China's Hu guarded in the limelight

BEIJING (Reuters) - Even under the global limelight of the Beijing Olympics, Chinese President Hu Jintao remains a leader whose guarded style and positions reflect a life immersed in the scripted rituals of Communist Party power.

Hu has been president since 2003, when he succeeded Jiang Zemin, who relished back-slapping bonhomie with foreign leaders.

In a rare encounter with foreign journalists on Friday, Hu showed that after over five years at the apex of power he wears the same armor of careful phrases that ensured his survival through decades of political upheaval and waiting in backwaters.

But Hu, 65, also cast himself as the custodian of a country in uncertain times and aiming to win wealth, power and respect on the global stage -- at the Beijing Olympic Games and long after.

"The current dream of the Chinese people is to accelerate building a modern country, realize the great renaissance of the Chinese nation, and with the peoples of the world seek peaceful progress, amicable co-existence and harmonious development," he said.

Hu has continued the policies of market-driven growth and one-party control the Communist Party has pursued since the late 1970s. But he has also reshaped those polices in ways reflecting his career emerging from the isolated poverty of northwest China and surviving under both reformist and conservative Party rulers.

A hydraulic engineer by training, Hu's fledgling career as a Party instructor at the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing was cut short by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when the Communist patriarch sought to purge perceived threats to his revolutionary radicalism.

Hu ended up in poor, hilly Gansu province in the west, where from 1968 to 1982 he worked as an engineer and then as an official, winning the notice of Party veterans who later nurtured his rise.

Brought to Beijing to work in the Communist Youth League, Hu's patron was Hu Yaobang, a reformist who irked Party elders with his maverick ways. In the 1980s, he earned his political stripes in dirt-poor Guizhou and then in Tibet.

But as Party chief of restive Tibet, Hu Jintao showed he could please hardliners when he oversaw a crackdown on pro-independence protests in 1988-1989.

Hu remained something of a mystery after he was helicoptered into the Politburo Standing Committee, the Party's decision-making centre, in 1992 by then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. At 49, he was its youngest member.

Jiang handed Hu the top Party job in November 2002, the presidency in 2003 and chairmanship of the Central Military Commission in 2004, completing the country's first smooth generational leadership change since the 1949 revolution.

Familiar with poverty through his time in Gansu and as Party boss of two of China's poorest regions, Hu has vowed to create a more equal "harmonious" society.

He has cut the tax burden and education costs of poor farmers and sped up health care reform to raise living standards and curb unrest.

An early test for the new leader came with the deadly outbreak of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in the spring of 2003, which was filling hospital beds despite government claims it was under effective control.

Surprising many critics with his decisiveness, Hu ordered the government to end the cover-up and sacked the health minister and the Beijing mayor.

This year, too, Hu and other leaders loosened controls on domestic media and charity groups, letting them pour into areas devastated by the May 12 earthquake in the southwest.

Hu huddled in a makeshift tent with survivors, listening to their tearful stories. But his bursts of improvisation stand out as exceptions for a leader who rarely departs from scripted comments, including at today's briefing for 25 news organizations.

"China is unswervingly committed to peaceful development, and also pursuing a strategy of mutually beneficial win-win opening up," was how Hu summed up his country's foreign policy.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Brian Rhoads and Nick Macfie)