Hu Jintao started his political ascent at the top leadership of the Communist Party of China by managing the repression of the demonstrations which took place in Lhasa, Tibet in 1989 . He was selected as Head of the Party in Tibet due to his reputation as “reformer”. After his relations with Jiang Nanxiang, his first supporter in the CCP hierarchy, he was appointed as instructor at the Party School of the Tsinghua University. After the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” which started in 1967, Hu Jintao was sent to the Gansu province for one year and was subsequently assigned to No. 813 Sub-Bureau, Fourth Engineering Bureau, Ministry for Water Conservancy, in charge of water resources and electric energy production. In 1974 he was transferred from the Gansu province to the capital city, Lanzhou, where he was selected for a career in the Party by Song Ping who, from Gansu was promoted to the Central Planning Commission in Beijing. Therefore, in 1982, Hu Jintao was selected as substitute member at the CCP 17th Central Committee. Two years later he became Secretary of the Communist Youth League from which in 1985 – after many internal fights – Hu Jintao was transferred by the Party’s General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, to Guizhou, as General Secretary of the Party’s provincial committee. Hu Yaobang was the “hard” line leader and, after a CCP mission to the poor region where Hu was Party’s provincial secretary, he sent to Beijing little gratifying notes on the local work carried out by the “reformer” Hu.

Three years later, Song Ping, his mentor and point of reference in Beijing, informed Hu Jintao of the fact that the CCP was looking for a leader to preside over the Secretariat of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee , an appointment which was entrusted to Hu Jintao in August 1988. Immediately mass demonstrations took place in Lhasa which – even though Hu Jintao coordinated the arrival of seventeen divisions of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army - lasted until the subsequent March, when on the 7th of that same month the CCP General Secretary, Li Peng, proclaimed the martial law in Tibet. This – inter alia – kept the Lhasa region isolated from the great rebellion, which culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre.

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