Hu Jintao

Biography

Hu Jintao was born in December 1942 in Tai County, Jiangsu, and lost his mother when he was seven. He trained as a hydraulic engineer at Tsinghua University, where he joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1964, and spent the late 1960s and 1970s working on hydropower construction and in the provincial construction department in Gansu.

Promoted under the patronage of Song Ping and Hu Yaobang, he moved through the Communist Youth League to become its first secretary in 1984. He then ran the party in Guizhou from 1985 and in Tibet from 1988, where his tenure coincided with the protests and crackdown in Lhasa in 1989. In 1992 he joined the Politburo Standing Committee and the party Secretariat, also heading the Central Party School, and he served as Jiang Zemin's vice president from 1998.

Hu became general secretary in 2002 and state president in 2003, later taking the chairmanships of the military commissions. His decade in charge, alongside premier Wen Jiabao, brought sustained growth, expanded health coverage and a programme branded the Scientific Outlook on Development and Harmonious Society, but also the Anti-Secession Law aimed at Taiwan and hard responses to unrest in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009.

He handed his posts to Xi Jinping in 2012 and 2013. In October 2022 he was led out of the closing session of the 20th Party Congress in front of the cameras, an episode that drew wide speculation.