If all goes according to plan, Hu Jintao will step down from his position as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the 18th party congress to be held later this year. It is supremely ironic that one of the most tightly controlled contemporary leaders of a major country should have his final months in charge, at least of the party, mired in scandal and rumour over the travails of a Politburo colleague, Bo Xilai .
For all those who have studied, worked with and observed Hu, this sort of frenzied excitement would be the last thing he would want.
Once upon a time, Hu raised hopes that he might be a liberal and a reformer. Before he was elevated to the key party, state and army positions between 2002 and 2004, there were some who hoped aloud that he might bring in far-reaching political reforms to match the bold economic ones that China had implemented since 1978. In 2004 and 2005, he and his premier, Wen Jiabao , talked increasingly of the need to address inequalities and imbalances in Chinese society and to do something for the many millions who had lost out on the reform process. But, at the same time as they publicly stated this, there was a scaling back of grass-roots innovations, such as extending village elections to township level.
By the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this tension between a globalised, modernising Chinese economy and its internal repressiveness started to grow. After 2000, China entered a new phase of control and unease at dissidence, and political opposition to the Communist Party internally.
Talk of Hu being a closet liberal is now largely forgotten.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Hu rose to power through a long apprenticeship in the poorer western provinces. He worked in Gansu , Guizhou and Tibet for almost two decades. This has given him a particular view of development. As he has stated about the eruption of problems in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009, the key thing for him is to develop economic capacity. The rest will follow.
His response to unrest in Tibet in 1989 was to authorise the sending in of many thousands of troops. For this, he won the trust of the central leadership, and elevation in 1992 into the all-important Politburo Standing Committee.