China's Rising Leaders

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Overall, however, this generation will deepen China's engagement with the West. Li Yuancho, 56, is a contender for Hu's job. Trained in economics and law, he runs coastal Jiangsu province and has helped turn it into a model economy, attracting record amounts of foreign investment from the likes of Emerson Electric (EMR), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Sony (SNE). Even the nationalist Bo took a backwater northeast town, Dalian, and turned it into an outsourcing center for Japanese business. That made it one of the hottest urban economies in China.

Some predict these new leaders, once they take over the top positions, might even start to dabble in democracy. Many, particularly those who attended Peking University in the late 1970s and '80s, participated in elections on campus. "There's much more appreciation of the plurality of interests in the economy and in society," says Joseph Cheng, a professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong.

THREE-WAY RACE
The new leaders will begin to assert themselves over the next five years, though Hu and Wen will remain firmly in control until the following Party Congress in 2012. Many see a three-way race to succeed Hu. Besides Li Yuancho, there's Li Keqiang, the 52-year-old party secretary of the northeastern province of Liaoning, the heart of China's old industrial rust belt. He has a PhD in economics and a law degree but details of his performance are scarce. Perhaps most important when it comes to succession, he's a veteran of the influential Communist Youth League, Hu's power base—making him the leading candidate. The other apparent contender for the top job is Wang Yang, 52, who runs China's largest city, Chongqing.

As the nation's economy continues to surge, the emerging leadership will face a host of challenges. They'll need to craft a quick and firm response to this summer's tide of unsafe and poorly made goods from China's factories. They'll face growing pressure from Washington over their ballooning trade surplus. And to get a handle on everything from pollution to job safety to counterfeiting to corruption, they'll need to rein in local officials who often ignore Beijing's edicts and focus on economic growth, no matter the cost. The next generation of leaders will "have to be attuned to what's going on globally," says Yang Dali, director of the East Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore, and "willing to adapt, to learn, and also take decisive actions when needed."

Roberts is BusinessWeek's Beijing bureau chief. Chi-Chu Tschang contributed this article to BusinessWeek Online from Beijing.