Not even everyone at Forbes can agree. Here is a report by a Forbes correspondent that actually lives in China. He argues that Hu isn't even the most powerful man in China let alone the world.
Is Hu Jintao Really The Most Powerful Person In The World?
This year’s Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People is out this year with a twist that may be a surprise to some and a confirmation of reality to others: Ranking Chinese President Hu Jintao at number one, above U.S. President Barack Obama.
Is Hu really deserving of the title of World’s Most Powerful? How about the other Chinese big names on the list? People’s Bank of China chief Zhou Xiaochuan, often imperfectly described as the Ben Bernanke of China, is ranked 11th, just three spots below the Fed chairman, who in point of fact is considerably more powerful, if you’re just measuring based on the levers at their disposal and their independent ability to maneuver them. Unlike Bernanke, Zhou answers to higher authorities, including Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao, who didn’t make the list.
But Zhou is the top central banker for the one economy in which so many are investing their anxious hopes, in the one nation that is spending and investing with some abandon in the global marketplace. As long as the U.S. economy and most of the developed economies are mired in stagnancy, the perceived power of China is all the greater. And that is the key clue to the makeup of this list.
That is why Lou Jiwei, head of the China’s $330 billion sovereign fund, China Investment Corporation, is ranked 30th. There are many ways to define power, and having a steady stream of CEOs and financiers fly into Beijing from far and wide to seek an audience and ask you for money — that would be one definition of power. Of course, on big decisions Lou doesn’t have final say either.
That brings us to how power works in China, which is no simple or transparent matter. One argument for suggesting Hu is more powerful than Obama is that Hu doesn’t have to contend with those annoying artifacts of democracy like Congress, an independent judiciary, an uncensored media and voting by common citizens. But in contrast to Obama’s vast executive powers, Hu (whose title that matters most is not president but general secretary of the Communist Party of China) cannot decide the important matters of state and party on his own. He has to contend with other powerful factions as one of nine members of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, one of whom, propaganda chief Li Changchun, is ranked 32nd on our list. (I had nominated for the list another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang, who holds sway over the oil sector and security forces and who could be considered the Dick Cheney of China, but he did not make the list of 68).
Trying to figure out the ebbs and flows in the balance of power among these nine members occupies the time of many academics, diplomats, journalists and political risk analysts, and in truth, it’s all a game of educated guesses, many of them likely wrong. The Kremlin goes by a different name in Beijing — Zhongnanhai — but it’s still Kremlinology all the same.
What we do know is that today’s leaders of China don’t have the kind of singular power that their famous Communist Party predecessors did. Instead, as I have written before when the current Politburo’s membership was being selected three years ago, it is the Communist Party system that is powerful, and bends men to its ethos and principles, rather than the other way around. That does not mean personalities don’t matter, but it may be be more accurate to say that as a collective, China’s Politburo Standing Committee may be the most powerful “person” in the world. Maybe. There are other powerful constituencies in China that make governing extremely difficult, from large state-owned enterprises that want to protect their profits to countless local fiefdoms that routinely ignore edicts from Beijing, and so on. Even in an authoritarian system, power is not nearly as straightforward as it may seem.
What do you think? What about the other Chinese figures who made our list? Like Robin Li, the second-richest man in China on the latest Forbes China Rich List and the co-founder and CEO of the dominant Chinese search engine, Baidu, who comes in at 46th after watching Google give up on its China-based search engine. He ranks 14 spots behind the propaganda chief whose orders he must obey to keep his company out of trouble, and 24 spots below Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And finally at #62 there’s Wang Yong, chairman of the administration that oversees China’s biggest SOEs, including many enterprises whose chiefs are far more powerful individually than Wang, making his job a tough one.
I invite you to make this a debate. Comment below on where China’s most powerful fit in the world order, nominate your own suggestions for China’s most powerful people, and quibble with the choices above. You can also comment on the main story about the global list here.
http://blogs.forbes.com/gadyepstein...really-the-most-powerful-person-in-the-world/
