In October 2010, I visited Hu Jintao's ancestral village in Anhui province in central China. The mild-mannered, enigmatic Hu, whose successor will be officially named over the next week, traces his ancestry back to Jixi, a county of roughly 200,000 people that encompasses Dragon River, a town of 1,400 people known for its ancient canals and well-preserved traditional architecture.
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Dragon River, bounded by mountains on three sides and a river on the other for excellent fengshui, markets itself as a tourist destination. But Hu, who lacks the founding-father credentials of Mao Zedong, the charisma of Deng Xiaoping, or even the stature of Jiang Zemin, isn't the main attraction. Like the traditional merchants of Anhui, Hu Jintao is "very mild," said Johnson Yeh, a manager with a local branch of China International Travel Service (CITS), who gives Hu-themed day tours to Jixi.
"That's just the way it is," my tour guide in the town, who asked to remain anonymous, responded when I asked why there's no mention of Hu. "It's just more low-key." She explained away the near-empty shops and temples by claiming that "in summer the streets are filled with people." I asked Chen Yuecai, a 22-year old who worked at a teashop in the village, why they don't mention Hu's name on any of their promotional material. "Plenty of people come to Dragon River," she said. "Why do we need to use his name?"
All of the villagers I spoke with spoke in guarded, vague terms. An abbot of the local Buddhist temple who asked to remain nameless, and who grew increasingly agitated conversing with a foreign journalist, explained, "Hu Jintao must have accumulated a lot of karma in a past life to be emperor today." A middle-aged woman who worked as a part-time waitress in one of the city's dozen or so restaurants said that from the village's perspective, Hu's greatest achievement is that "he's made Dragon River into a tourist attraction," with better roads and more development. Claiming Hu's greatest achievement is bringing tourism to a small village could merely be a provincial attitude or one of the best examples of damning with faint praise that I've ever heard.
Unlike the hometowns of Jiang Zemin, Deng Xiaoping, and Mao Zedong, the People's Republic of China's three previous paramount leaders, Hu's lacks any trace of personality cult. The only mention of Hu I saw was in one of the shops near the canal that ran through the village, where a shopkeeper had displayed a large portrait of Hu smiling woodenly, with the caption "President of China, Chairman of the Military Commission Comrade Hu Jintao." When I asked about it, he offered to sell it to me for the bargain price of $15. "I'm the only one with this because you have to make them very carefully," he said. "If you make a mistake you'll offend Hu Jintao." He declined to talk to me anymore or give his name unless I bought something, so I left the shop.
And on it went. Hu's cousin, who lives in the nearby town, declined interview requests; an old man who knew Hu's family waved off my question and then proceeded to ignore me.
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