Former Chinese President Hu Jintao and his Premier Wen Jiabao have been making headlines again this week, along with their massive fiscal stimulus package that kickstarted the Chinese economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

While Hu is largely remembered in China for being under the political thumb of his predecessor and eminence grise Jiang Zemin, Wen is credited with pumping new life into the economy with a massive stimulus program worth 4 trillion yuan (US$586 billion).

Some commentators are now citing the measures as a stellar example of what is needed to boost lackluster economic growth under China’s current leader Xi Jinping, with markets rising in the hope of a similar package last week, and falling again when Beijing didn’t deliver.

But critics say the Hu administration’s approach is at least partly responsible for the massive increase in government debt, rampant inflation and the now-collapsed property bubble that China faces today.

“The collapse of Chinese stock markets since 2015 and the current collapse of the real estate bubble are bound up with the strategic mistakes made by China following the 2008 financial crisis,” New York City University politics professor Xia Ming told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “And the same strategic mistakes are being made today.”

Shot in the arm

From Beijing, the Hu/Wen package, which was followed up with further measures in 2012, seemed like a shot in the arm at the time.

Then National Bureau of Statistics spokesman Li Xiaochao credited it with boosting economic growth in early 2009, saying that “the timing of the economic stimulus measures was appropriate, and the effects clearly visible.”

From 2003 to 2012, China’s economy grew at an average annual rate of more than 10%, and overtook Japan to become world’s second-largest economy after the United States. In 2009, the country overtook Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter, dubbed the “Workshop of the World.”

But by May 2010, Wen was already warning that the economy faced new issues.

Local governments took the massive injection of funds from the central government and used it as leverage for uncontrolled local borrowing via local financial markets, sending them into spiraling debt.

These platforms, Wen warned, “grew too fast, and operated in an irregular manner.”

The Financial Times said in a 2011 article that the measures had also fueled an epidemic of bad debt among state-owned banks.

“The money was distributed to various departments of the state through administrative channels back then,” said Xia. “Naturally, those departments would first use it to fund the state-owned enterprises … instead of supporting private companies.”

“It was like drinking poison to quench one’s thirst.”

Growing civic consciousness

The Hu era saw exponential growth in internet users, with more than 43% of the population online by 2012, compared with just 8.5% in 2005, leading many to believe that political controls and censorship would inevitably fall away in the face of such unprecedented access to information and debate.

With the internet, and later social media, came a flowering of non-government organizations dedicated to helping some of the most vulnerable people in society, along with a growing civic consciousness among ordinary people.

When Sichuan was rocked by a deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2008, around a million volunteers flocked to the worst-hit areas to lend assistance.

None of this was to last. While Xi Jinping is generally known for stepping up technological and totalitarian controls over the Chinese people, he was continuing a policy that had been there all along since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949: the eradication of any public discourse or organization that could pose a threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

And while Hu’s tenure saw a huge expansion in public discourse, Xi’s predecessor did his part in making sure it was curbed and censored by the party’s propaganda arm, and the newly emerging internet police.

Cracking down

January 2005 saw a crackdown on the formerly cutting-edge Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper following a journalists’ strike at the paper over the censorship of its New Year’s message.

State security police were already paying calls to organizations deemed to be foreign-influenced or funded, while unofficial detention centers, or “black jails,” sprang up around the country to hold petitioners, ordinary Chinese with complaints against the government.

Other forms of detention and control emerged under Hu, including “residential surveillance at a designated location,” while 2010 Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo was jailed for 11 years for “incitement to subvert state power” after he co-authored the Charter 08 manifesto calling for sweeping political change.

In 2009, Beijing dispatched troops to suppress the Uyghurs in Xinjiang after a mass peaceful demonstration following attacks on Uyghurs at a factory in southern China.

And the government arrested hundreds of pro-democracy activists for taking part in calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” along the lines of mass popular movements in the Middle East.

While both Hu and Wen had populist tendencies, frequently visiting disaster sites in person and promising to help those in need, they also normalized mass surveillance and repressive measures when faced with protests from those displaced or evicted to make way for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, according to Xia.

“They normalized monitoring and stability maintenance mechanisms for the Olympics, and finally turned China into a country in a perpetual state of emergency,” Xia said, blaming former security czar Zhou Yongkang, who masterminded preparations for the Olympics.

Promoting Xi

Former Central Party School professor Cai Xia said Hu also paved the way for today’s China by promoting Xi Jinping to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. 

“The moment Xi Jinping [entered the Politburo Standing Committee], he was put in charge of party building and ideology, and immediately began to take a leftward turn,” Cai said. 

“In fact, the moment that happened, everyone knew that he would be the next [General Secretary],” she said.

According to Li Weidong, president of the U.S.-based political journal “China Strategic Analysis,” Hu did try to reform some aspects of the Communist Party in the later years of his administration. 

He was in favor of direct elections for rural party secretaries in some areas, a practice that was rolled out in some parts of the country from 2009. But nationwide implementation would have meant revising the party charter, and so the reform never took hold.

Hu’s proposal at the 18th party congress in 2012 for “socialist consultative democracy” was taken up by his successor Xi Jinping, and became part of Xi’s claim that China uses a form of consultative government called “whole-process democracy,” which is now used at every level of Chinese government.

But it’s a far cry from Western-style democratic governance, Li said.

“The Chinese Communist Party believes that if ordinary people are allowed to make decisions, they will form a tyranny of the majority, which it thinks is the weakness of a democratic system,” he said.

Liberal tendencies, up to a point

Cai Xia said that while both Hu and his predecessor Jiang Zemin had some liberal tendencies, there was only so far they would take them.

“On the one hand, they wanted to allow a certain amount of openness, but they would also draw back as soon as they got to a red line,” she said.

A rights activist who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals said the first half of Hu’s 2004-2012 tenure was relatively open, with more restrictions on activists in the second half.

That was largely down to the social conflicts sparked by the Olympics, he said.

“Before the Olympics, Hu and Wen were keen to show the international community how open China was, and to build on their economic and social ties with other countries after we joined the World Trade Organization in 2001,” the activist said. 

But he said the “totalitarian nature” of the Communist Party hadn’t fundamentally changed.

For Li Weidong, Hu was a relatively weak leader who had to contend with the political influence of Jiang Zemin behind the scenes at Zhongnanhai.

“He was unable to curb Jiang’s power, nor could he fight against the model he inherited from Deng Xiaoping,” Li said. 

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.