(1942–    ), Chinese leader, general secretary of the Chinese Communist party (2002–    ) and president of China (2003–  ). According to his official biography, he was born December 1942 in Jixi, SE Anhui Province, in E China. He joined the Communist party in 1964 while studying hydroelectric engineering at Qinghua University in Beijing. After six years (1968–74) with the Ministry of Water Conservancy, he was sent to Gansu Province, a remote, sparsely populated region of NW China. There he rose rapidly in the provincial Communist party hierarchy, developing a power base in the Communist Youth League (CYL), a training ground for many of China’s future leaders. In 1982 he was called back to Beijing, where, at the age of 39, he became an alternate member of the Central Committee of the Communist party; two years later he was named first secretary of the national CYL. Hu returned to the hinterlands in the mid-1980s, serving as secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Party Committee (1985–88). During the upheavals of the late 1980s he was assigned to Tibet, where, as provincial party secretary (1988–92) he was responsible for implementing a crackdown against Tibetan separatists. In 1992 he was elevated to the Standing Committee of the Politburo—the inner circle of Beijing’s Communist party leadership—and six years later he was named vice-president of China.

As expected, at the 16th National Party Congress, held in November 2002, Hu was promoted to general secretary of the Communist party, succeeding Jiang Zemin. The following March, at the Tenth National People’s Congress, Hu was elected to replace Jiang as president of China. This made Hu the nation’s first Communist leader and head of state to have come of age after the 1949 revolution. Little known outside China, he had minimal foreign policy experience, and Western observers anticipated that he would be expected to concentrate on improving living conditions in China’s impoverished rural regions.

Hu consolidated his power in September 2004, when he became the country’s military chief, after Jiang, citing health reasons, abruptly resigned.