Hu Jintao

"Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, *all* nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron-tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory."

"The point, however, isn’t to condemn Cook or Apple. It’s to convey the predicament they’re in. At the turn of the millennium, Washington made a bet on China—a bet that free trade would liberalize the country and perhaps catalyze the creation of the world’s biggest democracy. Instead, trade enriched China and empowered its rulers. Cook shouldn’t be blamed by politicians for enmeshing Apple’s operations in China two decades ago, but he has erred by doubling down over the past decade despite mounting evidence that Xi has been ramping up repression at home and taking a more combative stance in international affairs. “You can say that we read them wrong, that we misunderstood China. But Jack Ma read China wrong, too. Every entrepreneur read China wrong,” says a supply chain expert who has lived in the country. “You look at what Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao were promoting—the [business class] didn’t see this coming. Xi changed the game completely. He’s another Putin in the making.” This person adds, “Look, I’m not a Cook fan. But you have to be sympathetic. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. Nobody did.”"

"One episode demonstrating Xi’s hold over the party was captured on film. As Xi was poised to accept a third term as China’s ruler, his predecessor, Hu Jintao, was sitting right next to him at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, on October 22, 2022. When seventy-nine-year-old Hu reached for a red folder in front of him, another Chinese official removed it from his grasp. When Hu again attempted to grab it, Xi signaled to an aide, issued a command, and within seconds two aides lifted Hu by the armpit and escorted him out. As China journalist James Kynge writes: “As Hu was hustled out, none of a seated row of top officials even so much as turned to wish him well. They stared straight ahead, studiously ignoring his humiliation.” Inside the envelope, some experts believe, was a dossier that would have demonstrated that Hu’s key protégé wasn’t being elevated to the seven-member Politburo—the highest organ of the Central Committee. Xi had stacked the Politburo with allies, consolidated more power than any Chinese leader since Mao, and was set to rule for life."