Giant

Succeeding the person of 2006 You, the Time magazine select Mr. Putin as the person of 2007 and covers pages to describe how the Russia president influence Russia and the world. But I noticed that there is a guy who I have nearly forgotten in the Runner-up column. He is Mr. Hu Jintao. I remember last time I heard of him is the moment that he was nominated as one of 10 worst dictators in the world by Parade magazine. Although he is president and the boss of the Communist Party, I am not feel Jealous of him. He is never a free man like I do but a tool of the system instead. I went to the university in 2002 when he took the power. Two years later, this guy carried out a slogan like his formers Mr. Mao and Mr. Jiang, one is Serve the People(為人民服務), the other is Three Representatives（三個代表）. However, I have a eyesight problem which makes me feel them as Severed by the People（被人民服務） and Three Representative Bitches（三個代婊）. Now, his slogan is Eight Honors, Eight Shames（八榮八恥）, when someone reads this slogan, I feel he/she is saying left black dragon, right white tiger（左青龍，右白虎）. Enforcing this kind of education for his slogan is the education authority's responsibility. Unfortunately when this wind blown to my university, at that time I just finished the ideology education, so I don't know anything about him. I hardly believed that one man locked himself in the study and meditated for more than two year but only 112 Chinese characters squeezed out from his big brain.

As the Chinese aphorism puts it, Tall trees attract wind. Someone who was more overtly ambitious might have lost his cool over challenges, but Hu has managed to convey an air of composure, the better to maintain a semblance of accord between fractious leaders.

Tall trees attract wind means more popularity a person, more attention from the public but in the other hand he/she will likely be the target some people want to criticize, attack and compete with like the tall tree in the forest likely to be the first one broken by the strong wind. Obviously Mr. Hu is just the one. His power was always challenged by some ambitious party members. But he succeeded, not because the power of chairman is not tolerated to be challenged, but he derived something from the traditional Chinese culture to maintain his authority. Contrast to Mao, who had destroyed the Chinese culture, Mr. Hu managed to build himself as the preserver of the Chinese culture by emphasizing the importance of it. Chinese traditional culture is based on the Confucius's philosophy, which emphasized the authority of orthodox, discipline and so on so that overwhelming his challengers. So under his governance, Chinese traditional festivals will be intergrated into our hollidays from 2008.

Even though China's revolutionaries spent decades trying to expunge "feudal" culture, Hu has ended up as something of a closet traditionalist whose sense of a political true north derives as much from the Chinese classics, to which he has turned in search of models of concord, as it does from Mao and Marx.

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Such traditional-sounding rhetoric about harmony and peace — the antithesis of Maoist phrases about class contradictions and anti-imperialist struggle — has been spilling from party propaganda organs. Weary of struggle and strife, contemporary Chinese react almost autonomically to such rhetoric, which evokes the datong, the great harmony, a utopian ideal from the ancient Book of Rites.

To Mr. Hu, I agree the comment from the Yale historian Jonathan Spence on him:

"uses a language that preaches caution and the avoidance of extremes, but seems to have little sense of how to implement changes that will boldly address China's formidable problems."

This guy always uses "harmony" to boast his political ideas, building a ideology system like peaceful rise, scientific outlook on development and most important the harmonious society। He is quite ideal, seems like playing Tai Chi. He thought that harmony and peace can alleviate all kinds of social problems, but they won't basically solve the problems such as a majority of poverty, which submersed under the surface of the society,without any attention being paid. After all, the traditional political philosophy is not for democrats. The demands of freedom and democracy is ignored. In the meaning of suppressing speech and putting down the activities, Hu is not different from Mao and Jiang.

In fact, I like the funny illustration instead of Mr. Hu.