Boomers assuming leadership

Over the next 12 months, Chinese President and Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin will preside over one of the most important legacies of his rule: the handover of leadership to the next generation.

The so-called "fourth generation," led by Mr. Jiang's heir apparent Vice President Hu Jintao, is unlike any group of leaders to govern China.

"Because of their Cultural Revolution experience, this will be the most diverse, least ideological, and most capable generation of leaders in China's history," says Cheng Li, a professor and author of the book "China's Leaders."

The emerging elite are pragmatic survivors of hardship, and may deal with the United States - on everything from nuclear arms to human rights - in substantially different ways.

Born between 1941 and 1956, they travel in the West, talk BMWs, listen to Beethoven and Mozart, and invest in the stock market. Few care for old slogans about "sacrificing for a bright future," or believe in Marxist rhetoric, experts say.

They are more professional, more educated, and more aware of the outside world than their parents were.

In 1980, for example, only 4 percent of China's ruling cadres had a college degree; today, more than 90 percent do. China in the 1980s had 3,000 lawyers; today there are 150,000.

Thirty years ago, some of the fourth-generation members were Red Guards, hand-picked enforcers of Chairman Mao's teachings. Others were beaten by these guards, or saw their parents killed in the name of progress during China's Cultural Revolution period (1966-76). Many were sent to the countryside, where they ate nothing but potatoes.

In the end, most were disillusioned - a generation that started, as the saying goes here, "with big bangs and big red flowers" but end "with a broken heart and lost soul," 10 years later.

Yet, after the Communist Party Congress and transition in September next year, leaders of the fourth generation - whose experience is "unprecedented and unrepeatable" says Chinese intellectual He Qinglian - will for the first time dominate its top ranks.

The generational handovers began in 1949, with Mao Zedong, the "first generation" leader of Communist China. Then followed Deng Xiaoping in 1977 and Jiang Zemin in 1989. President Jiang's apparent successor, Hu, is currently vice president of China, leading the so-called "fourth generation."

In the 1970s, Hu was sent to the countryside for a decade. He knows "the real China," says one expert, and "not just the developed coastal areas" - the wealthy east coast of skyscrapers and joint ventures that in recent years has defined China for Westerners.

Hu's generation is emerging at every level of the Party. In 1999, the fourth generation occupied 167 of 344 top Party spots, according to the Chinese Communist Party roster. During the 16th Party Congress changeover next year, that number may swell to more than 250.

Yet predictions about what it means for an educated cadre of business-oriented "technocrats" to run China - run the gamut.

It appears so far that the new breed is less sympathetic to the US. While older generation leaders, like Jiang and Premier Zhu Rongji, are known, privately, to admire the US, those between ages 45 and 60 are more likely to see the US as a global competitor and even a potential enemy.

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