Boomers assuming leadership

Still, in a speech this week at the school of the Communist Party Central Committee, Hu backed Jiang's recent opening to private business people. "We should stick to Marxism," Hu said in an obligatory reference.

But he then went further. "However, we should not be limited by certain specific judgments or programs of action drawn out at specific historical moments," Hu said. "If we stick to the old ideas, we will subsequently lag behind the times, and the Party will stop advancing and lose its leading status."

Also, the fourth generation takes over a China no longer run by one strong personality but by a group of seven "standing committee members."

"Decisions aren't made by one guy anymore, one charismatic leader," says a Western diplomat who asked to remain nameless. "Increasingly, the big decisions are made by seven guys, and that is an improvement."

In lifestyle terms, the fourth generation, whose children attend college in America and Europe, are more accepting of Western values and styles, especially of consumer values.

"It is easier for them to accept a Western lifestyle," says a Beijing political scientist and member of the fourth generation.

"When I call friends in the Party, they are often out at dinner or the theater. They don't have the same purpose as the old generation, the same revolutionary goals to change China. They show off a little. They are interested in a better standard of living. They also think for themselves."

In their early careers, this new breed rose through professional merit - rather than the systems of "guanxi," or personal connections, that are still important here.

After Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s, young Party members - many with degrees in science and engineering, and often drawing from survival skills honed during the Cultural Revolution - were promoted without having many friends in high places.

"They ... have risen [at first] more because of their practical abilities and achievement rather than political connections or ideological beliefs," says Dr. Harwit.

Still, as they rise, fourth generation figures, especially "princelings" or the children of officials, use the "guanxi" system. As Li points out, graduates from Beijing's Tsinghua University are at least as tightly networked and connected as those of Harvard, Yale, and Oxford universities.

Hu Jintao is a Tsinghua graduate; in 1998, five of 22 Politburo members were Tsinghua grads; Premier Zhu will soon retire as dean of the Tsinghua management school.

The education of the coming leaders, moreover, is more striking precisely because of Mao's hostility toward intellectuals and college graduates. Until the late 1970s, a college degree was an anathema to joining the Party.

Likewise, despite the fact that early leaders, such as Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping studied abroad (in France), China suspended for 20 years its student exchange programs, even with East bloc states. (Mao never left China except to visit Moscow, which he disliked.)

One Western diplomat describes the new leaders: "They went out to the farms. They saw first hand the destructive power of the party. They had to be resourceful to survive. Now the fourth generation feels it is 'their time' to rule, and they don't want to see China ever go through a period like that again."

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