. He also told of how they had hired an American chief executive, and given management contracts to international chains for hotel properties they owned. An investment banker, meanwhile, told me that the same embrace of international 'best practices' is happening, perhaps on an even more ambitious scale, at the Shenzhen Development Bank, under American president Jeffrey Williams.
It came together on the last day of the trip over breakfast with a quasi-government publisher, a woman in her late 30s who has responsibilities way beyond what is usually expected of someone with her experience. As she enunciated her vision for our prospective partnership, I was struck by her courage. Bringing foreigners into the holy cow of the media industry is a big gamble, given what troublemakers we tend to be. This is a far tougher cross-cultural experience than opening a shoe factory.
It seemed inevitable, therefore, when I climbed into an airport taxi and found the driver asking me in English where I wanted to go, that my luck would fail. Sure enough, Beijing Capital International Airport was a sobering experience: a 30-minute wait for a business-class check-in, an endless immigration line, surly, incompetent staff (even at the new Starbucks), and a take-off that was the standard 40 minutes late.