Hu Jintao: will travel broaden the mind?

By Editorial staff Simon Wilson Nov 29, 2005

It is rude to call the Chinese “inscrutable” nowadays, said David Rennie in The Daily Telegraph – and that’s probably fair enough.

No doubt the old tag “spoke to our prejudices, conjuring up fears of the sinister Oriental, seething with horrid schemes behind a mask of smiling courtesy”. But you see why everyone is itching to apply the word to China’s president Hu Jintao, who began his European tour in London this week.

The name alone is a gift to headline writers (‘Who’s Hu?’ and the like) and faced with the reality of the man himself, those old warhorse adjectives “opaque” and “enigmatic” have never seemed more apt.

Well, here is the news: “nobody outside the Chinese Communist inner circle has a clue who Hu is, and we are not going to find out during the course of this visit”.

Mr Hu is, in short, a “man of mystery”, agreed The Times – so any insight into his character we gain while he’s here will be an advance on the present “profound ignorance”. China watchers at first thought him a closet reformer, but there are now fears that he may simply be a Communist – “the first heading the Chinese party for two decades”.

But what is important about this week is that Hu Jintao is busy seeing the world, just as the world is busy making its mind up about China. Is it the “ultimate mercantilist machine, churning out more bras than there are breasts, or does it remain a vulnerable developing country?” Will it turn out, like Japan, to be an economic force yet at the same time a political eunuch? And is its policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in fact a cover for an “idiosyncratic isolationism that will undermine its strategic long-term interests?”

In seeking to find out the answers, the West is right to embrace China, but at the same time, Hu’s China must be more open to internal criticism and external debate. Let us hope, in this case, that travel does indeed broaden the mind.

Published in Economics | More articles by Simon Wilson

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