Word: wen
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When a group of 15 executives from multinational mining companies met with Wen Jiabao, China's Premier-designate, in late 2001, they hoped to be getting face time with a kindred spirit. The execs, among them heavyweight representatives of giant mine operators such as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, wanted to discuss the opening of China's mineral-extraction market to foreign investment. Wen, a geologist by training, was in a position to make a difference as the country's Vice Premier. As everybody sipped green tea in a meeting room at Zhongnanhai, the Beijing leadership compound, Wen listened politely...
...China's National People's Congress, when it opens March 5 to rubber-stamp Wen's promotion to Premier, will complete a generational changing of the guard. The enigmatic Hu Jintao, already named last year to lead the Communist Party, is set to succeed Jiang Zemin as President. Meanwhile Wen, 60, will replace Zhu Rongji. He has some size-14 hobnailed boots to fill. The brilliant but overbearing Zhu, 74, brought China into the World Trade Organization and hacked away for a decade at the stultifying vestiges of the command economy. For the world's most prominent businessmen, including Microsoft...
...Wen succeeds Zhu?who championed his promotion to Premier and to the nine-member politburo Standing Committee?carrying a reputation as a buttoned-down technocrat who lacks not only his mentor's fiery bravado but also his business savvy. Even during his four-year stint as Vice Premier, Wen was rarely called upon to deal with foreigners or promote market economics. Some question whether he has the clear vision and political will to run China's contentious Cabinet while managing a trillion-dollar economy, overseeing the layoffs of millions of angry workers in state companies and forcing another round...
...Wen learned as he worked his way up to keep his own policy views to himself; his success in ascending party ranks was due more to his efficiency than to his leadership. Before being transferred to Beijing in 1982, he toiled for 14 years as a low-level apparatchik in impoverished Gansu province in western China. His are the political instincts of a prairie dog in falcon country; he twice survived purges by keeping his head down while those of his immediate supervisors were rolling. During the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, Wen was firmly in the camp of reformists...
...credit for that has to rest partly with Brand and first-year assistant coach Guogang Wen...