Hu Jintao
Hu Jintao is the highest ranked leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), having assumed the position of CCP general secretary at the November 2002 16th Party Congress and again at the October 2007 17th CCP Congress. He was appointed president of the PRC in March 2003 and re-appointed president in March 2008. Hu will lead the CCP and the PRC government for the next five years. He also exercises military leadership as chair of the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC), to which he was first appointed in September 2004, replacing Jiang Zemin. He was reappointed chair of the party CMC at the first plenary session of the 17th CCP Central Committee.
A native of Jixi, Anhui, Hu was born in 1942. In 1946, his family moved to Jiangsu where he began school. Later, while a student at Qinghua University majoring in hydraulic engineering, Hu joined the CCP in 1964. He became a political instructor at his alma mater upon graduation in 1965. In 1968, Hu was transferred to the Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power and, in 1974, to Gansu where he served as deputy head of the Project Design Management Division of the Provincial Construction Commission. During this period he took part in the construction of two hydroelectric power stations in the upper reaches of the Yellow River.
Hu became the youngest member of the CCP Central Committee in 1982, when he was 39. At the age of 44, he became CCP secretary of Guizhou, again the youngest among his peers. At the end of 1988, Hu was appointed CCP secretary of Tibet as turmoil erupted. Hu has roots in the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC), first serving as secretary of the Gansu provincial CYLC and then becoming a member of the national CYLC secretariat in Beijing in 1984. He also took up the post of the president of the All-China Youth Federation.
Hu was appointed to the Standing Committee of the CCP Politburo in October 1992 at the 14th CCP Congress, at which time he was also appointed to the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee. At the 15th CCP Congress in 1997, Hu was re-appointed as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and member of the Secretariat of the 15th CCP Central Committee. In March 1998, Hu was elected vice president of the PRC at the first session of the ninth National People's Congress (NPC).
Hu and his wife, Liu Yongqing, were classmates at Qinghua University. The couple has a son and a daughter who are both graduates of Qinghua University.