POINT OF VIEW/ Nobuyoshi Sakajiri: Hu Jintao struggling to be No. 1 in his own right

On April 22, the red nameplate of People's Daily, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was printed in black, to denote mourning. On the front page was a large photograph of all nine top leaders, or members of the Standing Committee of the party's Political Bureau, standing in a single row with heads bowed in silent prayer. General Secretary Hu Jintao stood in the center, flanked on each side by four members.

Hu was on an official tour of Latin America when a devastating earthquake struck the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Yushu in Qinghai province on April 14. To let China's 1.3 billion people see him mourn the dead and offer sympathy and support to survivors, Hu cut his trip short. In fact, he had little choice in the matter.

In addition to being general secretary of the Communist Party, Hu is president of China and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Technically, he is the nation's "paramount leader." But the authority of the party's secretary general is not much different from that of the rest of the members of the Political Bureau's Standing Committee.

Even as a first among equals, the only prerogative of the general secretary under party rules, which take precedence over the Constitution, is that he alone has the authority to convene a meeting of the Standing Committee. It was precisely for this reason that when unrest erupted in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region last July, Hu had to cancel his planned attendance at the Group of Eight summit in Italy and return home.

Even though Hu can convene a Standing Committee meeting, he cannot control the outcome of the talks because policy decisions are made by majority vote. The days of Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping are long gone. Hu is only one of the nine who make up the top leadership.

His predecessor Jiang Zemin, who rose to power as Deng's protege, was the last paramount leader to be often referred to as "the core"--as in "with comrade Jiang Zemin at the core." Hu has never been referred to as "the core," except when a news program announcer of the state-run China Central Television did so inadvertently. The announcer's comment was later expunged from official records.

For Hu, who has yet to take over the status as "the core" from his predecessor, his summit with U.S. President Barack Obama on April 12 offered the perfect opportunity for trying to stop Beijing's relationship with Washington from deteriorating further.

The bilateral relationship had started turning ugly early this year, just when it looked as if a new G-2 era of China and the United States was dawning. During his meeting with Obama on the first day of the Nuclear Security Summit, Hu displayed his readiness to be flexible about Washington's initiative to impose additional sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program.

The special treatment Hu received in Washington clearly set him aside from other world leaders attending the gathering, and that included Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

On April 13, copies of the day's People's Daily were not delivered to The Asahi Shimbun's China General Bureau in central Beijing until little past 5:30 p.m.--more than one hour later than the local evening newspaper. The Obama-Hu summit had ended about 12 hours before, but the Communist Party's official paper has no copy deadline for stories that concern the party secretary general. The paper's publisher must have needed half a day to let Hu's aides go over and edit stories filed by reporters and members of Hu's entourage, decide on headlines and layout, and then print and ship the paper out.

Faced with ethnic minority problems, widening income disparities, thorny diplomatic issues and a political power struggle, Hu, who has yet to evolve from "one of the nine" into "the core," must be feeling as if he is walking on thin ice, even though he is the top leader of this authoritarian state.

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Nobuyoshi Sakajiri is the chief of The Asahi Shimbun's China General Bureau in Beijing